The Paris Olympics have provided an excuse to turn the host city into a security state overrun by police, military, barricades, and AI-powered surveillance technology. In brutal yet predictable fashion, authorities have reportedly been sweeping homeless encampments, rounding up unhoused people, and expelling them by bus to other parts of France ahead of the Olympics Opening Ceremony. Reporting from Paris, TRNN’s Dave Zirin speaks with Paul Alauzy, a project manager at Médecins du Monde (Doctors of the World) and an organizer of Le Revers de la Médaille (The Other Side of the Medal) campaign.
Studio Production: Jules Boykoff
Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Dave Zirin:
Hey, this is Dave Zirin for Edge of Sports TV, only on the Real News Network. I’m thrilled to be in Paris looking at the other side of the Olympic Games. The story they’re not telling you on NBC. Not so much what’s happening inside the lines, but outside the lines. And I have a perfect guest for such a show. His name is Paul Alauzy, and he is an activist here working on a host of issues regarding the Olympic effect on the city of Paris. Paul, how are you, sir?
Paul Alauzy:
Good, good. Busy, tired, but motivated.
Dave Zirin:
I want to hear what’s making you so busy and tired these days?
Paul Alauzy:
Unfortunately, the social cleansing. Last week we had the biggest week of evacuation that I never saw, actually in Paris. They evicted 10 cities in only four days, 500 people were moved, put into buses, so it was super intense. We had to wake up every day at 5:00 and follow the people, and then we have to raise awareness. So there’s the medical watch we do, and then there is answering the media, organizing protests. So it’s intense.
Dave Zirin:
We should talk about your organization so people have a better sense of who you are. It’s two organizations in English. It’s Doctors of the World.
Paul Alauzy:
Yeah.
Dave Zirin:
People can see [foreign language 00:01:12], and also The Other Side of the Medal. Yeah. Can you speak to us about both of those groups?
Paul Alauzy:
Yeah. So Doctors of the World, they’re the ones paying my salary. I’m a project manager for them, so it’s been six years. I have an amazing team of doctors, psychiatrist, nurses, translators, social workers, and we go towards refugees who unfortunately lives and survive in the streets of Paris and its surroundings. It can be 10 cities, it can be squat in abandoned building that people occupy in order to be out of the streets. And then we have a great network of partners, other NGOs, activists with which we work. And so we organized a year ago and we created [foreign language 00:01:58], The Other Side of the Medal because we started to just suffer the effect of the Olympics.
And it’s not just the refugee community, it’s every homeless person, whether it’s a drug user, sex worker, a refugee, people from Eastern Europe. Everybody got affected. All the numbers of expulsions, harassment, even sometimes control and police violence got bigger, new practices started to develop. So we had to organize to shed light on this matter and also to offer solutions in order to avoid that.
Dave Zirin:
Now there are attacks on homeless or unhoused people in cities, certainly across the United States and in major cities throughout the world. Do you think the Olympics have been an excuse for this crackdown, or do you think it is happening because of the Olympics?
Paul Alauzy:
I think it’s a bit of both. I think for the states and the states in general, it’s an opportunity. Because when they do the social cleansing, they’re going to push the population away and they’re going to replace the tent city with big rocks. They’re going to build new walls, they’re going to put barbed wire.
So I think for them, it’s not just about the games, it’s also an opportunity to transform the city and to select the population. And most unwanted population is the one in public space that they have to push away. So there is opportunity and then there is an effect. There is an Olympic effect, and I think it’s in the DNA of the games. They want to do the [inaudible 00:03:35] village. You have to clear out the streets of all the people you don’t want to so it’s a bit of both.
And here there is a lot of evacuation that you can link to the Olympic village being nearby the passage of the flame. Today it’s the bicycle. Bicycle.
Dave Zirin:
The cycling.
Paul Alauzy:
The cycling race happening today. So they kicked a slum last week because it was on the tour of the bicycle. So there is a lot of things that you can directly link to the Olympics, but I think it relates to a more general spirit of big capitalist states being violence and mistreating the homeless population in general.
Dave Zirin:
You mentioned about them being moved out, put on buses. Where are they going?
Paul Alauzy:
That’s a good question. Yeah, so I heard a lot about the buses living at [inaudible 00:04:34] before the games, the buses living Vancouver before the games. And here we witnessed this. So it used to happen a lot in France to take the people in buses and send them somewhere else. But France, right before the games in March, 2023 created a new system. It’s called the SaaS system, and they created 10 spots everywhere but in Paris.
