A first-hand account – part 3
I read in the newspapers about the French police raids on November 28, 2023. It’s a hard feeling to describe – reading about something you lived through and not recognizing the truth in a single line. I was there. The people who wrote about it were not. The first time, I was wronged by those who arrested me. The second time, by those who reported on it. I noticed the same pattern as in 2004 in Romania, when authorities raided the MISA ashrams. The same sensational headlines. The same twisted words, taken out of context.
2004. The Same Pattern
In the summer of 2004, I was a journalist. It was the year of the biggest anti-MISA media scandal in Romania. In August 2004, I went to the yoga camp in Costinesti. I wasn’t attending the course at the time. In the middle of the scandal, I kept my eyes wide open. What I found there was nothing like what I had read in the newspapers. Starting that autumn, I enrolled in yoga classes. I am now in my 22nd year.
Twenty years later, another country has the same shocking headlines. There are tens of thousands of people practicing yoga in schools affiliated with MISA, in countries all over the world. People with professions, families, normal lives, who have chosen this practice knowingly. No one has asked them anything. The press never asks the obvious question: if what is being described is true, how is it that so many people stay, year after year, of their own free will?
Prejudice
I noticed something during the days of my arrest at the end of November 2023. The police officers were commenting among themselves that we were “very strange” because we didn’t react violently, didn’t shout, didn’t threaten. They were surprised. It didn’t match the image they had formed of us before meeting us. That’s how prejudice works. And the cost of these prejudices held by people with power and decision-making authority I felt in the handcuffs. I lived it in the cell. I saw it in the eyes of officers who were convinced they knew who I was before exchanging a single word with me.
In the same way, year after year, journalists write about us without ever meeting us. The absence of a point of view becomes a technique in itself: if you don’t respond, you’re guilty; if you do respond, you’re defensive. There is no way out of this vicious circle once it has been created.
What Doesn’t Fit in the Headline
Newspaper headlines have no room for nuance. “Dozens of women rescued” is a good headline to sell papers. But what doesn’t fit into it is the reality that not one of the women who were there filed a complaint. That our complaints, the complaints of dozens of people present, women and men, were later filed against the police.
The police hit me, kept me in the cold with my hands handcuffed behind my back, took me from my bed in my pajamas, without allowing me to take anything with me. I was held in custody for two days, interrogated for hours, deprived of some basic freedoms. Then I was thrown out into the street at night, with no money, no phone, nowhere to go.
It doesn’t appear in newspaper headlines that I endured thirst, cold, and hunger. That I had no access to a doctor or a lawyer.
Before accepting a story as absolute truth, ask yourself whether you have heard all the voices, not just the ones that confirm what you already believed.
Cold, Hungry, Terrified
At least I was lucky afterward. I waited several hours and was found by an acquaintance. I returned to Romania within two days. But there are many other stories like mine that you don’t know. A girl arrested with me was also thrown out into the street with nothing, but after four days in custody, not two. She didn’t know where to go. She wandered aimlessly through the streets until she found a hospital. She locked herself overnight in a toilet there. The next morning, she returned in front of the police station and waited. We no longer had phones. We didn’t know who had been released and who hadn’t. In those days, we tried to find each other through acquaintances, family, friends. Someone had the idea to circle the stations where we knew some of us had been held. That’s how the girl who slept in the hospital toilet was found – on the fifth day after the police raids. Alone, cold, hungry, and terrified
This is the last article in a series of three about the events of November 28, 2023. The true story that you will not find in the press.