Tvind: Secretive guru's dark empire

By MICHAEL DURHAM

It all began in the heady days of the late 1960s.

Mogens Petersen, a popular, attractive and rebellious young schoolteacher, left a comfortable job at the Kroggaardsskolen state school near Odense, in Denmark. According to legend, he was sacked for refusing to cut his long hair.

What followed was to affect the lives of thousands of idealistic young people - first in Denmark, then in the rest of Europe, Africa and America, and now in New Zealand, Fiji and the Pacific.

The movement Mr Petersen founded is usually known as Tvind - or by other names such as Humana (not to be confused with the leading United States hospital owner and healthcare provider Humana Inc in Louisville, Kentucky.)

Tvind is now a worldwide phenomenon, though little understood beyond Scandinavia. It is an empire, with schools, colleges, "charities," trading companies, volunteer networks and national organisations in many countries.

But it is an empire with a dark side.

According to the personal testimony of many early supporters, Mr Petersen's revolutionary baby has grown into a monster.

What began as a shining example of radical thought in action, they complain, has become commercialised, money-grubbing and cynically exploitative. There are even those - and there are many - who speak of brainwashing, psychological manipulation and mind control.

Tvind, they say, has become a cult, and Mr Petersen is its guru.

He leads a charmed life, not least because nobody in the outside world knows where he is.

In 1979, he went underground, refusing to appear in public or give interviews, and he has not been seen by anyone outside the organisation for 20 years.

He is reportedly driven everywhere by his friend Kirsten Larsen. Fearing assassination, he has built a huge headquarters in the Zimbabwean bush, kilometres from the nearest town.

Today, young people in many countries are warned to steer clear of Tvind - by official bodies such as the French and Belgian Parliaments, by anti-cult groups and by former members who have set up an international "movement against Tvind."

Even so, Tvind continues to grow and attract devotees. Suppressed in one country, it springs up under another name or in another part of the world. Now it is recruiting in New Zealand universities, and in small ads in national newspapers such as the Herald.

Tvind began in a windswept field on a farm - from which it gets its name - outside the Danish village of Ulfborg. Mr Petersen, Kirsten Larsen and a small band of enthusiasts laboured to build, with their own hands, two "alternative" boarding schools, the Necessary Teacher Training College and the Travelling Folk High School.

Next, Mr Petersen set about recruiting more like-minded young people to "train." Posters went up in universities and job centres.

In the anti-authoritarian atmosphere of the early 1970s, young people flocked to join, attracted by an "experimental" course which included minibus expeditions to Third World countries and spells working in factories, where students supposedly experienced life in the raw.

Over the next few years, Tvind students in their battered buses became a familiar sight in western Denmark and in places as far afield as India, the Middle East and South America.

From this modest start, the Tvind empire grew. It now has a presence in more than 50 countries, where desperately loyal "Tvindies" have been sent, like latter-day apostles, to open schools, buy property, start covert companies and commercial operations, run "Third World aid projects" and sign up more recruits.

Is any of this helping the poor? Only Mr Petersen knows.

Young people working abroad for Tvind have told of being forced to hitch-hike for kilometres in dangerous parts of Africa. Volunteers collecting donations are regularly expected to knock on strangers' doors in European capitals, asking for food and accommodation.

Yet loyal Tvindies expect to take such risks - sometimes at the cost of their lives.

In 1983, a boat carrying eight young Tvindies to a meeting with Mr Petersen in Denmark sank in a storm off Dover, drowning all of them. The boat was unseaworthy and none of the eight was an experienced sailor.

One of the dead was a young Norwegian woman, Kristin Skagemo. Tvind refused to pay to send her body back to Norway and presented her parents with the bill.

As Tvind became more authoritarian, paranoia grew.

Newspapers were banned, enabling Mr Petersen to keep a tight grip on information. Followers were told never to commit anything to paper, not to use public phones and to talk to one another by digital cellphones. Today, communication is often by encrypted e-mail.

Blind loyalty aside, the secret of Tvind's success is money. For a supposedly philanthropic organisation, Tvind has an acute nose for business. Its inner circle, known as the Teachers Group, pool their assets in a private "money tank," Faelleseje.

Over the years, Faelleseje has become enormously rich - as long ago as 1983 Danish journalists estimated its wealth at over $15 billion.

If it ever accounted for its riches - which it does not - Tvind would probably assert that the money has been used to build Tvind schools, staff training colleges and run "Third World aid projects" overseas.

In fact, there is evidence that it has secretly spent much of the money on commercial farms and plantations abroad, where Scandinavians run profitable businesses exporting fruit and vegetables to Europe and the United States.

Henning Bjornlund, the former financial director of Tvind - who himself defected in 1989 and now lives comfortably in Australia - recently confessed to an undercover reporter from a Danish newspaper that he had personally arranged many such purchases, none with any link to charity.

At one time, there were vast orange estates in Australia. In Fiji, Tvind has been connected with a company called Pacific Trading Ltd, and Tvind is reported to own plantations in Belize, Ecuador, Brazil, the Caribbean and Zimbabwe.

In recent years, Tvind has run a worldwide operation collecting castoff clothes for resale, making yet more millions, under the names Humana People-to-People, Development Aid from People-to-People and Planet Aid.

The clothes are not given away - they are sold in Africa, Central America and Eastern Europe. Tvind says it uses the money for charity projects, but there is no independent verification.

Even Tvind's international volunteer programme and Third World "development projects" come at a price - students hoping to volunteer for work abroad have to pay around $6500 in advance, and collect more money by selling postcards and newspapers on the streets, instead of attending college.