So it’s going to be close to [foreign language 00:05:00] transport in smaller cities, like small cities, like with 5,000 inhabitants tops, in which people get taken in charge for three weeks. They have three weeks in a hotel or something. After three weeks, 40% of them they will have solution meets long-term solutions in that region. All the others, they are being sent to emergency shelters sometimes for nights, two nights, two months tops, and they end up homeless in another smaller cities where they don’t have the same community outreach and everything.
To give you a very concrete example, just today, two hours ago, I had some patients, they have guns. They’ve been living in the streets for a couple of months here. They just received a new guy. He is an Afghan, too. They know him. He’s been kicked out of Belgium. So that’s his first day in Paris because they’re in Paris called an NGO. I was able to give them a tent. I was able to give them sleeping bags, and they will try to find somewhere to sleep because it’s very tense now with the Olympics, but at least they have this. You have a community and then you have a community that has a network. If you go to a smaller city to reach the states doesn’t give a dime to receive that population. It’s just going to be horrible for their health and dealing conditions.
Dave Zirin:
Through the Olympic activism. Have you been able to meet new people who take this issue of the unhoused more seriously? Have more people gotten involved in the struggle for the rights?
Paul Alauzy:
Well, the beautiful thing, the right side of the Olympic effects is the fact that everybody’s coming up together. We never regrouped that many association and NGOs working with so many different publics. Usually it’s going to be, oh, you guys work with refugees. You do your thing. Us, we work with the sex workers. We will do our things on the side. And now everybody come up together. Sometimes people with very different positions. So that’s a good thing.
And then the campaign was crazy because when you have a subject of the homeless or whatever, usually people don’t care that much. If you add Olympics to it, then it blows out of proportion because then you have the BBC making inquiries. You have you coming to ask me questions. You have the international attention. So we really spread the world in a way I couldn’t even imagine. This year, we have media from every country in the world asking to make inquiries about this. And I think it’s not just the Olympic effect, but it’s also the ethic of journalists all around the world that want to not just serve the good side of the Olympics, but also do their job. And it’s nice to meet that many journalists from that many country taking their job very seriously to treat every side of that event.
Dave Zirin:
This must be very bracing for you to see all of this attention paid to this work that you’ve been doing for a long time.
Paul Alauzy:
Yeah.
Dave Zirin:
It must be head spinning.
Paul Alauzy:
Yeah, it’s kind of unreal. Sometime two weeks ago, I had ABC Australia here in front of the building. I’ve been working in for six years, and I’m like, oh, we’re going to have the games in Brisbane in a couple of years. What advice do you have for the people Brisbane and of Australia? What do you have to say to them? I was like, I’m a social worker from France, but it’s a bit a spinning is the world.
Dave Zirin:
Yeah, surreal is the word that I was reaching for. Oh, I know what I wanted to ask you. Okay. So you just had this election with national rally. You beat back the fascists.
Paul Alauzy:
Yeah.
Dave Zirin:
Congratulations.
Paul Alauzy:
It was a close one.
Dave Zirin:
It was very close. But people in the coalition trying to beat them back include people like the Socialist Party, Mayor Hidalgo, I mean people who are very much pro Olympics. Is there tension now in that united front because of different opinions about the Olympics?
Paul Alauzy:
Well, we already see that. For example, we have the party of the [foreign language 00:09:22] France assumies. We are organizing tomorrow a protest against the Olympics. It’s going to be the counter opening ceremony of the games tomorrow, the day before the real opening ceremony. And the Francis Suis party put out communique and appeal to rally everyone up to go to that protest, which is a good sign for us. But for sure, we have been seeing people from the Socialist Party and from Paris City saying that they don’t even believe in social cleansing. So we can see the difference of position in that coalitions, which seems a bit crazy to me to have people denying social cleansing and hard on facts that are being brought by lawyers, doctors, NGOs, researchers, journalists. So yeah, we’ll see if they happen to form a government, we’re not going to let go any of them. We’re going to arrest them every day.
Dave Zirin:
And just for our viewers out there, we are going to cover those counter-Olympic protests. So you’re going to get a bird’s eye view of what that looks like. And I couldn’t be more anticipatory in my thinking about that. That’s going to be very interesting. Is there anything that we’re missing? Is there anything about your work, anything about the Olympics that you’d like to share?
