SHARE
COPY LINK

PARIS 2024 OLYMPICS

Refugees caught up in Paris clean-up drive

"The police arrived at 7am and said to us 'get in the bus'," Ali, a refugee from war-torn Sudan, remembers of the morning that police raided the squat he was living in last April in northern Paris along with 500 other migrants.

A photograph taken in Saint-Denis, north of Paris on March 28, 2024, shows a view of the headquarters of the Paris 2024 Olympics and Paralympics Organizing Committee (Cojo).
A photograph taken in Saint-Denis, north of Paris on March 28, 2024, shows a view of the headquarters of the Paris 2024 Olympics and Paralympics Organizing Committee (Cojo). Refugees have been relocated from Paris to regional towns in what many charities suspect may be a clean-up operation ahead of the Games. (Photo by JOEL SAGET / AFP)

Despite having a job and refugee status, he was ordered on to the vehicle.

“We didn’t have any choice,” he explained.

Along with others scooped up at the disaffected office building, he was told he was being sent by bus to Toulouse — a nearly 700-kilometre (435-mile) trip of seven or eight hours to the southwest.

“They (the police) went from room to room to tell us to get out, then they took our identity documents and said ‘get in the bus’,” he added in an
interview with AFP. “It was impossible to get out of it. They were saying we had to hurry up.”

Ali, who has a job as a cleaner at Disneyland Paris earning 1,400 euros ($1,500) a month, had been caught up in the French government’s policy of sending migrants from the capital to regional towns.

It was announced by French President Emmanuel Macron in September 2022 during a speech in which he criticised the idea of concentrating refugees and migrants in low-income and troubled neighbourhoods of Paris as “absurd”.

READ ALSO: France’s allies to help with Olympics security

Rather than adding strain to the stretched social services of these areas, he argued that asylum seekers and refugees could help reverse declining populations and labour shortages in other areas of the country.

Some charities welcomed the idea in principle, but worried about the implementation.

It caused immediate fury among anti-immigration politicians, and many charities now suspect Macron and his ministers of wanting to clean up Paris ahead of the Olympic Games this July and August — which the government denies.

‘Not our problem’

Ali’s experience demonstrates the difficulties of relocating people.

He didn’t know Toulouse and, once he arrived there, he was taken to an asylum seekers’ centre where he was told he couldn’t stay for longer than four days.

Because he had already obtained refugee status, he was also informed that he shouldn’t be there “along with 17 other refugees” who had been transported from Paris, he remembers.

“I explained that I didn’t know where to go and that I didn’t know anyone.

They told me ‘it’s not our problem’,” he explained from his new home, an office building in Vitry-sur-Seine in southeast Paris occupied by 400
migrants.

Soon after arriving in the southwest, he bought a return ticket to Paris and managed to save his job at Disneyland.

Abdallah Kader, a 51-year-old from Chad in northern Africa, was another person evacuated from Ali’s squat on the Ile-Saint-Denis, an area of Paris that will host the Olympic village during the Games.

Also with refugee status, he was sent to Bordeaux in southwest France, but decided to return to the capital soon after.

“I know people here. We help each other. I find work,” he said in Vitry-sur-Seine where he sleeps in a small former office with another refugee.

READ ALSO: Paris Olympics Guide: How Metro tickets, passes and apps work

‘Social cleansing’? 

Abdallah was once employed as a security guard at one of the many building sites around Paris linked to the Olympic Games which kick off on July 26.

Several charities are convinced that the migrant transfers are linked to a desire among French authorities to banish rough-sleeping, tents and squats from the capital before the eyes of the world fall on its famed cobbled streets.

In February, an umbrella group of 80 French NGOs denounced what it called the “social cleansing” of Paris ahead of the Olympics with efforts to remove migrants, the homeless and sex workers.

“Clearly ahead of the Olympics, there are transfers, a social clean-up to prepare the city for the arrival of tourists,” Jhila Prentis, a volunteer at
United Migrants, a charity that works in Vitry-sur-Seine.

