Protesters rounded up by Beijing police

By AUDRA ANG – Aug 7, 2008

BEIJING (AP) — At least two women who have protested being evicted from their homes ahead of the Olympics were rounded up and taken to a police station, amid ramped up efforts Thursday by activists to use the games to spotlight their causes.

Zhang Wei and Ma Xiulan, who have been vocal about the pain of losing their family compounds near Tiananmen Square to make way for Olympic construction, were taken from their homes late Wednesday and early Thursday morning, according to Ma.

The efforts are part of stringent security measures for the games by Chinese communist authorities determined that the Olympics should be an international showcase for the country.

With the world's eyes turned on Beijing in anticipation of the games, which start Friday, activists have stepped up their protests to publicize their causes.

The groups so far have been small and police have acted with relative restraint. No arrests were reported although the Beijing Olympics organizing committee condemned the demonstrations.

Ma said officers came to her door at 2 a.m. and bruised her arm while grabbing her. Reached by the AP on her cell phone, she said she was at a local police station with Zhang and a number of other residents but could not give any other details.

"The police are watching me and are restricting my phone use," Ma said. "They are not letting me talk to reporters, especially the foreign media. I'm here because I talked to the foreign media before," Ma said before quickly hanging up.

A woman who answered Zhang's cell phone said Zhang had been taken away a little before midnight by two police offers and one plainclothes security agent. She refused to give her name for fear of official retribution and would only say she was a family member.

Two officers who answered the telephone at the police station where Ma said she was being held said no one had been detained and refused to give any more information because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Qianmen, the historic area where the homes of Zhang and Ma were located, is south of Tiananmen Square and has undergone a huge makeover to make way for a commercial strip with businesses such as Nike, Starbucks and Rolex.

A former resident in the neighborhood who had been planning to display a protest banner on the street was surrounded by plainclothes security agents and led away. He tried to speak to AP reporters before the agents used their hands to block the cameras.

Thousands of people have been forced from courtyard homes that have been passed down for generations to make way for the redevelopment, part of larger relocations throughout Beijing as a property boom transforms the city's landscape.

Earlier this week, some 20 people angry about their evictions from Qianmen demonstrated near Tiananmen Square in a rare protest around the tightly guarded area. The demonstrators scuffled with neighborhood officials as police watched.

Also on Thursday, a second protest by three Americans in Tiananmen Square was stopped by security agents, including at least one plainclothes police officer, who blocked the group from view with umbrellas before grabbing their arms and leading them away.

Another group of foreigners, pro-Tibet activists, were detained Wednesday after climbing up lamp poles outside the Beijing National Stadium, also known as the Bird's Nest, and putting up banners proclaiming "Free Tibet."

Two of the four detained activists from Students for a Free Tibet — both of them British — were deported to Frankfurt, Germany, group spokesman Matt Whitticase said Thursday.

The other two, Americans Phill Bartell from Denver, Colo., and Tirian Mink from Portland, Ore., were also deported and en route to San Francisco on Thursday.

Foreigners who protest Beijing's human rights record or official policy of atheism on Chinese soil normally face deportation. Chinese who demonstrate would face detention and hours of questioning by police, at the very least.

The government also has used its visa rules to try to keep out foreigners who might want to protest. Former Olympic speedskater and Darfur campaigner Joey Cheek had his visa pulled Wednesday, hours before he was to travel to Beijing.

Religious activist arrested in Sochi

Jul 25, 2008

MOSCOW (AP) — A lawyer says police in the Russian city of Sochi have arrested a member of a religious community for defying orders to leave land intended for the 2014 Winter Olympics facilities.

Yuri Marikovsky said Friday that Dmitry Drofichev, of a Russian Orthodox sect known as Old Believers, was arrested for allegedly insulting land inspectors and threatening to destroy their equipment.

On Wednesday, two other Old Believers were sentenced to 12 days in prison for resisting house inspections.

About 600 members of the sect face eviction from houses on coastal wetlands they say are unsuitable for major construction.

Officials say more than 100 homes in the area will be razed and their owners compensated.

Russia: Locals in Sochi Fight Off Olympics

www.kommersant.com
July 23, 2008

Residents of Imeret lowland that had been chosen to construct facilities for Sochi 2014 Olympics clashed with bailiffs and police yesterday, July 22, 2008. Armed with sticks and bottles of incendiary mixture, 200 locals were defending their houses.

