Feature
Games of Shame

An estimated 4 billion people watched the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, the biggest spectacle of our times. Few, however, are aware of the dark reality behind the polished surface of corporate-sponsored sporting: dozens of dead construction workers, sports gear made in sweatshops, and a militarised Athens where the homeless have mysteriously disappeared from the streets and every conversation is monitored.

“There is a climate of absolute terror on the streets”, says Spyros Psychas, a member of Arsis, a Greek charity working with the homeless and underprivileged youth in Athens. “People are afraid. They're ringing in saying how unbearable the police controls have become”. Over the past few weeks, thousands of immigrants, beggars, drug addicts and homeless people have been disappeared from the streets of Athens in an effort to “clean it up” for the Olympic celebration. Human rights activists believe that while some vulnerable people have been moved on to less visible districts, others are being detained without trial in unknown locations. Some have clearly been forced into psychiatric institutions. Already in June, staff at the Dromokaition psychiatric hospital staged a protest to expose this fact. “Following arrests, the prosecutor issues sectioning orders that force us to lock up drug addicts, alcoholics or mentally ill people”, said Michalis Yannakos, leader of the hospital's trade union.

Mass deportations have also soared in advance of the games, leading the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to urge the Greek government to ensure that “international standards”, including the Geneva conventions, were not being breached. According to Greek daily Ta Nea, of the 13,766 immigrants arrested in the first six months of this year about 6,623 had been forced to leave Greece. Lawyers told the Guardian that they believed growing numbers of foreigners had been banished in recent weeks under fast-track procedures which allowed them no chance to appeal.

You won't see any of this on television, where the cameras don't leave the stadium and entertainment substitutes for reality. No place on screen for anything that will tarnish the slick image of the Olympic Games, a huge corporate spectacle driven by multinational corporations who pay for multi-million dollar endorsements. From their inception, the Olympics have been closely associated with corporate interests. The games in 1900 and 1904 were both attached to trade fairs: the participating governments saw sport as an avenue for commercial gain. Today, the sporting events are structured and timetabled to ensure maximum advertising exposure of the big corporate sponsors, and as many commercial breaks as possible for TV coverage in the Northern Hemisphere. Corporate interests penetrate the Olympics through sponsorship of the games themselves and of individual athletes. The Olympic Program, formed in 1982 by the International Olympic Commission, has combined with the marketing consortium International Sports and Leisure (ISL) to sell corporate sponsorships at a level approaching a 50-50 split with income from television rights. Contracts with Coca-Cola, Eastman Kodak, 3M, Ricoh, Matsushita, Sports Illustrated, Visa, and U.S. Postal express in 1992 brought in more than $120 million to the IOC. Coca Cola and Samsung have officially branded the Olympic Torch Relay, while Shell and Heineken are official sponsors of the Athens games in the petrolium and drinks categories.

Amid the races, records and medals, viewers are also unlikely to realise that in the run-up to the games the Greek capital has become a militarised Big Brother zone. Under the pretext of preventing “terrorist attacks” about which no concrete intelligence is available, over 70,000 police and military personnel have been drafted to patrol the capital. Two zeppelins hovering in the city's skies are only the most visible fixtures in a $300 million surveillance operation, which gathers images and audio from an electronic web of over 1,000 high-resolution and infrared cameras, 12 patrol boats, 4,000 vehicles, nine helicopters, a sensor-laden blimp and four mobile command centres. And if you're taking a walk in Athens these days, you'd better watch what you're saying. Spoken words collected by the cameras with speech-recognition software are transcribed into text that is then searched for patterns along with other electronic communications entering and leaving the area, including e-mail and image files. The system, which includes components already used by U.S. and British government intelligence agencies, covers all of greater Athens, nine ports, airports and all other Olympic sites.

The system was developed by a consortium led by San Diego-based Science Applications International Corp., which also includes Germany's Siemens AG; General Dynamics Corp. and Honeywell International Inc. of the United States; and the Israeli company Elbit Systems. Several Greek companies also are participating. Much of the information analysis is enabled by software from London-based Autonomy Corp., whose clients include the U.S. National Security Agency. In June, the Greek government expanded surveillance powers to screen mobile and fixed-line telephone calls during the Olympics. “It listens, reads and watches," Dominic Johnson, Autonomy's chief marketing officer, said of his company's software. Beyond Greek and English, the software understands Arabic, Farsi and all major European languages.

