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YOGA SQUASHED TO THE WALL! A WRONG MOVE FOR ROMANIA ON ITS WAY TO THE EUROPEAN UNION THE POWER BLATANTLY DISREGARDS HUMAN RIGHTS: THE MENTHOR OF THE LARGEST SPIRITUAL SCHOOL IN THE EX SOVIET BLOCK IS DECLARED PUBLIC ENEMY NO. 1 More materials. Videos, Online Petitions, Testimonials, Reports, Feedback, More materials in Romanian, In the Google News The Movement For Spiritual Integration into the Absolute (MISA) is a huge phenomenon. Both spiritual and social phenomenon, that is. Created immediately after the overturn of the communist regime in Romania, MISA has multiple yoga courses frequented by over 35,000 people. Another 10,000 people from sixteen other countries practice yoga under MISA-based yoga courses.  Photo Representing a Group Meditation, at the Herculane Yoga Camp, Romania MISA's public image has been attacked right from the start, in 1990, in the Romanian mass-media. MISA was the target of numerous calumny and defamation campaigns, a readily available way of releasing social stress and a punching bag for journalists. The less knowledgeable readers, journalists and even the police took to this unfortunate stereotype propagated in the press and television. Amnesty International and Association for the Defence of Human Rights in Romania – the Helsinki Committee (APADOR-CH) have spoken clearly about the repeated persecutions MISA adepts are subject to. No matter how little are we interested in yoga, what is happening today with the Movement For Spiritual Integration into the Absolute should concern us all : when the human rights of a single man are trampled, the human rights of everyone are in danger.  The military boots were smashed through the doors of sixteen houses, in the same spring morning, at the same hour. It was a nice neighborhood, where you could hear the singing of the birds, but then all you could hear were the brutal commands of the masked anti-tero forces : “Stop, I will kill you, don't move an inch!”, “Down to the earth or I'll shoot!”.It is the 18'th of March, Bucharest, Romania. Romania declares itself a democratic country. It is election year. Over 300 gendarms, policemen, DAs, and secret service officers invade the private homes of many yoga practitioners. They don't even bother to ring the bell, they prefer just to smash the doors to pieces, even the unlocked doors. Some yogis are dragged outside and kept in the cold for hours on end, hands up. Other yogis are smashed to the floor, some handcuffed. No one of them fights back. The masked men put the barrel of their guns to the heads of those yogis they deem dangerous. Some of the 'dangerous' yogis are young girls, just awakened from their sleep.  One of the girls is called Anca Toadea. She has an incredible livid face because she is suffering from thalassemia, a blood disease that threatens her life every second. She is ordered to lay down on the floor, face down, but Anca cannot obey the order fast enough. She is too slow, she tries to say something but doesn't get to finish the sentence – a soldier gives her a push down to the floor and smacks her with his gun on her forehead. She is made to lay down on the cold cement of the kitchen floor with her hands tied in the back. Five days later, Anca Toadea still had a horrible bruise at her right eye and suffers from continuous sickness.Nine foreign citizens are among the yogis under assault. The defenders of the law are yelling in a tongue they can't understand and forbid anyone to communicate with one another. The foreigners don't understand a thing. Amongst them is Pierre Crié, a renowned French photographer. All his things get confiscated: phone, phonebook, passport, laptop and 10,000 pictures made in Tibet, Nepal and other corners of the world. The troops deem suspect Pierre's photo collection. They act with no explanation at all. And how could they explain anything when they did not have a translator on site. “I thought the war has begun” 
Ana Weinstein, an Israely girl, chose Romania to practice yoga and now she's in a state of shock. Her heart is beating wildly in her chest – what are we accused for ? None of the police officers care to translate. The girls around her start crying. The policemen threaten them. Ana has the feeling that she is in a nightmare. She's not allowed to assist the search and seizure of her personal objects. She cannot know what the policemen seized by force.I met her the next day, after the ransacking. She has enlarged eyes, sunk into their orbits, from lack of sleep. In a trebling voice she says : “My family knows what the Nazi regime meant, they were hunted and tormented. I thought making such a mockery of people, especially in a country that wants to be considered democratic, will never be possible again. I was afraid in that morning, I was afraid because all my rights were denied and no one and nothing mattered then to the police troops. It was as if they could have killed us and no one would have been held accountable”. “Not a single word or I'll kill you!” Adriana Ciupe was in one of the sixteen searched houses. The troops were ransacking all the rooms of her house, destroying even the open doors, the furniture, kicking the girls with the guns and feet. An officer orders all the girl into a small room. They are forced to lay down face down on the floor. A police cameraman is recording the scene: “OK, now put that syringe there on the shelf ...”