Inside the struggle to stop the ‘social cleansing’ of Paris for the Olympics

This article Inside the struggle to stop the ‘social cleansing’ of Paris for the Olympics was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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With the approach of the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics, organizers and aid groups are working to ensure the continuation of social services in the city. They are also trying to stop the evictions of over 12,500 of the city’s most vulnerable people, who often face the destruction of their dwellings, belongings and documents. 

“Those are their homes, no matter how rough,” emphasized Antoine De Clerck, coordinator of La Reverse de la Médaille, or RDLM, a collective of over 80 different aid organizations formed in response to the “social cleansing” operation underway in the city.

More than a million people filed requests for asylum in the European Union in 2023, the highest level in seven years, according to E.U. statistics, and France received the second-highest number of requests at 167,000.

“We have a welcome policy in France,” De Clerck said. “You are welcome on the streets.”

Paul Alauzy, the migration mission manager with Medecins du Monde in Paris and a founder of Collective Access to Rights, which is part of RDLM, said the group took the early decision not to oppose the games outright. 

“We share common values with them. But they promised the most inclusive games ever, so we want them held to the promises,” Alauzy said. “You have a big state machine crushing the lives of the most unwanted people, and the Olympics is like oil, making the machine stronger.”

RDLM launched in October with a protest by activists and aid workers outside the Olympic Committee Paris headquarters and a simultaneous letter to the committee and the government. 

Knowing that the government normally funds social services but gives the work to NGOs, they began by offering detailed proposals to handle the entire project of continuing to care for the homeless during the games.

“We worked really hard [to develop responses to the] problems that we identified — food and water access, emergency sheltering, public spaces,” De Clerck said, but the budgets were never approved. “We’re going to work with police to make sure that where there’s food distribution and some queuing we don’t have police doing controls for undocumented people, so at least people get food.”

No support

To find the funds to ensure the continuation of care, RDLM went first to the Olympic Committee itself, which said it could not support their efforts with its $12 billion budget. The group then appealed instead to the games’ corporate sponsors. De Clerck wrote over 60 letters to sponsors of the Olympics, and the group received only a handful of responses, all of which said they did not have the budget. 

Alauzy pointed out that there were funds for a “propaganda” campaign that gave pamphlets on Olympics history to schoolchildren along with a two-euro coin, which cost $16 million. To save the lives of people dying in the streets, RDLM was only asking for $10 million, “a drop in the bucket” that could have been used to provide food and stockpile tents and blankets.

A large part of the resistance effort has been the compilation and dissemination of information. On June 6, RDLM released a 78-page report called “One Year of Social Cleansing” that detailed evictions case by case along with legal assessments of their proposed justifications. The document also contains several examples of government memos that explicitly link the expulsions to the Olympics as a matter of policy.

“The Olympics have definitely accelerated the social cleansing,” said Amaia, a professor of colonial history of America at Sorbonne University and a member of the Solidarity Collective with All the Immigrants and Sud Educational Syndicate.

To collect data, volunteers participated in a “night of solidarity,” where they surveyed the city to count those sleeping outside. Researchers then extrapolated the population of homeless in the city from those counted during the annual event. By combining these numbers with data about police raids, they were able to determine that at least 12,000 people had been displaced, even accounting for those who faced repeated removals. 

Aid workers are clear that the expulsions have made their work more difficult, if not impossible at times. Alauzy and de Clerck both said that their organizations generally lose contact with those who are expelled, and both described the loss of hard-earned trust in the aid groups’ work. 

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Alauzy said that when 450 migrants were expelled from a warehouse in Virty-Sur-Seine, the largest squat in France, Medecins du Monde received steadily fewer responses from phone calls to the population every week. Many of them had jobs but faced discrimination in rentals on top of pressure on the housing market in France generally.

Beyond providing partial solutions to basic needs like shelter and water, the squats serve as centers of community, group solidarity and community organization. 

Alauzy gave the example of a particular homeless immigrant from Sudan who has struggled with alcoholism since coming to Europe, but had found improved stability thanks to his squat and the networks it provided. 

The community in the squat would encourage him to sleep and drink water, but now he can be found living alone on a mattress outside a metro station. 

“Since the end of the squat his health is going down, down, down, because he’s alone, he’s isolated; he cannot shower like he used to, so he’s drinking more,” Alauzy said. “So when we say there are 12,500 expulsions, it’s real individual lives … being crushed.”

Beyond the Olympics, the RDLM believe that the government has systematically targeted those encampments and squats which have been centers of resistance and organization.

Speaking out

One way that affected populations are resisting has been by speaking to major news organizations. 

With the government repeatedly rejecting requests for funding and denying that expulsions were linked to the Olympics, the aid groups have escalated their threats to speak to the media, particularly during the games.

“So we told them, yes you’re gonna have cameras from the whole world for the athletes, but they’re gonna want to tell what’s happening in the city, and we started getting attention,” De Clerck said.

The government initially denied the link between expulsions and the Olympics but now no longer denies it, instead disagreeing about numbers.

Alauzy wanted to launch the collective “with a bang, something new and memorable,” so the group took an idea from French environmental groups and used lasers to project “Games of Expulsion” on the Olympic Committee building.

Refusing to cooperate

The main option offered to evicted persons during the last six months was being bused to centers located in rural, isolated locations with few resources and little opportunity to connect with the community. 

