Someone to Watch Over Me

Article published: Monday, August 25th 2008

Take a deep breath. The Olympics are finally over. Daytime TV can return to reassuring re-runs of Murder She Wrote. Huw Edwards no longer has to pretend nightly that anyone gives a shit about dressage. And in about twelve months time, when we’ve all finished congratulating ourselves about how good the British are at cycling, those Beijing residents inconsiderate enough to have their houses in the way of the velodrome might even be let out of the Re-education Through Labour camps.

I hate to wreck our warm Olympics afterglow – although I’m far from the only person to be sourly remarking that British media coverage of human rights standards in China has decreased in almost exact proportion to the rise in Britain’s medal tally.

But the connection between sport and state repression is more direct and systematic than this bread and circuses effect. Sporting mega-events don’t just serve as diversions from state abuse and government ineptitude (in the UK as well as in China). They provide archetypal opportunities to cement state power; to inscribe it in the urban space of cities around the world.

As international sporting tournaments have mushroomed into a global industry, so their freedom to re-organise urban space and infrastructure has grown commensurately. The extraordinary kowtowing of urban authorities to the sportfest industry’s planners is explained by two impulses. The first is based on hope: the Oz-like promise of urban regeneration still hawked by the global sportfest industry. The second is based on fear: the spectre of terrorism that has haunted sportfests since Munich 1972. In 2005, consultants Booz Allen and Hamilton estimated that the world market in security electronic products for stadiums alone was worth between $2 and $6 billion a year. London’s Olympic Development Authority is set to spend £600 million on security, with a further £238 million “security contingency fund”. Compare this with the US Department of Homeland Security – perhaps the most profligate state security spender in the world – which gave US local authorities and the private sector a measly $445 million to protect US cities from terrorist attacks in 2007. For London 2012, access to East London public spaces will be transformed; London’s residents and visitors logged, scanned and filmed; hundreds of new CCTV systems installed.

All of which remains long after the athletes have left and the wind is whistling through under-used stadia. This is the real sustainable legacy of the Olympics and World Cups: a pervasive surveillance infrastructure, and – more significant than any physical legacy – a model of ‘crisis’ event security which becomes the permanent condition of post-sportfest cities. Beijing’s Olympic security infrastructure will be integrated into China’s Golden Shield plan to consolidate public surveillance in every major Chinese city. Athens’ sportfest security wonks have gone further, seeking to use the 2004 Olympics as a general model for state security. In 2005 the Greek government established a Coordinating Centre for Security Studies to “cooperate with foreign governments and provide advice and know-how obtained during the Olympics to organise security for similar organisations and events.” The Centre has since established cooperative arrangements with such champions of privacy and human rights as the Chinese Ministry of Defence and the Russian security services.

All this is egged on by global security companies, some of whose profit margins really don’t distinguish between stopping a bomb in a stadium and running a prison camp. I work near Sportcity, the centrepiece of the promised regeneration of east Manchester by the 2002 Commonwealth Games. For the 2002 Games, an advanced CCTV system and 54 cameras made by US security company Pelco were installed around the stadium, helping to create a “sterile site”, in the organisers’ security jargon. The cameras, at least, have stayed. In amidst what remains a barren urban wasteland (where nearly one in five men are still long-term unemployed), the deserted car parks around what is now Manchester City stadium are still sentinelled by CCTV stands.

Pelco, who reportedly got another fat contract for Beijing 2008 security systems, still uses the Manchester Sportcity stadium in its promotional brochure’s list of “worldwide installations” – an astonishingly candid rollcall which also includes, in the company’s own proud words, “Shenzhen 2nd Re-Education-through-Labor Camp” and “Shanghai Execution Ground”. Which is lucky, because both must be in heavy demand right now. Chinese authorities announced last year that in the run up to the Olympics, flyposters and unlicensed street vendors would be punished with Re-education Through Labour. And last month the Washington Post reported that public executions had been restarted in western China. First to get bullets through the back of their skulls, watched by hundreds of school children, were three young men from Xinjiang, allegedly members of an organisation fighting for independence on behalf of western China’s Muslim Uighur population – and accused of planning to disrupt the Beijing Olympics.

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