Red tapism delays relief for parents

September 1, 2008

K Praveen Kumar

TNN

CHENNAI: Three years after the controversy over illegal adoptions carried out by Malaysian Social Services (MSS), hit the news stands, the story has made it to the headlines again following a recent report by a foreign publication.

The Great Indian adoption racket across four continents

Lakshmy Ramanathan, TNN, Sep 1, 2008, 05.30am IST

Article

Comments

CHENNAI: Seven thirty on a chill February evening: residents of the Pulianthope slum off the Pulianthope high road in North Chennai had gathered outside their shanties to cook their last meal for the day.

Mohammed Adam The Ottawa Citizen Sunday, August 31, 2008

The Nairobi High Court Building is a grand monument to justice, but when Peggy Taillon stepped into Courtroom 33 one fateful February morning, she wondered what kind of justice awaited her.

From: Garnier-Merz [mailto:beagarnier-merz@gmx.de]

Sent: Freitag, 29. August 2008 02:45

To: 'Arun Dohle'

Subject: AW: Mali?

Hallo Arun,

Painful truth about adopted children

August 26, 2008

Siobhain Ryan and Sean Parnell

WHEN Julia Rollings first heard that the orphanage from which she had adopted her son and daughter was embroiled in a child-trafficking scandal, she was faced with a life-changing choice.

She could do nothing, safe in the knowledge that her children, Akil and Sabila, had been declared free for adoption by Indian courts, were Australian citizens and were in a place they called home.

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• Audio: Qld Govt investigates another stolen child claim (PM)

From: Lynelle Beveridge [mailto:icasn@bigpond.net.au]

Sent: Montag, 25. August 2008 05:14

To: 'Julia Rollings'; 'Ricky Brisson - AFC'; 'Marilyn Nagesh'; 'Gary Banks'; 'Helen Edwards'; 'John Ford'; 'Eun Bryan'; treasurer@aacasa.org.au; 'Aileen Berry'; 'Julie Rankin'; 'Mark Byrne'; 'Mark Stewart'; 'Mahoney Sonya'; 'Marianne Saliba'

Subject: RE: Kids 'kidnapped for Aussie adoption'

I believe we as a Peak Group (and as individual organisations) should be pushing for the Australian Govt to conduct an investigation / full inquiry into these Indian adoptions and ensure that Australian procedures are tightened to prevent adoptions from organisations that have a history of, or any questionable behaviour of child trafficking / stolen children. If the Netherlands can do this, surely the Australian Government can also take some responsible action?

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By Rory Callinan/Chennai
YEARS OF HEARTBREAK: Zabeen's birth mother Fatima at a local tea shop; her daughter was taken as she played outside

Fatima thinks it was her daughter Zabeen's beautiful smile that attracted the child stealer. Playing outside the tea shop near their home in the north Chennai suburb of Washermanpet, with only her four-year-old brother watching, the bright two-year-old was an easy target. While Fatima popped around the corner to the market, Zabeen was bundled into a motorized rickshaw and vanished into the mass of humanity that swirls through the city's squalid alleyways and slums.

"I thought someone had taken her for her kidney," says the weeping mother, clutching a photocopy of her daughter's picture that she keeps in a special place in her tiny two-room flat. "Many, many places I looked. My husband traveled everywhere looking. I was all the time crying for my daughter." Her husband says: "My wife was half mad with grief."

Fatima hoped she might one day be reunited with her daughter, but as time passed she lost hope. "I gave her up to Allah," she says. It would be seven years before she learned the truth. Zabeen had been snatched by a gang of criminals who hunted pretty children in the poorest parts of southern India and spirited them away, giving them new identities before dispatching them to adoptive parents in the West. Stolen from a mother's arms while they slept on the pavement, kidnapped as they played, or taken from gullible parents who thought they were being sent to boarding school, the children were processed through an adoption agency and orphanage known as Malaysian Social Services, at Tiruverkadu in Chennai's northwest.

Indian police say MSS staff renamed the children and fabricated histories for them, complete with photos of fake mothers supposedly offering them for adoption. False signatures were appended to documents giving vague reasons like "the social stigma of the child being born outside marriage" to justify the infant's surrender. Children were then shipped to wealthy countries, including Australia.