Olympic U-Turn

Eight months ago Harjeet Dhillon was looking forward to the London Olympics as one of the few lucky enough to have a ticket to attend the games. Since then she’s been involved in Occupy, given her ticket back, and is now a Counter-Olympics campaigner. She spoke to OT reporter Emma Fordham about why she changed her mind.

Em: Harjeet, you had a ticket for the Olympics but you’re not going anymore. How come?

Harjeet: Well, I was one of the lucky few with a ticket, I was given it as a present. It was a good ticket at the stadium for major athletic events and medal ceremony. But I’ve given the ticket away.

Em: Why did you do that?

Harjeet: Through my involvement in the Occupy movement I became aware of the Counter-Olympics Network and campaigns such as War on Want, GamesMonitor and Greenwash Gold 2012. I realised that the London Olympics is being sponsored by corrupt and polluting corporations which will gain a huge amount of publicity from their involvement. I didn’t want to condone that so I decided to give away the ticket and protest about the Olympics instead.

Em: How will you protest against the games?

Harjeet: I don’t want to disrupt the events or the athletes, so I‘m focusing on raising awareness about corporate involvement and profiteering and I’m also involved in highlighting how the Olympics is adversely affecting local communities.

Em: Were you politically active before Occupy?

Harjeet: I’ve always been politically left-wing and concerned with social issues, gender politics, human rights, inequality and injustice; being an Indian girl I experienced and understood about those issues from a young age. I’ve been involved in anti-war, workers’ rights and other demonstrations in the past but my political awareness had become diluted in recent years until I got involved in Occupy.

Em: In what ways have you been involved in the Occupy movement?

Harjeet: I turned up on the first day, October 15th, unsure of what to expect … I spent a lot of time in the Information tent in the OccupyLSX camp outside St Paul’s, collecting information and sharing it with campers and visitors. I trained as a legal observer and since the eviction at St Paul’s I’ve been going to demonstrations and actions as an observer and have been involved in arrestee support. I’ve also become a bit involved in the Corporations Working Group because that overlaps with the Counter-Olympics campaigning.

Em: What do you find most shocking about the London Olympics?

Harjeet: The thing I find most shocking is that Dow Chemical has been accepted as a major sponsor of the London Olympics. This was the prompt for giving up my Olympics’ ticket and was the reason for the resignation, live on Newsnight, of Meredith Alexander, the Commissioner for a Sustainable London 2012.

Dow Chemical invented Agent Orange, responsible for killing thousands in the Vietnam war, and later merged with Union Carbide, who were responsible for the world’s biggest industrial disaster: a chemical spill in Bhopal, India, in 1984. Amnesty International estimates that up to 25,000 people have been killed by poisonous gases and pollution resulting from this spill. The area has not been decontaminated and thousands continue to suffer.

It’s disgraceful that Dow have been accepted as a sponsor for London 2012. Then there’s BP being the ‘Sustainability Partner’ which would be laughable if it wasn’t so shameful, given BP’s responsibility for the Deep Water Horizon accident and their involvement in Tar Sands projects in Canada.

Em: What about local issues?

Harjeet: Occupy supporters have been supporting local campaigns such as Save Leyton Marsh. The marsh, which is Metropolitan Open Land and should not be developed, is being built on to make a three storey Olympic training facility, without proper consultation or an environmental assessment. Although the developers say it is only a temporary structure, they’ve been digging foundations far deeper than the planning permission allows and locals doubt they’ll get their green space back.

Em: The Olympics is being sold as a worthwhile investment. What do you think?

Harjeet: The budget just keeps going up and up. We’re being told that cuts to public services are necessary but a huge percentage of spending on the Olympics is coming from taxpayers’ money. Corporations will benefit from all the advertising through their sponsorship but I don’t think the average person in the Olympic boroughs is going to benefit, probably the opposite. Green spaces are being taken away and freedoms are being taken away too – getting too close to Olympic sites, photographing them, and particularly protesting against them are met with over-zealous policing, even arrests and ASBOs.

Em: What inspires you to keep campaigning, now that the heady days of the St Paul’s Occupation are over?

Harjeet: The hope that Occupy gives to everyone that one day the world will change for the better, and that we can all help to bring that about, is what gives me the faith and motivation to carry on.