Workers' Tragedies

This Orwellian nightmare is only the beginning of a much longer roll-call of Olympian crime. Last week, protesters gathered in central Athens to hold a memorial service for the dozens of workers killed during the round-the-clock construction of venues for the games. "We have paid for the Olympic games in blood," said Andreas Zazopoulos, head of the Greek Construction Workers Union. The union has collected names and details of 14 workers who had died on Olympic facilities, but they believe that many more deaths have taken place in building the supporting infrastructure, like Athens' new roads, tram and metro lines. Activists estimate that over 40 workers - many of them immigrant labourers from Eastern Europe and South Asia - have fallen victim to the slackening of job safety standards in the effort to complete the construction in time for the spectacle. Greek opposition MP Liana Kanelli told BBC Radio 4's Face the Facts programme that the problems arose because although Greece had seven years to prepare for the games, more than half of that time was taken up by legal battles. “There wasn't a brick laid for the first three-and-a-half years. We've now got about one injury or one death every couple of days”, she said. Labourers were being forced to work long shifts, up to 14 hours a day every day, in very hot temperatures and under constant pressure to complete construction work in time for the Olympics. Major building contractors included Olympic Village S.A., a subsidiary of the publicly-owned Workers’ Housing Organization (OEK); Aktor, Greece's largest construction company (2003 net profits €70.8 million), who was contracted to extend Athens' metro lines; and Impregilo, Italy's leading engineering and construction group (2003 net profits €50.5 million) which undertook tram works. Speaking to the BBC, Greek Olympic Committee President Lampis Nikolaou admitted that the death toll in Athens was far greater than in any other city to have recently hosted the games, but dismissed it as an inevitable necessity. “This is something that I regret very much but in every country, in every workplace, accidents happen and people die”, he told the programme.

Meanwhile, the grim reality of sweatshop labour continues to overshadow the Olympics. In Bangkok this month, sportswear workers from Thailand, Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Philippines and Sri Lanka joined in protest against low wages and long working hours in the manufacture of clothing and equipment for companies using the licensed Olympic logo. Converging in the stadium of the Port Authority of Thailand, the protesters staged their own Olympics, complete with javelin-throwing and shot put. Thai garment worker Sunee Namso, 29, who was on a soccer team at the event, said she had worked for seven years in a dust-filled factory from 8 a.m. until 10 p.m., sewing arm pieces for shirts. She made 4p for every 12 sets she sewed. “If you didn't work those long hours, you didn't have enough to eat”, said Sunee, who now works in a sewing cooperative formed by workers after the factory closed in 2002.  Much of the world's sportswear is made in Asia, where many laborers work in sweatshop conditions. “Companies are pressuring factory owners to lower prices and those cost cuts are being passed on to workers as very long hours and extremely low wages”, said Tim Connor of Oxfam. He said the extra pressure to boost sportswear output before the Olympics was compounding problems that were already widespread in the industry.

On August 10 a group of activists staged a “sew-in” to highlight the grim reality of sweatshop labour behind the Olympic brands. Wearing white masks to symbolise how the industry renders sweatshop workers faceless and voicless, the activists sat at sewing machines on the rooftop of a hotel in the centre of Athens, with the Acropolis as the backdrop. This was the latest media stunt undertaken by the “Play Fair at the Olympics” campaign, which has lobbied sportswear corporations employing sweatshop labour since March. Launched by Global Unions, Oxfam and the Clean Clothes Campaign, “Play Fair” has called for the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and companies such as Fila, Puma, Umbro, Asics, Mizuno to incorporate labour standards and protect the rights of workers producing their brands. Some of the corporations have entered into dialogue with the campaign and promised to review some of their operations, but with the entire effort predicated on voluntary responses it is not surprising that other companies have ignored it entirely. The IOC has also evaded the lobbying efforts, with campaigners saying that it has “crudely dismissed” their concerns that licences to make Olympic-branded gear are going to sportswear companies that are violating the rights of their workers.

Local Resistance
Faced with these harsh realities, it is no surprise that many activists have been calling the very idea of the Olympics into question - especially in Greece. Even before the country undertook to host the games, many serious and documented objections were expressed by various citizens’ movements, ecological organisations and political parties in the country, focusing on the environmental and urban consequences for the Attica region and for the poor and disadvantaged around Greece. Today, broader circles of Greek society realise that the Olympic Games have intensified the inequalities between the country's capital and periphery, devastated a great deal of the little remaining green space in Athens, increased public debt to contractors while excusing government cuts in social spending, led to the abuse of workers in Greece and around the world, and served as an excuse for the erosion of civil liberties.

A resistance movement against the Olympics has been growing in Greece over the past year, amid fierce repression and criminalisation by the authorities and media. Amongst others, the “anti-2004” campaign and numerous grassroots and anarchist groups have taken on a number of actions and demonstrations to to show their disgust at the games and all that they stand for. There is no reason to expect anything different if London wins its bid for the 2012 Olympics. Already, the London Development Agency has threatened residents of the proposed Olympic site with Compulsory Purchase Orders if they do not agree to sell their homes and businesses, and relocate to make way for the developers. In the words of one campaigning group in Greece, “The Olympic games are for us UNWANTED. They take place against our will. We consider it an issue of great importance to express publicly our opposition to the choices that downgrade our lives, question our intelligence and undermine our future. The civilization of the Olympic games is not our civilization”.

Links:

Anti-Olympics round-up
http://www.scotland.indymedia.org/newswire/display_any/580

Ten Reasons to Oppose All Olympic Games
http://www.anti2004.net/ten_reasons.htm

Corporate Watch report on London Olympic bullying
http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/news/bullying_and_bribery.htm