We've met so many brave people in Sochi, people
who have taken a stand to protect
their homes, their families, the places where they grew up, the places where
they saw their whole future.
My home was everything, I spent my whole life on my house.
I have a big family, a daughter, a son, grandchildren, a wife.
We all lived together in the house.
We built the house in 1996,
and in 2012 the Olympics came and they demolished my home.
We've documented forced evictions,
people who were kicked out of their homes in order to make way for
Olympic venues and infrastructure.
The Russian government has
evicted a few thousand people,
and in most cases, gave those people compensation or relocated them to
alternative housing.
But what we found was that in a number of cases, the Russian government really took
advantage of some ambiguities in the law that happened right after the
Soviet period in a very confusing time of privatization.
They told us our building was marked for demolition
because a road would be built,
allegedly, through our home.
[The city] filed a similar court case 13 years ago,
similar court case 13 years ago,
and the judge ruled that we were the rightful owners.
The Khostinsky Court considered all of this in 1999.
So these men from the Sochi City adminitration,
with the support of the regional department,
went to the Krasnodar Regional Court of Appeals,
and in literally two minutes,
our house
was declared
an illegal construction.
People who were evicted,
they experienced a government a power, a power that was just going to come in and
do what it wanted to do.
without any regard for those individuals.
Russia hosts millions of migrant workers every year.
Huge numbers of them work in the construction sector.
In Sochi itself, the official numbers
from the Russian government have been
on the order of tens of thousands, an unknown portion of them are migrant workers.
Migrant workers typically come from the poor countries of Central Asia.
Workers face a range of abuses,
in particular,
non-payment of wages
some said that they had their passports withheld.
Workers across all sites told us that they worked twelve hour shifts,
directly in violation of Russian law.
People in Sochi feel that
there hasn't been sufficient transparency, from the authorities, about
what's being built, when it's being built, what it's for.
We welcome the Olympics
We welcome the Olympic development,
and we want to surprise the whole world.
But I don't think we will surprise them.
It's the opposite-- we will be disgraced.
With just the sort
of building as the one that will be built here.
So Russia is planning to build what is purported to be the largest natural gas
thermal plant, in a village that's part of Sochi.
The Russian authorities started some preliminary construction without doing
the due diligence,
to inspect the site for what the potential impacts on people's lives,
homes, and livelihoods could be.
These are drains.
They need to be removed from here.
They should be used temporarily during construction.
When they installed these supports
they drilled in bored piles over there.
There have been landslides as a result of construction related to Olympic infrastructure, or
dumping of construction materials, that have been so
severe that houses have slid down the hill.
They become very unstable
but people don't have any other choice but to continue to live in them.
When they tried to determine whether we have an emergency situation or not,
the head of the emergency situations traveled to us. He looked over everything here,
he stood here for five minutes and said that his head was spinning.
Then he went outside and said,
"This will not be declared an emergency situation, because there are no corpses." And that was it.
And in one neighborhood where people complained to the authorities, the government
came in and did an inspection, and determined that a number of the houses were
uninhabitable,
and then threatened to take one family's children away. So, you see this as a kind of
double punishment, that not only people have lost their homes because of
these landslides, but then the state is coming in further to say
this home isn't a place where your children can live anymore.
People in Sochi feel that the Olympics are coming to town,
and they have had no say
in what has gone on,
and how those Olympics had been developed, and what it is going to mean for
their lives.
The hosting of a successful winter Olympic games is completely within Russia's hands.
It's fully within its power to insure that people don't suffer as a result of the
games.