Russia is getting ready to showcase the resort town of Sochi, host of
the next Winter Olympics, and its snowboarding and skiing venues.
President Vladimir Putin is said to be sparing no expense on the
Games. The Washington Post devotes an article to the preparations for
the Olympic Games 2014.
"The frenzy of construction for the Winter Games enveloping this city
has local people feeling as if the Greek gods of old were flinging one
Olympian thunderbolt after another at them as they helplessly endure,"
the article begins.
The newspaper stresses the high human costs of the Olympic projects,
both for the construction workers and the local population:
"Bulldozers have torn the neighborhood of Mirny, near the giant
Olympic media center, in half to make way for new buildings and
highway interchanges. Many of the construction workers are migrants,
especially from Central Asia, who get miserable wages and sometimes
are not paid at all, according to a Human Rights Watch report issued
this month. And every day residents of the small settlement of
Kudepsta gather near their backyard stream a few miles from the
Olympic ice rinks, ready to block heavy equipment with their bodies in
an effort to fend off construction of a thermal power plant they
contend will poison them."
"To make way for the Games, about 1,500 families have been forced to
leave their homes, according to HRW. In some neighborhoods, such as
Mirny, most houses have been torn down, but a few remain there, lonely
islands surrounded by construction. Some have lost their houses
without compensation because titles, received during chaotic
post-Soviet days, were not always clear," writes the Washington Post.
“It’s only going to get worse when the Olympics are over,” the
newspaper quotes one of the local residents, “because the journalists
will be gone and anything can happen.”
