„Mager bewijs voor misstanden adoptie”

Anne Vader

20 mei 2021 18:31

Van Dam.?beeld RD, Anton Dommerholt

Van Dam.?beeld RD, Anton Dommerholt

The Joustra Committee rightly recommends the establishment of an expertise center for adoption. First of all it is appropriate to consider the grief that has been done. But with the suspension of international adoption, children are once again left out in the cold ...

On 8 February, the Joustra committee presented the results of its investigation to the Minister for Legal Protection (RD 5-2 and 8-2 ). The adoption community has been deeply shocked by those adoptions that saw abuses in the 1970s-90s. It is appropriate to recognize the grief that has been caused to those involved, adoptees and their biological family, but also their adoptive parents.

The Adoption Vereniging Gereformeerde Gezindte (AVGG) was founded in 1979, in the middle of the period studied. Also (former) members of our association (adoptees and adoptive parents) have to deal with abuse. This should never have happened! Pain and uncertainty are felt (again). We are also thinking of adoptive parents who entered a procedure in good faith that subsequently turned out to be based on an impure basis. We recognize that this can raise questions and doubts about God's providence, of which adoptees and their adoptive parents have previously been firmly convinced.

The Joustra Committee makes recommendations for the government to recognize that it has failed to combat adoption abuses. She also advises the establishment of an expertise center. These recommendations wholeheartedly endorse the GDPR. However, we do not support the recommendation to suspend intercountry adoption, which received the most attention. This recommendation causes attention to be diverted from the results of the original research assignment: what exactly happened in the 1970s and 1990s and what was the role of the Dutch government in this?

The period studied was followed by the Hague Adoption Convention (HAV), which entered into force for the Netherlands on 1 October 1998. This convention formulates all the conditions that international adoption must meet and can be tested. More than 66 'sending' and 'receiving' countries subscribe to this convention. The committee cites the principle of trust that is part of the HAV as a potential weakness in the system. The Netherlands no longer receives adopted children from those countries about which doubts have arisen.

Chinese children's homes pay money to finders who drop children off at homes. This is apparent from an investigation by the Ministry of Justice following a Network report on adoption from China. According to China, these are 'symbolic amounts'.

Netwerk managed to obtain the contents of a draft letter on this subject from Justice Minister Hirsch Ballin to the House of Representatives. In it he discusses the fuss that arose in March about adoptions from China following a report by Netwerk. That report revealed that children's homes in Hunan province pay for children brought in. Many -also Dutch- adopted children come from this province. The ministry then launched its own investigation.

In the draft report, the ministry calls the Chinese adoption system 'vulnerable'. "Possible new irregularities are reported with some regularity," the report said. The Chinese adoption agency has admitted to the ministry that "symbolic amounts" are paid to finders who deliver children to children's homes. Last March's Network broadcast showed that finders were paid semi-annual salaries.

According to the Hague Adoption Convention, which both the Netherlands and China have signed, it is prohibited to pay finders of children. "Not a dollar, not a cent," the Hague Permanent Bureau on the Adoption Convention told Netwerk in March. The letter to the House of Representatives shows that the Ministry of Justice has doubts about whether this ban is being observed in the provinces. "Many children's homes are located in poor regions where small amounts can be of great significance," the report said. That can encourage child trafficking.

Emeritus professor Rene Hoksbergen speaks in a reaction of 'a critical report'. He has doubts about new adoptions from China. Hoksbergen: 'It is extremely difficult for the Netherlands to continue in the same way after this report. But it is up to the adoption organizations to make a decision about this'.

Kinjal V Shah started this petition

We are a Jain family from Gujarat living in Berlin, Germany where the father is posted on work as a software engineer. We are all Indian citizens, including our child.

Our child, a baby girl breast feeding child, has been in the custody of German authorities for the last 8 months (since September 2021). We need your help and support to help get our child to be repatriated to India under the care of her maternal family.

Our daughter was found with a serious injury which parents did not understand and took her to the doctor about. Parents' were being asked to explain the injury. Initially, parents themselves were confused & did not know what happened. Later the paternal grandmother informed that she had accidentally caused the injury while visiting us the child in Berlin.

The parents' immediately informed lawyer and the German authorities. The grandmother has submitted a detailed affidavit on what happened in the German Court.

Korean adoptee artists have garnered attention in the western countries where they live, but their works remain relatively unfamiliar to people in their country of origin. This obscurity isn't due to a lack of effort on the part of the adoptees. Despite their attempts to engage with Korean society, Koreans have yet to reciprocate in kind.

Therefore, the artistic endeavors brought to Korea represent more than the creative expressions of the individual artist's experience. They additionally serve as part of the collective discourse of adoptees and their attempts to cultivate a dialogue with Korean society. Whether through performances, paintings, or written words, these artists raise questions that often confront and challenge the dominant adoption narratives in Korea.

One such prevalent belief among people in Korea insists that if a person enjoys comfortable conditions in the present, then there's little need to broach questions about the past, including inquiries about one's roots.

This notion remains prominent in adoption representation, having been historically constructed first by adoption agencies and now reproduced by overly sentimental media portrayals of adoptees. However, the recent work of Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide) counters such accounts by employing art that unravels persistent untruths that adoptees are orphans, and she critically examines the colonial narratives around adoption. Her long-term project, "The Mother Mountain Institute," centers on the mothers who have been dehumanized and silenced by the lucrative transnational and transracial adoption industry.