. Adriana wants to say something. “I don't want to hear one more word from you! I'll kill you!”. Then, complete silence. “OK, ..., now record them, and record the syringe too...” Adriana is afraid that the girls will be injected with drugs by the masked men. Thankfully, that did not happen. Adriana bursts : “You're lying, how could you lie like this?” The officer tells her that anyone who will open her mouth to speak shall be handcuffed and taped over her mouth. The next day all the news journals on many channels obsessively presented a video clip with yogis next to a syringe. Based on these images gracefully offered by the police to the media, the majority of news channels reported that the MISA yogis consume drugs and traffic illegal substances.  Claudia Petrescu, an NGO social worker involved with the recovery and social reintegration of drug addicts says with an ironic smile : “Anyone who knows a little about the drug addicts will realize that they don't use such huge syringe and needles as those presented on the TV news. It is very unlikely. Drug addicts want to protect their veins by using very thin needles, like the ones used by diabetics for insuline treatment.” The next day 37 people from the searched houses took a legal drug test and were found negative. No traces of narcotics found. As I write this late at night, I cannot help but wander: how would I feel if right this instant a hoard of policemen with black masks, secret service officers and district attorneys would ransack my home? How would you feel? Vandalism, not searches The owners of the sixteen homes searched by the police talk now with bitterness about their old libraries : tens of thousands of books on spirituality, philosophy, yoga, Christianity, parapsychology, numerology. From the home of yoga teacher Gregorian Bivolaru they confiscated the most : thousands volumes, rare editions by prestigious publishing houses. The troops loaded trucks-full of books. Thy made no detailed inventory. The search and seizure was executed in the absence of the owner, in blatant disregard to the law, as his attorneys affirm. The police stoped Gregorian Bivolaru on the road, taking him to the police station for a routine ID card check, while devastating his house at the same time. Twenty minutes after taking him to the section they let him go. All this was happening on the 18th of March, the same day as the other 16 searches. Witnesses ? Only the people that came on the behalf of the police troops. The press and TV stations manipulate the public opinion The accusations heard on the TV stations on the 18th would give the shivers to any decent human being. The Bucharest chief D.A., George Balan, declared that he led the biggest show of force the police has known in 15 years against MISA and Gregorian Bivolaru. His charges? They were looking to uncover a huge drug and human traffic network, prostitution, pornography and sequestration of persons. They also repeated their stereotype accusations that they've been printing for years: brainwashing, the breaking of families, encouragement to separate and isolate from society. The climax was attained with the accusation that MISA was a paramilitary organization and the secret service was afraid of an extreme act – a threat to national security. “All that's left was to accuse us of building the atomic bomb for China” was saying one of the yogis, with black humor. A few days later into the investigations the accusations were much less spectacular. No mention of drugs or organized crime any more – now they settled for investigating copyright infringement and tax evasion. And now they were not investigating an organization any more: they were focusing on a few individuals and their businesses, said the D.A. Just like in communist China, now people started pointing fingers : “He is a yoga practitioner too!” - and the police wanted nothing more. It is the case with the university professor Nicolae Cojan from Iasi. His house was the scene of a police search and seizure. They confiscated video tapes, books, computers and CDs. The people who were searched by the police were treated like dangerous criminals: they were laid face down on the floor, hands in the back, some even for hours on end. Some of them were threatened with the weapons, shocked and bruised. Other were not allowed to put on clothes even tough they were attacked while sleeping, and the cameramen filmed them in their underwear and then published the tapes on the TV news alongside computers with webcams and sex toys. Their accuse? Erotic video chat and tax evasion.  