Others are offered emergency sheltering, but it can be as little as one night, and when they call again after being forced back to the streets, they are told there are no spaces. So De Clerck describes it as a way for the government to pretend that they’re fixing the problem without really offering any permanent solutions.

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“Some people have been in the streets for 10, 15 years,” he said. “You can’t move those people,” who may have residence permits, habits, jobs, places to shower and social connections.

In January, after three months of weekly buses leaving Paris, many began to refuse the option, having heard by word of mouth that the proposed solution wouldn’t serve them. 

“This is an example of resistance as well,” Alauzy said, like when “a regular mom in the streets says ‘no, I’m not getting on the bus,’ because this is not good for us.” 

Youth stand up

Around a quarter of those affected by expulsions are minors, many of whom are alone in France, unaccompanied by adults. 

After being evicted from their tent encampment in Belleville Park in April, around 200 of the youths formed a collective and occupied a theater and cultural center. They routinely stage demonstrations at various strategic points across the city, like the health and education administration buildings.

Access to healthcare is among their chief demands, along with education and housing. “Most of the time they ask for school, and that’s very touching,” De Clerck said. “It’s beautiful the way they are demonstrating every day.”

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The Belleville youths can be seen passing out pamphlets to pedestrians at rallies held by migrant solidarity groups like Coordination Sans-Papiers and Marche du Solidarite, whose stickers advocating rights for undocumented migrants are plastered on lamp posts and street signs across the city.

The pamphlet also points out that the youths are in a real way a major subject of French politics and the recent election, where the primary fault line was disagreement about immigration. “We are not a danger,” a recent pamphlet read. “We are asking for, in short, the same rights as anyone in France.”

In the building, the youths have essentially established a welcome center of their own and can be found engaged in art projects, making group journals, cheering their friends as they return for the day, and welcoming contributing aid workers. There are security guards, and the city has banned journalists with cameras from entering.

“They’ve been demonstrating outside the education administration buildings and they’ve earned small victories by gaining an audience with administrators,” said Jeanne,  a founder of a social services group called Center Tara. But they still face technical issues like a dysfunctional website that requests their proof of address, “which, by definition, they don’t have.”

Logistics of resistance during the games

The RDLM is now engaged in a massive mapping project intended to provide food and other basic services, comparing the security zones with the locations of social facilities. During the games themselves, some aid centers will face mandatory closures while others will need to be moved for practical reasons of protection. Centers that normally serve a thousand meals a night to people who often queue an hour and a half will have to serve two thousand meals, as other surrounding centers are closed. 

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One of the largest medical centers of Medecins du Monde will have to be dispersed to other locations because it falls within the triangle of the Olympic village, the stadiums and the Olympic Committee offices.

“It’s not because it’s not accessible, but they’ve got a lot of undocumented people, and the police presence will be insane,” De Clerck said. “So they’re very careful about the undocumented people being able to go for their health checks without risking being deported.”

The groups have had to continually fight for access to information about the government’s plans. For example, government documents suggest that any location near train stations might need to be cleared due to overcrowding and security concerns.

“Fundamental rights, just being here and breathing, will be threatened,” De Clerck said. 

“It’s a big moment for militarization of the police. They’re policing the streets and kicking out the unwanted, but they’re also going to police the social movements,” Alauzy said. “If we organize an action during the games, will we be like social terrorists? We don’t know what they will do to us, so it’s one of the really scary parts of the Olympics.”

But Amaia said that, “it can play in favor of the activists to the extent that it is the moment to put pressure [on the government]” because there will be so many journalists there to cover the Olympics.

Minor successes and ongoing struggle

When the authorities tried to ban food distribution in two areas of Paris with high numbers of migrants and drug users in October, the RDLM quickly filed an appeal. Within two weeks they won the case, since the government’s justification for denying such a basic service was weak. 

“We’re really fearing that it’s happening again just before the Olympics, so that we don’t have enough time to go to court,” De Clerck said. “We have a bunch of lawyers scrolling all the decrees every day — they can just put a little sentence in a decree somewhere.”

They also won a small victory when the Olympics gave half a million dollars to a social center for children as part of the new Olympic village. 

Despite successfully blocking repeated unsuitable solutions suggested by the government, the Belleville youths were eventually evicted from the squat on July 3. The youths were bused to be housed by the city in gymnasiums for the summer. Since it’s only a temporary solution and they don’t have 24-hour access or showers in the gyms, they are continuing their organizing efforts.

After buses removed 230 minors to be relocated to gymnasiums, mothers with infants who were also staying in the building refused for over four hours to enter the vans as supporters protested alongside them. 

“The city is prepared to throw these women with children in the street,” Amaia said. “It’s a disgrace. We are asking what world, in what life, what society is it where women with infants who are one-month, two-month, or three-months old have to sleep in the streets? And how is it possible that there isn’t a place in a city of more than a million, and so rich?”

Thanks to the demonstrations blocking their removal, the mothers finally received an accommodation offer at the end of the day from the city government, who will be taking charge of them. But the groups continue to protest to make clear their demands for their living conditions and access to care.

“Just because you have a high security [situation] doesn’t mean you need to push the homeless away,” De Clerck said. “If you don’t want to have them in the streets, then just shelter them.”

This article Inside the struggle to stop the ‘social cleansing’ of Paris for the Olympics was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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