Evictions still rankle a year before '08 Games

Add as a preferred source on Google

Beijing, Aug 3: 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 organising 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.

Reuters>