Untitled - Rebel Studies Library

106 PLANET OF SLUMS
were kidnapped; pregnant women and children were subjected to
physical violence; public services to the barrios were cut off - a
pressure tactic; families were insulted and threatened; and the police
acted as judges.38
The modern Olympics have an especially dark but little-known history.
In preparation for the 1936 Olympics, the Nazis ruthlessly purged
homeless people and slum-dwellers from areas of Berlin likely to be
seen by international visitors. While subsequent Olympics - including
those in Mexico City, Athens, and Barcelona - were accompanied by
urban renewal and evictions, the 1988 Seoul games were trulyunprecedented
in the scale of the official crackdown on poor homeowners,
squatters, and tenants: as many as 720,000 people were relocated in
Seoul and Injon, leading a Catholic NGO to claim that South Korea
vied with South Africa as "the country in which eviction by force is
most brutal and inhuman."39
Beijing seems to be following the Seoul precedent in its preparations
for the 2008 Games: "350,000 people will be resettled to make
way for stadium construction alone."4o Human Rights Watch has
drawn attention to extensive collusion between official planners and
developers, who manipulate the patriotic excitement inherent to the
Olympics in order to justify mass evictions and selfish landgrabs in the
heart of Beijing.41 Anne-Marie Broudehoux, in her brilliant book,
The Making and Selling f Post-Mao Beijing (2004), claims that in statecapitalist
China the current preference is to hide poverty behind
"Potemkin-like" fa