The group wants the state to run more checks before sending people to provincial France “so that it meets their needs and that they agree to leave,” she added, explaining that often “they have a life here.”

France logged 167,000 requests for asylum last year and Macron is under constant pressure from right-wing political opponents and public opinion to reduce immigration.

Housing Minister Guillaume Kasbarian told parliament on Tuesday that 200,000 homeless people slept each night in shelters provided by the French state, with 100,000 of these places in the capital region.

“Given the saturation in the Paris region, not everyone can find a place,” he added. “That’s why, without any link to the Olympic Games, the government put in place a dispersal policy from March 2023,” he explained.

Member comments

Log in here to leave a comment.
Become a Member to leave a comment.

PARIS 2024 OLYMPICS

Factcheck: Is France really trying to ban speaking English at the Paris Olympics?

A resolution by a group of French MPs to 'say non to English at the Paris Olympics' has generated headlines - but will athletes and visitors really be required to speak French?

Factcheck: Is France really trying to ban speaking English at the Paris Olympics?

In a resolution adopted on Thursday, France’s Assemblée Nationale urged organisers of the 2024 Paris Games, as well as athletes, trainers and journalists, to use French as much as possible.

Annie Genevard, the sponsor of the resolution from the right-wing Les Républicains party, expressed alarm to fellow MPs that “the Olympic Games reflect the loss of influence of our language.”

The French MP’s resolution has garnered headlines, but does it actually mean anything?

Citing examples of English slogans in international sport, she added: “The fight for the French language … is never finished, even in the most official spheres.

“Let’s hope that ‘planche a roulettes’ replaces skateboard and ‘rouleau du cap’ point break (a surfing term), but I have my doubts.”

She’s right to doubt it – in French the skateboarding event is ‘le skateboard’, while the new addition of break-dancing is ‘le breaking‘.

But what does this actually mean?

In brief, not a lot. This is a parliamentary resolution, not a law, and is totally non-binding.

The Games are organised by the International Olympic Committee, the Paris 2024 Organising Committee and Paris City Hall – MPs do not have a role although clearly the Games must follow any French domestic laws that parliament passes.

The French parliament has got slightly involved with security issues for the Games, passing laws allowing for the use of enhanced security and surveillance measures including the use of facial recognition and drone technology that was previously outlawed in France.

So what do the Olympic organisers think of English?

The Paris 2024 organisers have shown that they have no problem using English – which is after all one of the two official languages of the Olympics. The other being French.

The head of the organising committee Tony Estanguet speaks fluent English and is happy to do so while official communications from the Games organisers – from social media posts to the ticketing website – are all available in both French and English.

Even the slogan for the Games is in both languages – Ouvrir grand les jeux/ Games wide open (although the pun only really works in French).

In fact the Games organisers have sometimes drawn criticism for their habit (common among many French people, especially younger ones) of peppering their French with English terms, from “le JO-bashing” – criticism of the Olympics – to use of the English “challenges” rather than the French “defis”.

The 45,000 Games volunteers – who are coming from dozens of countries – are required only to speak either French or English and all information for volunteers has been provided in both languages.

Paris local officials are also happy to use languages other than French and the extra signage that is going up in the city’s public transport system to help people find their way to Games venues is printed in French, English and Spanish.

Meanwhile public transport employees have been issued with an instant translation app, so that they can help visitors in multiple languages.

In short, visitors who don’t speak French shouldn’t worry too much – just remember to say bonjour.

Official language  

So why is French an official language of the Olympics? Well that’s easy – the modern Games were the invention of a Frenchman, the aristocrat Pierre de Coubertin, in the late 19th century.

Some of his views – for example that an Olympics with women would be “impractical, uninteresting (and) unaesthetic” – have thankfully been consigned to the dustbin of history, but his influence remains in the language.

The International Olympic Committee now has two official languages – English and French.

Official communications from the IOC are done in both languages and announcements and speeches at the Games (for example during medal ceremonies) are usually done in English, French and the language of the host nation, if that language is neither English nor French.

SHOW COMMENTS