They publicized the baby trade from Sri Lanka
Sarah Ineichen had not expected these consequences: Five years ago she went public with her story and told how she was brought to Switzerland from Sri Lanka and adopted here as a baby under questionable circumstances.
From then on nothing was the same again. Her phone kept ringing. Dozens of those affected came forward, and soon there were hundreds. And everyone reported a similar experience. Sarah Ineichen just wanted to clarify the question of where her own roots are.
For her, the birth of her own children was a decisive factor: "That's when I realized: It can't be that a mother voluntarily gives her child away without leaving a mark on her," says Sarah Ineichen. “The pain of being separated from my mother and the need to find her consumed me completely.”
Looking for her mother
She was only able to trace her origins once she had put down roots herself with her family. And so in 2017, full of hope, she traveled to Sri Lanka with the information on her birth certificate from 1981.
But the longed-for meeting with her mother did not happen. She did find the woman who was listed as the mother on the birth certificate. But as it later turned out, she was an acting mother; a woman who had been bought to play mother to the authorities and give her consent to the adoption.
The bitter thing about it: “Only my biological mother could tell me exactly what happened in my story,” says Sarah Ineichen.
With her search for origins and subsequent going public, Sarah Ineichen set off an avalanche that gradually brought down the questionable system of Alice Honegger from Eastern Switzerlandshould expose. For four decades, she worked as an adoption broker for babies, her activity became a real child trafficking. From the 1970s, she began intensively to place children from Sri Lanka with married couples in Switzerland.
How Celin Fässler came about
According to various media reports, Sarah Ineichen founded the Back to the Roots association together with other affected people in 2018. The organization supports those affected in their search for origin and is committed to helping society come to terms with this international adoption scandal.
Celin Fässler was one of those affected who contacted the club at the time. In 1982, Alice Honegger took her to Switzerland when she was less than three weeks old. She grew up well protected. And yet: “I wanted to look for my roots early on, I had a lot of questions within me – and no answers.”
“Taken gratitude is expected from the adopted children because the new families believe they have done good.”
CELIN FASSLER
Such phases of self-discovery were sometimes interpreted by those around them as disloyalty. The new environment often finds it difficult to understand that affected children have an infinitely deep desire to find their mothers, says Celin Fässler. “Taken gratitude is expected from the adopted children because the new families believe they have done good.” This also led to her seeing herself as ungrateful.
She has had her birth and adoption documents since she was 18 years old. But the right time for her to look for her origins only came a few years ago. To this day she has not found her birth mother.
Documents full of lies
Almost nothing is correct in their adoption records . In the meantime, Celin Fässler had to realize that the whole story she was always told is probably wrong. The children from Sri Lanka did not generally come from poor families who were happy to give them away so that they could have a bright future in Switzerland.
But it was precisely this narrative that many families who adopted a baby from the island nation in the Indian Ocean used at the time. No wonder: the adoption agents sold it to them accordingly.
“It’s an emotional roller coaster ride.”
CELIN FASSLER
Celin Fässler is aware: “Most of us will probably never find our parents.” But she doesn't want to give up hope. In the meantime, she has deposited her DNA in a database in the hope that one day a woman in Sri Lanka would register there - and there would be a hit. That would be lucky. “It’s an emotional rollercoaster,” she says.
Thousands of babies from Sri Lanka
What those affected like Sarah Ineichen and Celin Fässler and the subsequent research by various media started five years ago can hardly be estimated in its scope to this day: In 2020, the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) published a research report on behalf of the Federal Office of Justice - with a shocking conclusion: Between 1973 and 1997, the Swiss authorities issued a total of 950 entry permits for babies from Sri Lanka.
And just as depressing: since the early 1980s, child trafficking was known to the general public - and therefore also to the authorities. Nevertheless, Switzerland never considered stopping the adoptions.
In all, thousands of babies were taken from Sri Lanka. This trade was fueled above all by the unfulfilled desire to have children from couples from Western Europe. In Sri Lanka, the high demand led to a veritable adoption market dominated by a network of lawyers and agents.
Authorities remained inactive for decades
The ZHAW study came to the conclusion: “The Swiss authorities were aware that children in Colombo were being exchanged for money, everyday necessities and luxury goods. The people who placed children from Sri Lanka in Switzerland were part of a corrupt system." Finally, in December 2020, the Federal Council also expressed its "regret" about the questionable adoptions.
From today's perspective, it is particularly memorable how federal and cantonal authorities looked the other way. The St. Gallen supervisory authority, for example, allowed the adoption broker Alice Honegger to do her job for decades, even though lawsuit after lawsuit was filed against her and she repeatedly ignored official orders and bans.
Insufficient dossiers were waved through
The whole drama was finally revealed last year in a research report from the canton of St. Gallen. All 86 adoptions from Sri Lanka between 1973 and 2002 were examined. The shocking result: not a single case met the legal requirements for adoption at the time. There were more or less serious inconsistencies in all dossiers.
The accompanying report states: “Missing, incomplete or contradictory information was also accepted in the Sri Lankan documents that were central to the Swiss procedures without further investigation. In some cases, the birth parents' consent to the adoption or the children's birth certificates are missing. If they were present, they often had obvious inconsistencies. This made it possible to conceal or falsify the origins of the children, thus making it difficult to search for theiroriginsADOPTION The search for the rootsmade significantly more difficult or completely impossible.”
Many people affected, few resources
Celin Fässler knows from her own experience how important the search for origin is for those affected: “It wasn’t enough for me to know that I was adopted. I also had to find a way to deal with the fact that I was constantly made to understand in everyday life that I wasn't from here and that I didn't belong here either."
Sarah Ineichen and Celin Fässler reached a milestone last year with the Back to the Roots association: they were the first organization in this field to receive a service contract from the Justice and Police Department and the Conference of Cantonal Justice and Police Directors (KKJPD): Back to the Roots will be financially supported until the end of next year in order to help 60 affected people in their search for their origin in Sri Lanka and to look after them personally.
The association now has 18 members and also has a small team in Sri Lanka. The problem: With the current resources, Back to the Roots can only support a fraction of those affected who are looking for their roots.
Politics is not moving forward
Politically, the issue is far from over, on the contrary: a new scientific report is due to be published this late summer, which will examine adoptions from a number of other countries. It will be interesting to see whether there were as many questionable practices and omissions there as in the case of the adopted children from Sri Lanka.
The question of how Switzerland should deal with the search for the origin of adoptees in the future continues to cause discussions behind the scenes. Confederation and cantons pass the ball to each other. A report by a working group led by the KKJPD has drawn up recommendations on how adoptees should be supported in their research. But the paper has so far remained under lock and key. The cantons and the federal government cannot agree on who should take on which role.
With their commitment to Back to the Roots, Sarah Ineichen and Celin Fässler have brought to the public a socially relevant chapter of social history that the responsible authorities would have preferred to remain silent about. But for the two of them it is clear: What has been achieved politically so far can only be a first step. "We're running out of time, we can't wait for laws to be passed in a few years that won't help us anymore," says Celin Fässler. "We were not transplanted here voluntarily, but we try to make the best of it for ourselves."
People in Switzerland who were adopted from Sri Lanka and would like to come to terms with their origins can find support and advice from the Back to the Roots association : info@backtotheroots.net