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President Emmanuel Macron and French Olympic organizers promised to make this year's summer games the Olympics of inclusion. Olympic housing was built in disadvantaged neighborhoods with the idea that some of the units will be converted into public housing when the games end. But critics say thousands of marginalized people have been displaced to make way for the games. NPR's Eleanor Beardsley reports.
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE: A couple days before the Olympics started, police arrived at dawn to evacuate an encampment of tents along a canal under a bridge in Northeast Paris, a short walk from an Olympic site.
They're opening their tents and telling them to leave. Some people are sleeping.
Most of these migrants are from places like Sudan, Eritrea or Afghanistan. They've fled war and hardship to seek asylum in France, like 25-year-old Afghan Wally Maufren (ph), who says he has refugee status - so the right to be here, but nowhere to live.
WALLY MAUFREN: Here is - in France is the life is too much difficult for refugee, for migrants, because they're waiting too much long time here to get some place for sleep.
BEARDSLEY: Organizations that help the homeless say sweeps to get people off the Paris streets have gone into overdrive with the Olympic games, with many people being bussed to far-flung smaller French cities. A collective called The Other Side of the Medal formed to pressure authorities to make a proper plan. Paul Alauzy is its spokesman.
PAUL ALAUZY: We are not anti-Olympics, OK? But we started to see a year or a year and a half ago the side effect of the Olympics, and it has a big side effect on everybody that lives or depend on the streets. With the organization of the game, they started to be pushed out and sent to other regions of France.
BEARDSLEY: He says other regions are ill-equipped to deal with them, and after a month of emergency housing, they're pushed back onto the streets in an unfamiliar place. Antoine de Clerck, a coordinator with The Other Side of the Medal, says officials are trying to promote a certain image of the French capital.
ANTOINE DE CLERCK: Paris is supposed to be, you know, Amelie in Paris postcard. This is the image that we want the whole world to keep in mind when they visit Paris.
BEARDSLEY: But he says that's not the reality.
DE CLERCK: As any other big city in the world, we have poverty. We have homelessness. We have sex workers. We have drug addicts. We have all those kind of population that live and depend on the streets.
BEARDSLEY: And they can't just be swept away, he says. The group claims 12,500 people have been evicted from encampment, squats or shanty towns in the last year, five times more than usual. City officials deny accusations of what some call social cleansing. Adeline Savi is chief of staff for the Paris police prefect.
ADELINE SAVI: (Speaking French).
BEARDSLEY: "This operation is what we've been doing every week for the last several years," she says, to make sure camps don't get too big and to help people who are living in difficult conditions on the street. But that doesn't wash, said de Clerck right after the raid.
DE CLERCK: Those people evicted today, they were there for three years. So why would you let people sleep outside for three years and suddenly wake up and say, Oh, with France, we don't let people sleep outside.
BEARDSLEY: Milu Borscoti (ph), with organization Doctors of the World, was trying to help the men just evicted from under the bridge. He said the city never had a proper Olympic plan when it came to the homeless.
MILU BORSCOTI: It's not impossible to shelter them and provide the access to the basic rights. It has been done in the past, it has been done for Ukrainian people, and it has been done really well.
BEARDSLEY: He says, as the Olympics approached, officials suddenly found emergency housing just outside the capitol close to support organizations like his. So, he says, that proves there's no need to send them far away. Borscoti hopes it's an Olympics legacy that will endure after the games are gone.
Eleanor Beardsley, NPR News, Paris. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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