The TV stations sometimes “forgot” to obscure the identity of the people presented in indecent clothing. This is a violation of a human right to dignity, a fundamental right protected by the Constitution.Personal holiday photos, not porn  Many of the pictures seized by the police portray yogis in bathing suit or just panties. The yogis say that some of the pictures were taken at the sea shore, on holiday, and other pictures were taken for a book that was to study the physical transformation over the years of the human body by the practice of yoga. These private and personal images were presented without obscuring their identity on the TV, repeatedly declared to be porn. Just a few days earlier, the Big Brother show produced a scandal by broadcasting nude images in prime time. Then the Audio and Visual Committee (an oversight body for the decency of TV broadcasts) defined porn as representing sexual acts, not single people standing. Also, whenever they put the pictures on air, they were mentioning “group sex” and “urinotherapy”. The first was a complete lie and the latter is an accepted form natural therapy all over the world.They call us “witnesses” ... What witnesses ? Were we really witnesses? The authorities attributed the quality of witness to the 78 persons searched on the 18th of March. Nicolae Vârbanescu is wandering : “How could they say now that we were and are witnesses? They handcuffed me and bruised my hands. The yelled at me and my friends while we were in the house, they kept us laying down on the floor for tens of minutes even after it became clear that there were nu guns in the house and we were not fighting back. They did not allow us to call a any lawyer, both during the search and later, at the police station, where we were transported without any explanation whatsoever. How could we be witnesses when the D.A.s dictated to the yogis what they wanted to have in their declarations, subjecting them to pressure and intimidation and finally having them sign their names? How could we be considered witnesses when the police refused to display the search warrant in many of the searched houses and in two of them they were found not to have a search warrant at all, excusing themselves after ransacking the homes with the lame excuse that they mistook the address.How could we be considered witnesses when the search and seizures were executed in a chaotic manner, not making a detailed inventory of all the objects they took. Well, in these conditions they could just declare they found a skeleton in the closed, for all that I know...” Mediafax, the most prestigious Romanian news agency fell pray to this game The press and the TV channels started their old calumny and distortion campaigns while the police in the first seven days had no official accusation against the yogis. The information was transmitted to the public directly as it came, not bothering to check for independent confirmation first, in many cases. A big TV talk show brings light on things By appearing on “Marius Tuca Show” on the 25th of March, the spiritual mentor of MISA, Gregorian Bivolaru, answered and cleared the confusion. Then it was clear that he was not wanted by the police and was not forbidden to leave the country. He was not accused by the police of using drugs or sexual perversions. The authorities denied all these rumors circulating in the press. So, a week after the start of the biggest police campaign ever to take place after the '89 overthrow of the Communist regime, the authorities did not possess any incriminating evidence. In a state where law is respected, they should have been in possession of strong evidence before the start of this huge police action and not after it, as required by the presumption of innocence. You don't get to trash someone's house just to see if you can find anything wrong with them, you need to have sufficient evidence against them beforehand. This action was politically requested When Gregorian Bivolaru affirmed that the whole police action was politically requested by a high ranking political figure in Romania, he refused to name names citing insufficient evidence, all that he said was that it was not the President, mr. Ion Iliescu. The mass-media diversion : covering for another Bivolaru Amazingly, there was another mr. Bivolaru that was wanted by the police at the same time : this one was Gabriel Bivolaru, an ex P.S.D.R. (no P.S.D.) deputy put under general search in Romania and all over the world for the stealing of 60 million dollars from BRD (The Romanian Development Bank). This other Bivolaru, a political protege and colleague of the prime minister Adrian Nastase had just beed condemned to serve 5 years in prison. In the mean time the common folks started to confuse which Bivolaru was the guru and which Bivolaru was de ex deputee and white collar thief. The thief was nowhere to be found. Saturday, the 27th of March – the question of the day : Who ordered the police raid against MISA ? Adrian Nastase took to the defense of his ex party colleague, Gabriel Bivolaru. Sunday, the 28th of March, 21:00 – Coup De Théâtre, the mass-media is roaring:  Gregorian Bivolaru, the guru, was retained in the Nadlac customs house at the border. He is accused of trying to secretly pass the border into Hungary. Miraculously, TV reporters are just in the neighborhood. A black wig is displayed in front of the TV cameras. A hand belonging to someone out of sight was turning the wig on all its sides, displaying it. It seems that the yoga professor Gregorian Bivolaru was wearing this wig while trying to cross on foot to Hungary right thru the customs office building, on the entering lane.