Accompanied by bailiffs, the land surveyors attempted past morning to enter a dwelling at Nizhni Imeret Street. The traffic police blocked the road and the bailiffs showed to hostess Svetlana Droficheva a writ of execution spelling out the ban on opposing their cadastral activities.

The news that authorities set eviction into motion spread amid the neighbors in no time. Some 200 barricaded themselves inside the house, the remaining stood on the defense in the street.

Chief of Adler authorities Evgeny Piven showed up at around 11:00 a.m. to confirm that the bailiffs really have the writ and the owners are to admit them to the house for cadastral work. “Over our dead bodies,” the locals rebuffed.

Meanwhile, the police and the bailiffs set to assaulting the gates. The locals didn’t retreat and police used pepper gas against them. A woman felt sick and an ambulance was called to help her, but the locals didn’t yield that time.

Officers of Russia’s riot police, OMON, were summoned to break down the resistance of people, whose houses are within the construction site of Sochi Olympics. Luckily the conflict didn’t escalate into a war. The tension was eased by police acting chief Yuri Starshikov. He approved of “my house is my castle” standing of residents and said they have ten days to appeal the writ.

Sochi Residents Speak Out Against Forced Evictions

March 23rd, 2008

Residents of the Nizhneimeretinsky (Lower Imeretinsky) Bukhta, the low-lands area where most of the Olympic village will be built for the 2014 Sochi olympics, have written an open letter to plead against the forced eviction of locals. As the Sobkor®ru news agency reported on March 20th, the letter is directed at the Russian and international community, Russian authorities, and representatives of the International Olympic Committee.

Residents believe that despite the promises that the Olympics will "serve people, bringing them health, happiness and joy, [the planned Olympics] are in fact remaking the destinies of hundreds of Sochi families… not for sport, and not for the prospect of developing [the] city of SOCHI."

"The Olympics will pass through in two weeks, while we will lose our "SMALL HOMELAND" forever!", the residents write.

The full letter follows:

An address from the residents of Nizhneimeretinsky Bukhta to the Russian and international communities, representatives of the Russian authorities, and officials of the International Olympic Committee.

We, the residents of the Nizhneimeretinsky Bukhta, address this to you personally with belief and hope.

Help us to protect and save our "SMALL HOMELAND"! Officials have spoken from every platform to tell the whole world that there would be no demolition of houses and no seizure of lands from residents of the Nizhneimeretinsky Bukhta, and that the Olympic stadiums were planned for and would be built on unoccupied land, which, in fact, we have more than enough of.

Yet the meeting with Viktor Kolodyazhny (the mayor of Sochi), denoted a sharp problem on the relocation of residents of the Nizhneimeretinsky Bukhta. We are categorically opposed to this decision by the authorities.

It is clear, that in our modest lives, we don’t fit in with the grandiose plans of the "powers that be." When the prices for land in Sochi grew beyond belief, our land, right on the sea, sparked many people’s interest. Now it holds tremendous worth, and not for the Olympics, but for business. At one time, this land did not exist. There was impassable malarial marshland and swamp, which our grandfathers and great-grandfathers drained and cultivated, dying from malaria and fever. This land was obtained not only with an exchange of life, but also with gold paid to the Russian government. Every family had in its possession, 50 acres under Tsarist rule; 37 sotok [a traditional Russian measure of land, equalling 100 square meters] under the Bolsheviks; 15 sotok under the Communists; 7 sotok under the democrats; and a ? (questionable) amount "Today."

Today, we are appealing to the public authority and asking them to protect our rights, guaranteed by the Russian Constitution – the right of property of every Russian citizen! The current structures want to take possession of our lands, in order to continue cashing in at the expense of the modest people, who have grown almost affluent by chance. [And they want to] buy us off with what they themselves consider sufficient! According to the talk, the Olympics serve people, bringing them health, happiness and joy, but in fact they are remaking the destinies of hundreds of Sochi families, and as it looks to us, not for sport, and not for the prospect of developing our city of SOCHI. The Olympics will pass through in two weeks, while we will lose our "SMALL HOMELAND" forever!

By law, properties of equal worth must be provided. But where can they be found for Everyone, if [those providing them] need [the land] themselves? The relocation of people from private homes into apartments. Presenting people who live on the sea with lands remote and distanced from it. Compensation with a fair price? Such a thing is completely unequal!! And it is not at all clear why land immediately on the coast of the Black Sea is needed to conduct the winter Olympics in Sochi.

