Baku Initiative Group issues statement on violation of Olympic principles at Paris 2024

The Baku Initiative Group has issued a statement on the violation of the principles of Olympic Games in Paris 2024.

AZERTAC presents the statement:

“The Olympic Charter states that ‘the goal of the Olympic movement is to channel sports into the harmonious development of humanity in order to promote a peaceful society that would serve to protect human dignity’.

Although the President of the French Republic, Emmanuel Macron, and his Government portray the Paris 2024 Olympic Games currently underway in France as a “moment of peace and hope”, French colonial and neo-colonial policies are evidence of exactly the opposite.

According to information obtained from representatives of political parties and movements fighting for independence in Polynesia, Corsica, Melanesia, the Caribbean and the Antilles, there is discrimination in the employment sector and access to housing, the development of natural resources or, for example, cases of organized mass immigration under the patronage of the French Government.

Here are a number of cases that run completely counter to the spirit of the Olympics:

- The deliberate implementation of a poor economic development strategy in certain countries, which involves excessive food dependence of the population (more than 80 percent of food products come from France) and a high cost of living to meet the interests of French monopolies; poverty (50 percent of the population of French Guiana lives below the poverty line), mass unemployment and all kinds of abuses (violence, arms, and drug trafficking) in order to seriously jeopardize the future of these territories;

- Non-ratification of Convention No. 169 of 1989 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples (French Guiana);

- The institutions of French cultural hegemony, the gradual disappearance of local languages and the application of a policy of assimilation to local children, which involves the teaching of the French school curriculum to children and does not correspond to the history, geography, culture, and the future ambitions of our peoples;

- Land grabbing (90 percent of French Guiana belongs to the French state), control over millions of square kilometers of the Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) (which makes France the second-largest sea power globally with 11 million square kilometers of EEZ) and decades of a policy of deportation of young people to France for settlement colonization of Guadeloupe and Martinique, which has greatly contributed to an unprecedented demographic crisis and the plundering of natural resources;

- The creation of a two-tier colonial justice system that criminalizes all resistance movements and protects bribe-takers (chlordecone poisoning in Martinique and Guadeloupe and arrests of young people fighting against land occupation, creation of exclusive jurisdictions for the Corsicans in order to try them without recognizing their status as political prisoners and conditions of their imprisonment, the arrest of Mr. Herve Pinto, President of the Collective Justice Martinique Association);

- An “empty chair” policy since Polynesia was re-incorporated into the list of countries to be decolonized;

- Refusal of the local population to perform under the flag of their country at the Olympic Games;

- Use of the territories from the Indo-Pacific zone (Polynesia, New Caledonia), as well as the Caribbean-American zone (French Guiana, Martinique, Guadeloupe) and Corsica (Solenzara base) as military bases for war preparations without any consultation with local peoples whatsoever;

- Failure to comply with the decolonization process initiated under the Noumea Accord, thus holding an illegal referendum and the reduction of the Kanaks to a minority in their own land as a result of the expansion of the electorate, as well as the numerous arrests and deportations of CCAT (Coordination Network of Territories) activists away from their countries and families;

Taking the above into consideration, we are asking rhetorical and basic questions:

Can the Olympic Games, which represent a “moment of peace and hope” in the 21st century, be held in a country that subjugates nations?

Couldn't the host country of the Olympic Games remove restrictions on freedom in Kanak and release political prisoners? After all, they also have the right to experience this “moment of peace” in their homes together with their children.”