Olympics ‘displaced more than two million people in 20 years’

THE Olympic Games have displaced more than two million people in the last 20 years, mostly minorities such as the homeless and poor, a rights group said yesterday.

A total 1.5m people will have been displaced by the Beijing Games alone, according to a report by the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions.

“Our research shows that little has changed since 1988 when 720,000 people were forcibly displaced in Seoul, South Korea, in preparation for the Summer Olympic Games,” said Jean du Plessis, the group’s executive director. “It is shocking and entirely unacceptable that 1.25 million people have already been displaced in Beijing, in preparation for the 2008 Games, in flagrant violation of their right to adequate housing.”

The Chinese Foreign Ministry rejected the figures as “groundless”.

Some 6,037 households have been demolished since 2002 to make way for nine venues in the process of preparing for the 2008 Olympic Games, spokes-woman Jiang Yu said.

“Those citizens have received cash compensation and been properly resettled. Not one single household has been forced to move out of Beijing,” Jiang said.

IOC spokeswoman Giselle Davies said that the IOC planned to attend a COHRE workshop addressing the issue in mid June.

“We want to dialogue fully with them and the UN to understand the figures more fully,” Ms Davies said. “We’d like to get a better understanding of the issues and see what international norms and UN standards exist that could serve as guidelines for governments in the future.”

The three-year study covered seven past and future Olympic host cities — Seoul, Barcelona, Atlanta, Sydney, Athens, Beijing and London.

The study says that large-scale events often lead to rising housing costs, resulting in forced evictions, displacement and criminalisation of homelessness.

Five years ahead of the London 2012 Olympics, more than 1,000 people face the threat of displacement from their homes, while housing prices are escalating, the study said.

No logo: outcry over insignia of 2012 Olympics

CRITICISM of the London 2012 Olympics logo continued yesterday with thousands of people signing up to an online petition calling for it to be scrapped.

After just one day, the Change The London 2012 Logo petition already has more than 19,000 signatures. The petition is at tinyurl.com/ysyxlf.

Dr Peter Donovan, from Richmond, said he was ”gutted” about the logo.

On signing the petition calling he wrote: “It resembles a swastika and looks like graffiti — two things London is not about and should not aspire to.”

Peter Michell from Ipswich wrote: “It looks like some sort of comical sex act between The Simpsons.”