The horror. On October 5, 1994, in the middle of the night, Swiss firefighters discovered 23 bodies in a burned farm in Cheiry. Then 25 others in chalets in Salvan, not far from there. The sect of the Order of the Solar Temple, through what will long be presented as a “collective suicide”, bursts into broad daylight. Thirty years later, two journalists from Radio Télévision Suisse, Fanny Moille and Gautier Renault, investigated the sect and the massacres.
A ten-episode podcast was released at the beginning of September, a real dive into the mechanisms of the sect. For 20 MinutesFanny Moille returned to the media treatment of the affair, and how the massacres of the Order of the Solar Temple still resonate today.
In 1994, two massacres were committed in peaceful villages in Switzerland. At the time, what media impact did this affair have?
Fanny Moille : With Gautier, we were 14 years old at the time, and it was the first current affair that challenged us in our daily lives. Before, it floated a little around us, but now, it’s happening to us. And it was a media storm, in Switzerland in particular because that’s where there are the two crime scenes with the most bodies. From the morning of October 5, there are the Swiss media but CNN is also there with a helicopter passing over the farm, Japanese TV is there. These two small villages become the center of the world. It was everywhere.
In the RTS archives, it’s quite impressive. From the 7 a.m. flash on Saturday, that’s all we talked about in the weeks that followed. You have to understand that sects made headlines at the time. A year earlier, the FBI raided the Seventh-day Adventist sect in Waco. For the OTS, Luc Jouret was already known in a previous case in Canada but in Switzerland, he was completely unknown. There is a form of trauma among the inhabitants of Cheiry, a bucolic place, because they knew the occupants of the farm but knew nothing about the sect, they had the impression of having lived next to something enormous. .
Today, what traces of the affair remain in people’s memories?
F. M. : Mediatically, I don’t know if there’s much left beyond the anniversary. But it marked a societal awareness of the threats of sectarian excesses. The case did not only concern a territory with specific laws, the OTS is in Switzerland and Canada, a year later there was the Vercors massacre in France. In Switzerland, we have set up an intercantonal information center. We don’t want to be repressive but to know what’s going on. In France, it was more repressive after the Vercors, with the creation of a blacklist, the law on the abuse of weakness and the creation of Miviludes. This laid the foundations for how to prevent, punish and prevent abuses.
You draw a parallel with what is happening today. How does the OTS massacre shed light on current abuses?
F. M. : Today, these abuses and the mechanics of control and manipulation still exist, but they no longer make the headlines even if Miviludes has sounded the alarm. However, there is always this threat, particularly in the radicalization of young people who want to wage jihad. It’s more diffuse and more hidden, we’re talking about virtual communities so it’s more complicated to regulate it. It’s striking to see that conspiracy theories, anti-vax, were already present in the OTS. It’s quite dizzying to see how similar it is.
There are keys in the history of the OTS to understanding current abuses. We had access to a mass of internal archives of the sect which are in Fribourg, the gurus recorded and filmed themselves during their speeches, from the first community at the end of the 1970s until the very end, i.e. almost 400 hours of recordings. We see the drift, how on laudable values with an ecological conscience, people who wanted to treat themselves differently, educated people, will be manipulated to drift towards suicides and murders.
In short, can everyone fall into it?
F. M. : We identify with these people because they are not crazy people who want to be transferred to Sirius at the start. When we only hear the speech, without seeing the grandiloquent side of the ceremonies, it seems less crazy. We ask ourselves the question, “what would I have done in their place?” “. In the end, some followers will become aware of the drift, want to leave and get their money back. The gurus will wiretap them, and there too we understand how they were manipulated, lured to be killed. Making this podcast also meant doing justice to the victims, because it was easier at the time to caricature when talking about collective suicide.