Paul Alauzy:
Well, I’d like to say that of course there is the great work of the [foreign language 00:10:54] and we’re so proud of it, but there have been so many example of community resistance to that social cleansing. We had a lot of homeless people, refugee sex workers, whatever, coming to France conference to spread the message themselves.
Some young migrants, they formed a collective and they occupied a lot of places during the year to resist that social cleansing. And they won to have some housing in some gene in Paris, and they stayed in Paris, thanks to the mobilizations. Now as we speak now, there is between 203 homeless families, people in families protesting. It’s been 24 hours now protesting in front of one of Paris city saying that we want house, we want house [inaudible 00:11:42].
So of course, we have a lot of activists and I’m super proud of what we did. But one of my proudest achievement is that we managed to also support communities the good way and to make them in touch with politicians, in touch with journalists. And there have been so many examples, really admirable examples of resistance, because we had so many medias asking, Hey, can I meet a victim of social cleansing? No, you’re going to meet people who are resisting. It’s not just victims.
Dave Zirin:
Right. The day we’re doing this interview, it was announced that the French Alps will be hosting the Winter Olympics in 2030, at great financial expense, of course. I wanted to ask you what your thoughts are about that and what you have to say to the folks in the Alps.
Paul Alauzy:
Well, we’re already in touch with some people in the Alps. We put out today in one of the biggest newspaper [foreign language 00:12:39]. We put out an open letter signed by more than 80 organization, not just about social cleansing, but also about the environmental impacts, the economic impact, the impacts on just surveillance and democracy. And at the end of that letter, we asked for a referendum because yeah, the CIO validated today that the Alps could hold the games in 2030, but I really think we need the people of the Alps to vote.
So that’s going to be our next campaign. We started today, we’re going to talk about it at the rally tomorrow. We hope that there will be soon a new Parliament government, and we really need a referendum about this. And that’s what the work, I think we kind of lost for Paris 2024 in terms of direct protection and benefits for the populations targeted by the social cleansing. But we still have six years, and I read in one of Joe [inaudible 00:13:38] books that the games in Denver were canceled in ’72. It was 50 years ago, and you still have six years to go. So we were out for that fight.
Dave Zirin:
Love that. Love that. You mentioned earlier about media coming from all over the world to speak to you. How are you now thinking internationally about the Olympics and other mega events and connecting with activists in other cities who are trying to figure out how to resist the Olympic monolith?
Paul Alauzy:
Well, it’s one of the heads spinning thing. So when we started the campaign, after about two months of MCG public, we were contacted by some folks in Vancouver working on drug risk reductions and everything. And they lived through the Winter Olympics of 2010. So we went there.
So for the first time in my life, I crossed at the Atlantic. I went to Canada, and when one of the first talk that we had, one of the activists, he said, you have to understand that this is a global international movement, and that now you are part of this, and so you have a responsibility to feed it and to make it stronger. And it really amazed me, and even if we didn’t add all the solutions that we were expecting for bias 2024 to be really inclusive and protective and whatnot, I’m deeply convinced that all the work that we’re doing now will be of use. And one of the things I’m thinking the most about is the people of Vancouver. They made themselves available 14 years later because the games they were in 2010. So we were in this for the long run, I think.
Dave Zirin:
Absolutely. I remember Vancouver in 2010, I was there. Those are some serious activists.
Paul Alauzy:
Oh, yeah, they kick ass.
Dave Zirin:
That’s amazing. And that they’re still doing the work 14 years later. It speaks to not just that people are in it for the long haul, but how it affected and changed people to be part of this struggle. I mean, it does change people forever because the priorities of a city are so at odds with the social needs of a city, the priorities of the Olympics. It’s like a train that runs headlong into what the people, the most vulnerable and marginalized populations need.
Paul Alauzy:
And when you read about the Olympics, you realize that at first it was only for white people, only for men. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, they were doing anthropological experiments. I mean, it was very bad. Then they did the games with the Nazis, and now when they organized the game, they’re going to try to do something about the environment. They’re going to try to talk about a social legacy for their homeless. So seeing those people and meeting them from Vancouver really made us realize that we can transform the game. Even now, after nine months of craziness and social cleansing and violence, I’m still convinced that maybe in a few years we can make significant change in the games.
Dave Zirin:
Wow. Paulo Alauzy, thank you so much.
Paul Alauzy:
Cheers.
Dave Zirin:
Thank you so much for joining us here on The Real News Network, edge of Sports TV, more footage and stories coming from the other side of the Olympics here in Paris.
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