More than enough unoccupied land with a way out to sea exists for the placement of Olympic facilities and the Olympic park, starting from the motocross field and ending at the "Yuzhny kultury" state farm, with the "Yuzhny kultury" dendrological park. We would even understand the necessity of tearing down one house, as with the building of the airport, if it stood at the center of the state’s interests in relation to solving Olympic problems. But we cannot understand how a whole village could interfere (with more than 100 houses, with several families living in each house).

Whose interests are the Olympics, which must bring peace to the whole world, pursuing, if they are denigrating their own people in this way!!!

Residents of the Nizhneimeretinsky Bukhta

translated by theotherrussia.org

Evictions still rankle a year before '08 Games

Ben Blanchard, Reuters
Published: Thursday, August 02, 2007

BEIJING (Reuters) - Water, power and gas have been cut off. Jobs have been threatened. Unmarked police cars with blacked-out windows hover menacingly.

With a year to go before the Beijing Olympics, some people are still refusing to quit their houses in areas marked for redevelopment, despite the threats and government's insistence there is not a problem.

"I'll protect my house with my life. I'll set myself on fire," said Lao Chai, who asked not to be identified by his full name for fear of retribution from the government.

"We don't want to move. We're happy where we are," he added, puffing on an acrid cigarette in a dingy tea house, not far from the frenetic building continuing apace for 2008.

"Companies have been telling employees who don't want to move to make way for Olympic venues that if you don't go, you'll be out of a job," he said. "Many people moved only because their jobs were threatened."

Compensation has been offered, he says, but at levels set in 2001 when real estate prices were lower.

"Prices have rocketed since then. You can't buy anything with that money," he adds. "And if you're forced to move, the money is even less."

Reports from overseas human rights groups on the situation have painted a bleak picture.

Amnesty International has said Ye Guozhu, jailed for organizing protests against forced evictions, has been tortured in prison, and considers him a prisoner of conscience.

"His situation is quite serious," said Amnesty's East Asia researcher Mark Allison. "He's also been subjected to discipline because he's trying to appeal against his conviction."

In June, the Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions said that some 1.5 million residents of Beijing will be displaced by the time it hosts the Olympics, many of them evicted against their will.

SIGNS OF DISSENT

The Chinese government says all is well, though.

The Foreign Ministry reacted with anger to the Housing Rights' report, saying it was groundless and the figures vastly inflated.

The Beijing city government and Beijing 2008 Olympic Project Office, which is in charge of the construction efforts, declined additional comment on the eviction issue.

Despite the posters declaring the Games a "People's Olympics" and endless advertising featuring smiling residents in a variety of happy poses under the optimistic slogan "One World, One Dream," there are small signs of dissent.

In April, riot police evicted the last remaining protesters holding up construction of a state television station's new headquarters in Beijing's glitzy central business district. It is being redeveloped in time for the Games to make the city look more modern.

Some residents of the low-rise, red-brick block of flats on the edge of the site had scrawled "Oppose forced eviction" and "Where are our rights?" on windows and banners and refused to leave for at least a year.

There were no obvious signs of the protesters as police, wearing bullet-proof vests and carrying batons, clambered over the roof of the building. Police told foreign reporters to leave.

The last building was only finally demolished last week -- but not before somebody had had time to write on the wall facing a main road in large, white letters -- "The Olympics -- a lifetime of pain." It was painted over in a matter of hours.

FORCED EVICTIONS

"It's meant to be the 'People's Olympics'. But they have treated us inhumanely," said another person, who is also refusing to move.

"The places they have offered to move us are very far out. We couldn't afford to live anywhere else anyway. It will be hard to get to work. Out standard of living will go down. For me, this is a question of survival."

The government has to face up to the issue, said Amnesty's Allison.

"It's a huge issue and it needs to be dealt with," he said.

New rules enacted last year to restrict lawyers representing protesters in collective disputes, such as over land, could only worsen the situation, Allison warned.

"That might be cutting off a legitimate channel for people to gain redress, and when you do that you actually add fuel to the fire because people feel they have no other option than to engage in protests which can sometimes turn violent," he said.

Insurrectionary Anarchists of the Coast Salish Territories