Paris police evict migrants from an encampment in the city on July 25, one day before the 2024 Olympic Games open.Siegfried Modola/The Globe and Mail
They arrived without notice at around 2 p.m. on Thursday; more than two dozen police officers who quickly took up positions in front of a municipal office building in northern Paris.
With well-practised precision they sealed off the street and began rounding up nearly 300 homeless people, slowly directing them to buses that pulled up in regular intervals.
No one seemed to know where the buses were going and in the commotion families became separated. Panicked relatives searched the crowd for familiar faces as charity workers scrambled to offer help. The area around the building was littered with blankets, empty water bottles and food wrappers.
“I’ve been living on the street here for a week with my son,” said Aisha Konate as she sat on the sidewalk and held a bottle for her seven-month-old son who wriggled in his stroller. “I don’t know where they are taking us,” she added, tears streaming down her face.
Across the street an orange blanket lay neatly on the sidewalk. Next to it was a handwritten sign on a piece of cardboard that read; Enfant à la rue, children on the street.
Charity workers say city officials have carried out dozens of evictions with decrees that can be challenged in court but only long after the people have been moved. Migrants look on during a police operation in Paris on July 25.Siegfried Modola/The Globe and Mail
Charity workers said it was no coincidence that police chose the day before the Olympics opening ceremony for the raid. They say city officials and police have been targeting homeless people for weeks, shipping many to temporary shelters far from downtown in order to spruce up the city’s image for the Games.
Christophe Noël du Payrat, a senior Paris official, denied that the evictions had anything to do with the Olympics. “We are working on this issue every week since several years,” he said in an interview outside the municipal building. The city has an obligation to find shelter for people living on the streets, he added, especially young children.
“We are taking out of the streets about 6,000, 7,000 each year from these kinds of camps within Paris,” he said. “We can’t say ‘It’s the Olympics we don’t intervene’, because otherwise we’ll be criticized.”
He acknowledged that some homeless people have been moved from spots near Olympic venues such as the Champ de Mars and Place de la Concorde because of the Games. But he insisted that Thursday’s action was “social work as usual for us.”
His comments didn’t sit well with Antoine De Clerck, who is with Le revers de la médaille or the “Other side of the coin”, a Paris-based coalition of charities that works with homeless people.
A man sits on concrete blocks placed by the city’s authorities to deter people from setting up encampments in Paris, on July 25.Siegfried Modola/The Globe and Mail
Personal belongings are left over by migrants after having been evicted by the police in Paris.Siegfried Modola/The Globe and Mail
De Clerck said city officials have carried out dozens of evictions by issuing decrees that can be challenged in court but only long after the people have been moved. Typically officials seek a court order first, he added. But since that process can take weeks, they’ve opted for the more efficient decrees.
“The number of operations we have seen in the last four months is the same that we had in just one year,” he said Thursday. He added that most of the people have been bused to temporary shelters for only 30 days, just long enough for the Olympics.
Sixteen-year-old Abou has been driven out of almost every place he’s tried to sleep in recent weeks.
He came to Paris from Guinea in March and has spent most of that time living under bridges and in train stations. As the Olympics drew closer, the police presence escalated and he’s been constantly on the move.
“It’s very, very difficult for us,” he said, asking that his last name not be used so as not to jeopardize his asylum claim. He recently was given a bed in a gymnasium, but he has to leave during the day and spends his time avoiding the police.
Paris isn’t the first city holding a major world event to be accused of “social cleansing.” Almost every Olympic city has engaged in similar efforts to clear away people officials deem undesirable.
“The Olympics are an inequality machine. They take the inequalities that exist in society and they magnify them,” said Jules Boykoff, a political scientist at Pacific University in Oregon who specializes in the politics of the Olympics. Boykoff said he has seen a similar pattern stretching back to the Seoul Olympics in 1988.
Jules Boykoff, a polticial scientist at Pacific University in Oregon who specialises in the politics of the Olympics, talks to members of the press on July 25.Siegfried Modola/The Globe and Mail
Over in the northern suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis, known as the 93 because of its administrative number, officials have hung colourful drapes over the Pont de Stains to cover up graffiti and conceal an area under the bridge where charity workers say police removed about 100 homeless people last week. To make sure no one came back, they installed 35 large concrete blocks that make it impossible to sit or lie down.
The raid was directly tied to the Games, charities say. The bridge crosses a canal not far from the Stade de France, the main Olympic stadium. During Friday’s opening ceremony the Olympic torch will travel in a barge along the canal to the stadium where a cauldron will be lit for the duration of the Games.
“This had been a tent city for three years because these people were expelled from Paris and pushed here to the 93,” said Paul Alauzy, a co-ordinator with Le revers de la médaille. “So now this is Olympic ground and when the flame goes by the poor people have to go away, apparently.”
The heavy-handed approach has shocked some Parisians. Miche Samuzu was stunned as she watched the police prod people onto the buses outside the municipal building. “I just came up from the subway and I saw this and I am just sick,” she said as she stood across the street. “It’s not right to treat people like this. They are not animals.”