Allegations of “social cleansing” have been made against organisers of the Paris Summer Olympic Games as homeless people, sex workers, and illegal migrants are being taken off the city’s streets and sent to regional France ahead of the event.
Serge Grouard, the mayor of Orleans in central France, went public Monday with his complaints over the unannounced arrival of up to 500 homeless migrants in his town of 100,000 people, AFP reports.
“It has been proved that every three weeks, a coach arrives in Orleans from Paris, with between 35-50 people on board,” he told reporters, adding it was to “clean the deck” in the capital ahead of the Olympics in July and August.
Volunteers from associations seen removing a migrant minors camp that was evicted by police under Pont Marie. A camp of migrant minors beneath Pont Marie on the banks of the River Seine was evicted by police. The rise of waters in the Seine, which caused several floods, motivated this operation, but for activist associations this was used as a pretext for cleaning up the areas where migrants live ahead of the Olympic Games. (Telmo Pinto/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Each new arrival is offered three weeks in a hotel at the state’s expense, but is thereafter left to fend for themselves, Grouard explained.
Paris has long been a magnet for asylum seekers and migrants, mostly from Africa, South Asia or the Middle East, with demand for short-term emergency accommodation far exceeding supply.
As a result, informal camps under bridges or on unoccupied land spring up regularly around the capital, which are periodically torn down by police, as Breitbart News reported.
Occupants are offered the chance to apply for asylum and the government’s policy is to send them out of Paris and elsewhere in the country.
“We haven’t been consulted, either about the creation or about the people who will go there,” the deputy mayor of Strasbourg, Floriane Varieras, told AFP when asked about a new facility near her city in eastern France.
“That’s where I agree with the mayor of Orleans, the rather opaque side of what is happening,” she added.
In January, the major of Lavaur, a small town near Toulouse in southwest 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.”
In February, an umbrella group of 80 French charities called the Revers de la medaille (The other side of the medal) denounced what it called the “social cleansing” of Paris ahead of the Olympics with efforts to remove migrants, the homeless and sex workers.
The 2024 Summer Olympics, officially the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad and commonly known as Paris 2024, is scheduled to take place from 26 July to 11 August
AFP contributed to this story
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