In this installation, the audience listens to the testimonies of women whose children were stolen and trafficked. The film, "Brussels, 2016," shows a video letter from the artist to her mother in Korea and speaks about the processes of racialization towards citizens of color, including the experiences of racism experienced by adoptees in their predominantly white adoptive countries.

GENEVA - In 1963, seven-year-old Tibi Lhundub Tsering was picked up by his foster parents at Zurich Airport, Switzerland. His mother Youden Jampa, working in a road-building camp in India, knew nothing of her son's whereabouts.

This is the beginning of the inconvenient and uncomfortable truth presented in Swiss documentary "Tibi and his mothers" directed by Ueli Meier.

According to the documentary, Tibi was one of the 200 so-called "Tibetan orphans" who were brought to Switzerland in the 1960s from the Nursery for Tibetan Refugee Children in Dharamsala headed by Tsering Dolma, the elder sister of the Dalai Lama. They were moved through a program privately run by Swiss entrepreneur Charles Aeschimann and approved by the Dalai Lama.

Contrary to the expectations of the foster parents in Switzerland, only 19 of these children were orphans, while the vast majority had at least one parent in Tibet, often both, said Meier in the bonus feature of the DVD edition, citing a report by Aeschimann.

In a confidential letter in February 1963, the Swiss Ambassador to India at the time said he discovered many of these "orphans" selected in Dharamsala actually had at least one parent. He warned against the "human and spiritual difficulties" faced by children who became "contractually assigned care items" thanks to the agreement between Aeschimann and the Dalai Lama.

Nenue: Did they seek for foster families through media afterwards?

Ueli Meier: Aeschimann targeted the media resources from the very beginning. The second child he adopted, who was a little girl, was killed in an accident. Therefore, he asked the Dalai Lama for a third child, as the Dalai Lama had guaranteed before on one condition that more exiled Tibetan children would come to Switzerland. And this time about 20 Tibetan children were sent to Switzerland. In order to help these children to find enough foster homes, several media started a campaign. Especially Vinay Warren Begg, a famous political commentator, called for Swiss people to adopt Tibetan children in his own column of Breaking Clouds (an ironic humor magazine in Switzerland). More than 300 families responded since then .

Nenue: How to deal with the applications of adopting Tibetan children?

Ueli Meier: The applications were all given to Aeschimann, then he invited every couple to his home in Olten for checking. Later he connected the elder sister of the Dalai Lama who was working in the children welfare home in Dharamsala. Then she chose several children who were able to be adopted by the Swiss families.

Nenue: Was the whole process ignored by the federal authority of Switzerland?

The fact that an adoption is difficult, adopted children have attachment problems and always want to find their biological parents, is not as easy as it seems, says Mirjam Postma. She was adopted from India as a baby of seven months and tells about it. Her adoptive parents are just her parents.

“Just because it's a success story doesn't mean it's always been easy,” Mirjam begins her story. “I just want to dispel the idea that all adopted children have attachment problems or want to find their biological parents. Of course there are many cases where it is, but it doesn't have to be an assumption.”

Mirjam is adopted when she is very small. “I think age matters a lot. As you get older, you may have a more active memory of the country of origin and that could be a bigger blow. I was only seven months old when I was adopted.”

'Put me a plate with stew and smoked sausage in front of me every day'

The feeling that is often described when it comes to adoption is: I feel different from my parents and other children, but Mirjam has never experienced that so strongly. “My parents have been very open about adoption from the start. Little by little I learned more about it if I wanted to. There has never been any mystery about it or there was a time when my parents finally told me. My brother and I have always been accepted in the village where I come from. Although we were one of the first adopted children, we weren't really bullied about it. I think that makes a big difference.”

Wereldkinderen

12 May at 15:31 ·

????Sulu Kalro komt ook naar de Wereldkinderendag op 21 mei a.s.! Sulu is sinds 1976 jarenlang onze contactpersoon in India geweest en zij heeft veel adoptieouders begeleid toen ze hun kindje gingen ophalen. Sulu kijkt er enorm naar uit iedereen te ontmoeten!

Wil je Sulu ontmoeten? Kijk dan snel op onze website en vraag je tickets met korting aan: https://bit.ly/3snBdKn

#wereldkinderendag #sulukalro #adoptie #geadopteerd

The first child was brought to the child protection unit in June and the second child, after she was declared physically and discharged from the hospital, in July last year.

After losing their mother to Covid-19 minutes after their birth and then their father a few months later who refused to take care of them, two newborn girls saw another ray of hope after they were both adopted by a financially able couple.

It was in the middle of the second wave of the pandemic in June last year when a woman in labour tested positive for Covid-19, according to sources in Chandigarh’s child protection unit. Right after she gave birth to twins, she died

from the infection.

“One of the twins was slightly underweight and was kept under observation in the hospital; the second child was handed over to the father. He took the child home and then told the child protection unit that he could raise the child because he was a daily wager and cannot afford to raise her. He also said that since his wife was no more and he was alone, he didn’t want the child,” an official stated after a post-adoption follow-up.