“It is a setup” he says. I cannot help but wander: why on the world would the yoga professor Gregorian Bivolaru try to illegally try to cross the border if he wasn't wanted by police and had no border interdiction? Why go under disguise? There is no logical answer to that. Gregorian Bivolaru declared to the mass media that it was a setup. Camelia Chisca, a witness to the whole episode declared: he was inside the customs building inquiring about whether he can cross the border when he was grabbed by three men and dragged onto the border line. Then the men begun to yell : “We caught Bivolaru!” and they brought him back into the customs building in the arrest cell. Next Gregorian Bivolaru was taken to the city of Arad and from there sent to Bucharest under police escort. There, the accusation of attempting to illegally cross the border was “forgotten” and the main accusation now is “sexual rapports and perversions with a minor girl”. Who is remembering about the ex deputy Gabriel Bivolaru, the wone who sacked the bank ? The yoga professor Gregorian Bivolaru became now the public enemy no. 1. The mass media was in a frenzy, with this cheap movie - like script. 
A newspaper breaks shocking news : “They are brothers!”A reported dug into the past of both Bivolaru and discovered that they have the same father. Gregorian Bivolaru finds about this from the press while he was in jail. Now we have no only Big Brother, but also “Big Father”. 
They want to keep Gregorian Bivolaru in jail for 30 days. They are making research in his case. The rumors against him at this point touch the absurd. He is refused vegetarian food, even tough he doesn't eat meat, like many other yogis in Romania. He declares that he will stop eating anything until he is freed. Thousands of MISA yogis take to the streets 
 
 Gabriel Bivolaru, the ex PDSR deputy gives himself up to the police of the 1st of April. The authorities loose control of the whole situation The wrong judge signed the arrest warrant and a court order strikes the warrant by nullity. Gregorian Bivolaru is declared free, but the police still don't want to let him go. At the same time the 17 year old Madalina Dumitru presented herself by her free will to deny once more the charges of having sex with Gregorian Bivolaru, thus exonerating him. Police does not allow her to file an official statement. Instead she is taken by force by the masked police to the Forensic Medical Institute (IML) to check whether she is virgin. She was taken to IML with her lawyer. There, at the IML, a spontaneous gathering of yogis and yogi supporters was forming. The yogis were protesting peacefully, with their hands raised in the air or on their heads as a demonstration of non-violence. The IML doors were controlled by masked police and inside the IML was full of masked men. In this situation, Madalina became frightened (remember she is only 17) and refused to subject herself to gynecological control. At this point the police dragged her by her hair out the back door into a police car along with her lawyer. They also smacked the lawyer's head into the car. After their car left, the masked police started beating the yogis in front of IML, dispersing them and then arresting them one by one. One of the yogis was so hard hit that he went into a coma. He was transported to the hospital. The police managed to arrest 25 people including one of the attorneys of Gregorian Bivolaru, Mihai Rapcea and charged them with having an unauthorized rally. Later, Gabriel Andreescu of Association for the Defence of Human Rights in Romania – the Helsinki Committee was declaring : “This time, the abuse of the Romanian authorities was played in front of the public opinion”. 1st of April, 21:00 hours. The immediate release of Gregorian Bivolaru is expected. His lawyers rejected the judges of the Sector 5 Court House and based on the earlier court order he was freed at last. At 23:30, same day - Gregorian Bivolaru appears live on the most popular talk show, “Marius Tuca Show”. Once more he gets to say his point of view on all the events, bringing light into this chaos of lies. Once more he denies all accusations brought against him. Once more I am in my room, wandering if, after I publish this article, I will wake up one morning feeling the cold metal of the gun at my head. It is the beginning of April, 2004, Bucharest, Romania. An electoral year. Article translated from Yoga Magazine special edition no 49, April, 2004. 
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