(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - Millions of pounds are being spent giving questionable politicians and fraudster delegates from the International Olympic Committee the VIP treatment in London.
They will be housed in luxury hotels and given personal chauffeured cars throughout the capital by Lord Coe’s organising team.
The VIPs will also include the bosses of top-level corporate sponsors whose business practices have infuriated protesters.
Human rights activists are appalled by the imminent arrival of one dictator in particular. Ilham Aliyev is the president of oil rich Azerbaijan and also heads his country’s National Olympic Committee.
Campaign group Human Rights Watch say he has a “terrible record on freedom of expression”, with six journalists in prison on “spurious charges” and several dozen opposition political activists also behind bars. Earlier this year, respected reporter Idrak Abbasov was beaten unconscious after he filmed forced evictions and house demolitions by the country’s state oil company.
The company’s security officials and police were thought to be behind the assault.
However, it is not just notorious foreign leaders who will take the Games’ best seats: controversial members of the International Olympic Committee will also revel in luxury hospitality.
They include former French sports minister Guy Drut, who was also an Olympic hurdler. In 2005, he was given a 15-month suspended prison sentence for fraudulently accepting a salary for a fictitious job created as part of a wider Paris City Hall scam. A suspension on his IOC membership was lifted when Drut’s friend and then French President Jacques Chirac controversially pardoned him as he left office in 2005. He remains a senior member of the IOC.
Billionaire Lee Kun-Hee, an IOC delegate from South Korea, is also likely to be an Olympic guest.
He remains the chairman of Olympic sponsor Samsung, having resigned from the position in 2008 amid a massive slush funds scandal involving bribes to judges and other public officials. He was convicted of evading £25million in taxes but was pardoned by the Korean government in 2009 as he helped the country win the right to stage the 2018 Winter Olympics.
Controversial corporate sponsors will also be driven around in top-of-the range BMWs. They include bosses of General Electric, which has attracted critics in the US for avoiding corporate taxes, and of Dow Chemical which is linked to the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster.
The British government is also up for questioning from Parliament over why it has handed over the Olympic Games' security to a company accused of human rights abuses in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.
The UK-based G4S, which describes itself as the “world’s leading international security solutions group,” was selected as the “official provider of security and cash services for the Olympics.”
Moreover, it has already taken on 10,400 new employees for the 2012 Olympiad.
However, the company’s activities in Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem (al-Quds), which the UK considers illegal, have raised questions in Westminster.
The matter of fact is that G4S is a known provider of equipment for several Israeli military checkpoints in the occupied West Bank as well as for security systems at the Ofer detention center in Ramallah. That facility houses a jail and a military court, where Palestinian political prisoners, including children, are held and tortured. British Parliament strongly criticized the detention center for human rights abuses in 2010.
G4S also provides equipment to and secures the perimeter of several other Israeli prisons in which prisoners, illegally transferred from Palestinian territories, are held in breach of Article 76 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
It remains unclear how a company with such a questionable reputation could have been chosen to provide security during the London Olympics.
G4S already runs six private prisons in the UK, where several hundred detainees are hired for full-time work paying under $3 a day. The privatization of prisons by companies like G4S creates a very dangerous financial incentive to criminalize poor people and "incarcerate them for private profit," according to Gosling.
G4S, the firm at the center of the debacle over security for the London 2012 Olympics, is also helping Israeli regime secure facilities where Palestinian children are imprisoned and severely abused.
Defence for Children-Palestine (DCI-Palestine) has released an urgent appeal to end the practice of holding Palestinian children from the West Bank in solitary confinement in facilities in Israel.
The organization has documented 53 such cases since 2008.
The children have been held in solitary confinement mainly in Al Jalame and Petah Tikva interrogation centers. The security systems for Al Jalame detention facilities were provided by G4S Israel, according to a March 2011 report on the firm by Who Profits.
G4S Israel is a subsidiary of British-Danish security firm G4S and it is deeply involved in Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, as well as in Israeli prisons and detention centers.
Meanwhile, activists have challenged the London games to bar entry to countries that discriminate against their athletes and betray the Olympics' human rights charter.
Peter Tatchell, director of the Peter Tatchell Foundation, has written an open letter to Lord Coe demanding the UK to ban countries like Saudi Arabia and India from competing.
"Many nations deny equal opportunities to women and to ethnic, religious and sexual minorities," Tatchell argued.
"They violate the Olympic spirit of equality. This discrimination takes the form of a lack of equal access to sports facilities, competitions and the Olympic selection process."
The letter is written amid numerous complaints that many of the competing countries are tainting the Olympics' commitment to equal rights.
Saudi Arabia is criticised for not allowing women to compete, and India for marginalising Dalits.
The UK government is also giving host to the Bahraini regime, another human rights abuser whose records on rights issues, particularly in the past year are peculiarly dark. At the same time, it has blacklisted Syria, which is fighting an armed insurgency inside its country, on human rights grounds.
There are other conditions under which the UK government is domestically abusing the rights of its own citizens or foreign workers.
The living conditions for the 2012 Olympic workers have been described as “prison-like slums” since they are overcrowded and unhygienic. 75 Olympic cleaners are expected to share one shower.
Every 25 staff members must share one toilet, and ten people are living in each room.
Many of the workers traveled from abroad in search of work. It was not until they arrived in London that they were informed there would be no work for the first two weeks, but they were expected to pay a total rent of over £550 a month to sleep in the miserable camps.
Many of London’s 25,000 cab drivers say they hate the Olympic Games Lanes, a network of roads reserved for the exclusive use of Olympic officials and sponsors.
With cabbies forced to ply their trade mostly in the minor roads of London, they believe that their takings will be way down, and that people just won’t take taxis. So they are protesting.
Hundreds of taxi drivers brought the streets around parliament and Big Ben to a standstill this week, hooting their horns and moving at a snail’s pace. They are threatening to hold more protests before the Games begin on Friday.
About 23,700 security guards had been due to protect venues as part of Britain’s biggest peacetime security operation, with 13,500 military personnel already earmarked to contribute.
But last week, Britain put an extra 3,500 soldiers on standby after the world’s biggest security firm G4S said it might not be able to supply the 10,400 security guards it had promised as part of a $441.93 million deal.
These additional 3,500 troops will take the overall tally at the Games to 17,000, more than the 9,500 currently deployed in Afghanistan. Yes, security is important, but how will the enormous military presence affect the atmosphere at the Games?
It’s true that Britons, and Londoners in particular, love to complain, but what exactly is the city getting for its $15 billion investment in the Games?
According to Andrew Scott, who is the deputy dean of the London Business School and comes from the area where the Olympic Park is located, Britons should stop trying to kid themselves that they made a shrewd investment. That’s because the most wildly optimistic estimate suggests that the Olympics will boost Britain’s GDP each year for a decade by no more than one-tenth of 1 percent.
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