The forgotten children of Romania

The orphanages were overcrowded and filthy, the living conditions unworthy. beginning of

The orphanages were overcrowded and filthy, the living conditions unworthy. At the beginning of the 1990s, Romanian children were redeemed through adoptions - so it seemed. But what actually became of them is uncertain. The fear: Many could have fallen into the hands of human traffickers.

By Andreea Pocotila

and Dan Alexe

BUCHAREST. When twins Zoe and Mikaela Radford were left by their birth parents in a maternity ward in the small Romanian town of Puciosa in 1991, they were only a few days old. They were adopted and moved to Canada with their foster parents - it is said. Little Jonathan Yourtee was probably taken to a hospital in Constanta by his parents. In 1991 he was taken over by a family from the United States. Later, the new parents also adopted Jonathan's brother Matthew. In 1995 he left home, the destination is unknown.

Reporters from the Romanian newspaper "Romania Libera" tried in vain to find out what became of Zoe and Mikaela, Jonathan and Matthew. They are just four of thousands of cases, of whom nobody knows how they ended up growing up and where exactly they live. Today they would have to be young adults - Romania's forgotten children who disappeared from the country's overcrowded orphanages after the collapse of communism more than 20 years ago. At that time, trading in children became an international business.

Anyone could "pick up" a child in Romania if they wanted to. Without a lot of bureaucracy and long waiting times, as is usually the case with adoptions. However, as soon as the children left the Romanian border, their tracks were lost. Quite a few, it is feared, could have fallen into the hands of human traffickers and been forced into prostitution.

The only way to get information about the whereabouts of the children is through the district courts and the orphanages. Each adoption had to be approved by a judge in the county to which the orphanage belonged. "If you want information about a specific child, you should know in which city it was born. Then you go to the relevant court and ask permission to look at the archives," explains Gabriela Petrescu, secretary general of the Romanian Adoption Office.

But even then, the chances of finding out more about the fate of someone who has disappeared are extremely slim. Namely, before 1997 no names, only numbers of adopted children were recorded.

Exactly 16,041 cases are said to have been between 1990 and 1997. However, the official number of children put up for adoption in the 1990s who left the country with their new parents reflects an exact knowledge that does not exist. Theodora Bertzi, formerly State Secretary responsible for the Adoption Office, is surprised: "The adoptions were not recorded centrally at the time, there can be no exact figures. I estimate that there were at least 30,000 people who adopted in Romania between 1991 and 2001 became." Thousands would not even appear in the official statistics. Ana Muntean, a professor at the University of Timisoara, and her team examined adoption practice in the 1990s, but only the national cases. As for the international long there are concrete indications of organized crime, says Muntean. "An American psychologist told me that there was a veritable trafficking in children in the corridors of the Interconti Hotel in Bucharest."

The poor information situation also has an effect in the opposite direction: the children - even if they were taken into care by well-meaning adoptive parents - can only find out where they came from in exceptional cases. "These children have no access to their origins," says Nigel Cantwell of Defense for Children International. "This is a violation of their documented human rights!" The Hague Convention on the Protection of Children obliges states to keep sufficient data on the descent and origin of children. So what became of Zoe and Mikaela Radford could remain a mystery forever.

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