Europe 1 with AFP / Photo credit: GEOFFROY VAN DER HASSELT / AFP 4:19 p.m., March 24, 2024

In order to alert people to the fate of people on the streets before the Olympic Games, activists redecorated around ten statues in Paris this Sunday. Facing the Senate, these Reverse of the Medal activists symbolically launched "a first test" of the Olympic Games, by throwing buoys representing the Olympic rings into the pool of the Luxembourg Gardens.

“They don’t seem to listen much to the living, so we made the deceased speak”: activists redecorated around ten statues in Paris on Sunday to warn of the fate of people on the streets before the Olympic Games . Facing the Senate, these activists from Revers de la Medal, a collective which brings together some 80 associations and NGOs, symbolically launched "a first test" of the Olympic Games, by throwing buoys representing the Olympic rings into the basin of the Luxembourg Gardens, noted an AFP journalist. Launched with colored smoke bombs, they carried, they explained, the “ills of the Olympics” (expulsions, harassment, etc.).

3,500 people sleep on the streets in Paris

Activists had previously "made several statues in the capital speak" with messages such as "social cleansing as a legacy", explained Paul Alauzy, spokesperson for Reverse of the Medal. Four months before the Olympics (July 26-August 11), in Paris, "3,500 people are sleeping in the street and a thousand in gymnasiums, and this summer there will be new arrivals", he pointed out. “We must take care of them so that the celebration is dignified and beautiful for everyone,” underlines the collective which is calling for the creation of 7,000 additional places in the Paris region. 

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“We have been warning for six months (...): people on the street who are always the last forgotten in our society, will find themselves chased out of the city, harassed. And there are already signs, expulsions squats, camps, shanty towns that are razed..." added Paul Alauzy, also coordinator at Médecins du monde. “We are not against the Olympics, we are here to ensure that these Olympics are as good as possible and as integrated as possible,” added David Clougher, of the “L’Assiette migrante” association.

A hundred migrants evacuated from a camp

The authorities, for their part, argue that 120,000 people are housed every night under the emergency in Ile-de-France. For several months, the collective has denounced the forced expulsions of precarious populations (homeless people, migrants in camps, sex workers, etc.) in the run-up to the Games. On Wednesday morning, around a hundred migrants, mainly unaccompanied minors, were evacuated from a camp under a tunnel in the 12th arrondissement in Paris, under a prefectural decree citing in particular a significant security risk.

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In Dugny (Seine-Saint-Denis), in front of the Olympic Media Village which is due to open its doors on Monday, between 60 and 70 environmental and housing rights activists in particular also protested at the start of the afternoon against gentrification and concreting which affects the areas around the Olympic sites, noted an AFP journalist. At the call of the Youth for climate collective, they calmly deployed banners on which one could read in particular: "The Olympics are concrete, we're knocking them out", chanting "Everyone hates the Olympics" or even "No justice, no Olympics.”