By Norm Dixon
Big business and government in Atlanta are using the Olympic Games as cover to rid the city of the poor and remodel it as a convention/sports mecca, safe for well-off tourists. The US government's many law-enforcement and security agencies have also used the games to boost their numbers, powers and technology. With Sydney to host the 2000 Olympics, it can be expected that similar developments will take place in Australia.
Business began preparing in 1989 to take advantage of the more than US$7 billion in Olympic contracts and predicted tourist spending. The Georgia state government and the Atlanta city authorities created a body with a huge budget and special powers to buy and sell land, borrow and lend money, form its own police force and distribute contracts for massive new building projects. It promptly delegated much of its power to a private corporation called the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games (ACOG), which united promoters, developers and big business conglomerates. Its chief executive is a powerful real estate agent.
It soon became apparent that ACOG's aim was to remove or reduce the mainly black poor inner-city neighbourhoods, harass the poor and homeless, and re-create the city as a glamorous new centre for national conventions, trade shows, concerts and sporting events. Central Atlanta Progress (CAP), an organisation of major business interests, built an 8.5 hectare park which is the centre of this new up-market residential and entertainment district.
Like most US cities, Atlanta's downtown has been allowed to become run down and crime infested by the refusal of governments and business to invest in services and amenities. The white middle class has migrated to the well-serviced suburbs.
The first target was Techwood Homes, one of Atlanta's oldest and best organised public housing estates. ACOG demolished 114 units and closed 1200. A new sports stadium was constructed in the middle of the poor Peoplestown community, next door to an earlier baseball stadium and car park that had already hit the community hard.
Next on the hit list were the homeless. There are an estimated 24,000 homeless people among the 366,000 residents of the central city. The city government passed a series of laws that, according to homeless rights groups, make it virtually illegal to be homeless in Atlanta.
Among the anti-loitering and anti-begging by-laws was an ordinance that allows police to arrest people in car parks who are "acting in a manner not usual for law-abiding individuals". The homeless often shelter in these places. Another law makes in illegal to lie down in a public park. Convictions carry a two to six month prison sentence.
Even though most are acquitted, they remain behind bars for several days until their case is heard. In this way, mass arrests are used to harass the homeless out of the city. Some are even given bus tickets. Homeless rights groups have documented 9000 arrests between May 1995 and May 1996, four times greater than earlier years.
The massive security presence has also impacted on poor neighbourhoods. On July 11, Atlanta police arrested 36 people in a sweep through the area surrounding Atlanta University, where 1100 ACOG security officers are being housed. The police retaliated on behalf of the games security officers, who complained of abuse and insults from nearby residents upset at the number of police and security roaming their streets and harassing them. The ACOG officers' function is to patrol the streets and report anything "amiss" to police.
Citing the need to defend the Olympics from "terrorists", right-wing militias and "radical groups", the US authorities have flooded the area with security personnel in unprecedented numbers and boosted the use of surveillance and mass control technology to levels normally unacceptable. For many agencies, the games provide opportunities to test out repressive strategies and technologies for use in civil unrest.
The 10,000 athletes are outnumbered by some 30,000 federal troops, National Guard troops, state and city police, CIA and FBI agents, immigration department officers, Secret Service agents and ACOG officers. The Pentagon's division of Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict has teams on stand-by. Georgia security officials travelled to Israel to get training in "anti-terrorist tactics". The security budget is estimated to be above $200 million.
The US government and private security corporations are working closely with the Atlanta police. The ominous-sounding Centre for the Application of Science Toward Law Enforcement has provided a computerised "command, control and scheduling system" for the police based on the US military's system during the Gulf War. The funds for this have been provided by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. The police have an airship in the air around the clock packed with high-tech surveillance equipment and computers.
Symbol Technologies has supplied scanning technology for the electronic security systems throughout the games. Hand-held computers scan encoded badges and the distinctive geometry of a person's hand to establish their identity. The technology has been developed in consultation with the US Defence Department, and there are discussions about its more widespread use to control illegal immigration.