By Rob Harris
Paris: Until recently, the city of romance had long really been the dirty man of Europe. Its streets were often overrun with litter, graffiti and dog mess.
On an evening’s stroll along the banks of the Seine in central Paris until a few months ago, you would have seen hundreds of encampments lining the riverbank and pitched under bridges. But they have just about all disappeared.
A homeless person sleeps on a bench in downtown Paris.Credit: Getty Images
French President Emmanuel Macron promised that the Olympic Games would showcase the country’s grandeur. But his government has taken a hard-nosed approach, putting thousands of homeless immigrants on buses and sending them out of Paris in the past year.
A report released last month by a group of charities found that for more than a year, authorities have been targeting a number of groups: the homeless, migrants, Roma people, sex workers and drug users.
“A number of indicators suggest that the Olympic and Paralympic Games are accelerating the dispersal and removal of people in vulnerable situations,” says the study, undertaken by Le Revers de la Medaille, a collective of more than 100 organisations that work with people in precarious situations.
Last week alone, about 470 people were removed from camps along the Canal de l’Ourcq, on the route of the Olympic torch relay, as well as along the Canal Saint-Denis, upstream of Games event sites, and at Pont Marie on the Seine, where the opening ceremony is scheduled for July 26. In some places, concrete blocks were put in place to discourage any returns or relocations.
The Eiffel Tower in Paris is decorated with the Olympic rings.Credit: Getty Images
Paris has long struggled to find enough space in its shelters for the 150,000 homeless people who live in and around the capital — half the total in France — so the government set up 10 temporary shelters across the country last year.
Since last July, police and courts have evicted about 12,000 people, most of them single men. City officials encourage them to board buses to cities like Lyon or Marseille with “access to care” centres.
But the immigrants say they were promised housing, only to end up living on unfamiliar streets far from home or flagged for deportation. Some charities have accused local authorities of carrying out a “social cleansing” operation in the capital region ahead of the Games by clearing away the homeless, as well as migrant camps and slums.
Thousands of homeless people were removed from the Paris region in a pre-Olympics “social cleansing”. Credit: Getty Images
“Eviction operations are not new, they were not created with the Olympic Games in mind,” says Paul Alauzy, co-ordinator at the humanitarian organisation, Médecins du Monde.
“But what has changed as the Games draw closer is the frequency with which occupied sites are cleared, and the systematic sending of those removed to another French region.”
Many other Olympic host cities have cracked down on people on the street before and during the Games. In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which hosted the 2016 Olympics, private security officers rounded up and relocated hundreds of homeless people from tourist areas. Ahead of the 1996 Games, Atlanta in the United States introduced laws that criminalised loitering or reclining in public, and used city money to bus homeless residents out of town.
The international athletes village was built in one of Paris’s poorest suburbs, Seine-Saint-Denis, where thousands of people live in street encampments, shelters or abandoned buildings. About one in three people in the area are immigrants — the highest percentage in the country.
Police increased raids on homeless camps and abandoned buildings last year. Working with city officials, they evicted people and said they would help relocate them.
But authorities have for several months denied any correlation between the eviction policy now in place and the upcoming Olympics.
“This has nothing to do with the Olympic and Paralympic Games, there’s no social cleansing,” Sports Minister Amélie Oudéa-Castéra said in March.
But an email, which was first reported by the newspaper L’Équipe, last month revealed a government housing official had said the goal was to “identify people on the street in sites near Olympic venues” and move them before the Games.
Shifting so many homeless immigrants to regional centres, where services are already stretched or unavailable, has caused tensions and even mass protests. In January, the mayor of Lavaur, a small town near Toulouse in south-west France, issued a public letter in which he denounced the policy of transferring migrants around the country as irresponsible and dangerous.
“To make Paris in all likelihood more ‘presentable’ and more controllable, six months before the Olympic Games,” wrote Bernard Carayon. “It’s unacceptable.”
Alauzy says Parisians want a clear plan to look after the most marginalised people, offering alternatives so that people can access something to eat, medical treatment and even a place to sleep during the Olympics.
“We’d like to see a positive legacy from these Olympics, including for people on the street, so that social exclusion doesn’t end up being the legacy of Paris 2024,” he says.
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