PARIS—They are the undesirables, the displaced, Les Misérables. But most of all they’re out of sight. A bus ticket to somewhere else is just about all that this city’s homeless — migrants, transients, asylum seekers, the shuffling desperados — have been offered, their existence scrubbed from view in advance of the .
Take it or leave it. But leave. and bridge underpasses of Paris as “social cleansing.
’’ Over the past few months and especially in recent weeks, and the most vulnerable souls made to move along, as far away as possible from the Olympic spectacle. Officials are intent on showcasing the grandeur of France and the beauty of Paris. There’s no room in that pretty postcard scene for the destitute and the sleeping rough.
“People were living here a week ago,’’ Paul Alauzy was saying on Thursday, pointing to the cement structures — they look like giant Lego blocks, with a knobby surface, by design impossible to sit or lie upon — that have been affixed to the ground beneath Pont de Stains bridge that spans the Canal Saint-Denis on the outskirts of the city. “They’d already been expelled from the city centre, pushed out here. Then they were pushed away again, all the tents torn down.
We had a warning but it was still shocking. “This really represents social cleansings in a nutshell.’’ Upwards of 120 people got booted from this location alone, hundreds more along a series of five canal bridges.
Colourful screens were dropped from the overpasses to cover the graffiti. “Hide the misery,’’ snorts Alauzy, project manager for Médecins du Monde, which is among the more than 100 NGOs and other agencies that have come together under the collective of “Le reverse de la medaille’’ — the flip side of the medal. It’s not that they object to the Olympics exactly, but rather to the societal disruption of the Olympics on an unhoused community — 7,000 homeless in Paris, as tabulated by a February census — that includes drug addicts, sex trade workers, trafficked women and the mentally ill, forcibly severed from access to supports such as medical clinics and food distribution services.
“We’re not against the Olympics,’’ insists Antoine de Clerck, spokesperson for the collective. “We believe that the festivities and the sports events should be able to happen without the social impact that we’re seeing. But the IOC, FIFA and governments have a different agenda.
’’ No such agenda afoot, officials counter. They’ve claimed that demolishing the encampments is a routine undertaking that just happens to coincide now with the Games and that shelter was found for 40 per cent of the evacuees. Denials were proved to be false when the newspaper L’Equipe published an email in which a government official said the goal was to “identify people on the street in sites nearly Olympic venues’’ and move them before the Games.
And though the activists may claim they’re not opposed to the Olympics, on Thursday night they staged a “Counter Opening Ceremony’’ at the Place de la République. “Every expulsion breaks a precious link that we’re trying to make with the homeless population,’’ says Alauzy. “This is the social legacy they’re leaving us.
’’ Paris is hardly the first host city that’s striven to exile the homeless. It happened in Tokyo and Beijing, amidst a pandemic, and to a tragic extent in Rio, where it was estimated that up to 70,000 of the poorest residents were strong-arm evicted. But in Paris, transients had previously been ousted from ragtag squats and shanty satellites that had sprung from abandoned factories in the derelict suburbs area of Seine-Saint-Denis, razed for construction of the vast Olympic Village.
Roughly one-third of people who live in Seine-Saint-Denis are immigrants and the government has spent billions to redevelop the area. So where are the poor people supposed to go? “The Olympics are wracked by a paradox,’’ says Jules Boykoff, an Olympics researcher who’s written a half-dozen books about the social impact of the Games. Though they typically boost redevelopment and improvement of infrastructure, they’re also an “inequality machine where displacement is very much a problem imported into the city that exacerbates existing problems.
’’ Unlike in encampments in Toronto, a majority of these homeless people are migrants, many of them in the process of seeking legal asylum, their cases dragging through the bureaucracy. A further reason — court dates — why they’re reluctant to leave the capital, recoiling from the bus and train tickets proffered by the French government, urging their relocation to places like Marseille and Orléans. Promises of long-term housing and social services haven’t been realized.
While police and the courts have evicted about 5,000 people in the past year — most of them single men — many of those who accepted tickets out of town didn’t realize they were simultaneously agreeing to enter a government program screening them for potential deportation. Among the displaced is Julien — surname withheld — who arrived in Paris last September from the Ivory Coast, a trek that took him from Mali to Algeria to Tunisia to Italy before landing in France. Now 17, he’s been living on the streets all this time, while a volunteer lawyer has brought his case before the courts, seeking legal protections as an unescorted minor.
“I’ve been sleeping in the streets, under bridges, wherever I can find a place to lie down. Every time I do find a place, the police evict me. They only give you a few minutes to gather your things and it’s ‘Go away, go away.
’ ’’ For three months he was part of a group that occupied a civil building in Paris, where they actually had beds and assistance from social agencies. But then all of them were kicked out of there too, the location turned over to a delegation from Japan’s Olympic team. For now, he’s staying at a far-flung encampment where some 300 migrants, mostly from Sudan or Chad — including mothers with toddlers and pregnant women — have recently relocated, apparently tolerated by officials because of its distance from the city and its quasi-hidden location.
“We are living day to day, hour to hour,’’ says Julien. “You never know when the police may come.”.
