Riot-torn Paris suburbs targeted by sects

Sect-like groups are profiting from the misery in riot-stricken French suburbs to attract new recruits under the guise of offering humanitarian aid, warns an official report. Organisations including the Church of Scientology, labelled a cult in France, are targeting vulnerable residents in the country’s poor, high immigration suburbs, it claims.

France’s official sects watchdog, the Interministerial Mission in the Fight Against Cults (Miviludes), said the situation called for “extreme vigilance”.

It said the activities of sect-like groups had increased in three main areas: children, alternative medicine and humanitarian aid.

“The presence in French suburbs following the disturbances of the autumn of 2005 of certain sect-like organisations proclaiming loud and clear the merits of their humanitarian action for the disadvantaged is worrying,” it declared, “especially when one notices similarities in the remarks of these organisations and the way the events in question were treated by certain international media.”

These organisations were increasingly using aid as a means of gaining respectability and a cover for spreading their message, preying on people who were often in a state of distress, it wrote.

It singled out the Church of Scientology, whose members include actors Tom Cruise and John Travolta, and described as “pure propaganda” a statement in which the group took credit for calming one of the riot-hit suburbs last November. After claiming to have been in the suburb of Aulnay-sous-Bois - badly hit by last autumn’s riots - for a fortnight members of the Church of Scientology wrote that its return to normal quicker than other areas was linked to the presence of its volunteers, said the report.

“Members of the Church of Scientology, the New Acropole or the Jehovah’s Witnesses are regularly deployed on the ground in France as elsewhere,” it added.

Presenting the report, Miviludes’ secretary, Jean-Michel Roulet, said: “During the last year the growth of sects in France has continued unabated. Children are at the heart of the campaign for sect leaders because they are malleable and represent the potential development of the group.”

In a television interview he added that humanitarian aid was “profitable in terms of image and recruitment because when somebody comes to help you, the polite response is to listen to what they say.”

The watchdog listed a wide range of alternative therapies including crystal therapy, iridology (diagnosis though examination of the iris) and shamanism among those practised by sects and said they had one thing in common: no scientific basis. In 2005 there were 200 methods of alternative medicine recorded by the French authorities, compared with 80 in 2001.

“Whether it’s a case of healing sects … or guru practitioners who create their own methods or are franchised by others who have founded doctrines, the choice is very large, and is therefore able to attract all kinds of need,” said Mr Roulet.

Six years ago the French parliament adopted Europe’s toughest anti-sect laws, creating a new crime of “mental manipulation”, punishable by a fine of ?50,000 and five years’ imprisonment.

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