Posted on 02/04/2004 2:41:15 PM PST by presidio9
There are children for sale in the slums of Romania, and their parents will give them up not only for adoption but for slavery. Michael Leidig uncovers a trade that no one seems prepared to admit exists
At just 11 months of age, the baby boy I held in my arms probably understood as much of the heated debate going on in Romanian between his grandmother and my translator as I did. For him that was probably a good thing, given that the subject being so hotly argued was how much money he was worth.
As I stood in the single-room flat, I tried to play the role I had adopted, a rich yet childless European searching in Romania for the only thing needed to make my life complete - a baby. I glanced around the tiny, cramped flat where most of the floor space was occupied by bedding, and saw a large insect run under a stove where a baby's milk bottle was being boiled.
In between gaps in the negotiations going on around me, I learned that the baby's teenage mother shared the room with five relatives, including the grandmother. It crossed my mind that if he could have had the choice, the baby might have preferred to leave with me rather than stay in a place that had so little to offer - and a family so eager to sell him off.
There was no kitchen or bathroom, and water had to be carried up two flights of stairs from a single tap in a muddy yard outside, where tired-looking women with buckets were in constant attendance. On the other hand, he had no guarantee that what I offered was any better. His grandmother only had my word that I was an Englishman looking for a baby to adopt with my Romanian wife.
The boy's 18-year-old mother, smiling nervously as she handed the infant to me to hold, was either too scared or too shy to speak, and his beaming grandmother was more than keen to see the deal go through for "not much, just enough to buy food, and perhaps rent a slightly larger place to live".
What I was experiencing was the ease with which a stranger can buy children on the black market in Romania as part of a trade that no one seems to want to admit exists. Only this month Romania was praised for progress in the area of child protection in a report from Brussels that proclaimed: "Romania continues to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, and has made good progress especially as regards to anti-discrimination, child protection and national minorities".
The authors of the study also proclaimed how pleased they were that: "The good progress noted in last year's report in reforming the system of child protection has continued." The report ignored such cases as the joint Romanian-German investigation into a Romanian boy murdered because he refused to beg. The child, named Florin, was beaten to death and his body burned and dumped in the outskirts of Munich in 1997 by a suspected Romanian mafia gang.
Police also recently uncovered a child-smuggling gang which had "rented" as many as 50 children and used them as beggars in Germany, Spain, Italy, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland. They were tortured by the gangs and police are investigating cases in which children were maimed to make them more likely to attract handouts.
But the human tragedy behind the trade was graphically exposed at the time the report from Brussels was released by a near-fatal accident on a Romanian pig farm that uncovered how poverty-stricken parents are prepared to sell their children for 4,000,000 lei (just £70).
A 13-year-old boy, Gheorghita Ciornei, was taken to a hospital in Bucharest suffering from 60 per cent burns after an accident involving a power line. Doctors raised the alarm when an illiterate farmer from Gostinu, 30 miles south of the capital, arrived to claim him and said he was the boy's "master".
When I travelled to meet Gheorghita's parents they told me such deals were common practice in the area, the poorest in Romania, and that while they regretted their actions they had no other choice if their children were to avoid starvation. As she cradled a grandson who will also be rented out when he is old enough, Gheorghita's mother, Maria, told me that she and her husband earn less than the equivalent of 30p a day from illegally gathering wood - not enough to feed them all. She said that although they saw none of the £70 a year "rent money" they were promised for their boys, at least they had known the pair would not starve.
The family home in the village of Cepleneta, near Iasi in the north-east, has a mud floor and the only furniture is a broken television set that serves as a table. Maria said: "We worked for 30 years for the local agricultural co-operative, but we were told we did not work long enough to get a pension. We had no choice, and it [renting out children] is normal for most people here."
With 90 per cent unemployment, people in Cepleneta mostly get by on the state child allowance of 290,000 lei - about £5 - per child per month. "The farmer who took our boys always comes here to rent children," Maria said. "He promised us he would take good care of them and buy them clothes, and would not beat them. But he lied, and he never paid the money."
The Save the Children organisation says that Gheorghita is one of possibly thousands of victims of a new trade in which children are sold by parents who say they have no other choice. George Roman, the programme director in Romania, said: "This is modern-day slavery."
Child labour has a long tradition in Romania where large, poor families in rural areas have sent members to help childless or wealthier neighbours in exchange for money, food or clothes. But this practice has been exacerbated by rampant poverty, and the forced closure of hundreds of orphanages by the EU - which, at the same time, has not introduced a safety net for families who can not afford to feed themselves.
Jonathan Scheele, the head of the EC delegation in Romania, said the Brussels report left something to be desired: "It is unfortunate that nobody in the local community brought this case to the attention of the authorities, let alone to that of the European Commission in time for it to be addressed in the 2003 Regular Report. It might become an issue next year, if not properly dealt with. Knowing the commitment and the efforts the Government has made over the past few years in dealing with the issue of institutionalised child care, I am confident that they will take the necessary measures to enforce the existing legislation and make sure the relevant institutions act responsibly."
Unfortunately, however, the trade has become so widespread that even in urban areas children for sale are available for adoption, child labour, or worse. In the flat where I was standing holding baby Mihai, his smiling grandmother assured me there would be "no problems with the deal". The whole block, she explained, had heard about the woman upstairs who had sold four of her children abroad, and now lived in comfort with her remaining four children in a "nice apartment" furnished from the profits of her deal.
"If the baby goes to another family it's my decision," the grandmother said. "It's not my daughter's decision. She will be happy."
Like the tale of the woman upstairs and her new apartment, so news of our arrival and our offer quickly spread. In every corridor we were addressed by women bearing children from infants through to the ages of two or three, and in one flat a boy of about six asked if he could be chosen to go to live in England: "Take me, can I come and live in a big house in England."
At one point, as we tried to leave, a man waving a gun insisted we follow him to where there was a baby we would like. The gun was a powerful incentive, and even when we realised in the flat that it was a replica, by that time we had a captive audience as the door was closed and our host listed the babies he could get for us.
"I know one with blonde hair, green eyes, very beautiful, you will love her," he explained. Yet while he may have been motivated by money, it was not possible to condemn any of the women who offered us their children as we moved from one grim, single-room flat to the next.
Some of the babies we discussed buying were not yet born. And some parents haggled in front of us about which of their children they would part with, but in none of the cases, notwithstanding the gun-toting middleman, was it apparent that they did not care about their offspring.
Georgeta, a 36-year-old who is pregnant with her ninth child, stood in a dirt-strewn corridor outside her flat and told The Sunday Telegraph: "Look at what my husband and I have. We share one room with all our children. If we could give just one of them a good home, and make enough money for ourselves to give the rest a better life, why would we not do it?"
All of the family, including Georgeta, seem to have a cough, and when we go into her flat to discuss the deal, her husband, Cristi, is asleep on the floor. He is informed of Georgeta's discussions with us, but while she wants to sell the unborn child because "she feels no emotional bond with it", he wants to sell their youngest daughter. The negotiations over the price pause while the parents debate who would be best to sell.
Their neighbour, a single mother, has a mentally disabled son aged seven, a deaf and dumb brother and a healthy daughter in the same single-room flat. Her husband left after their daughter was born, and she and her disabled brother get by on the 865,600 lei (£15) a month she receives from the state.
She would be happy to part with her disabled son, or to have another child for a price, but does not want to part with her daughter. "There is nothing wrong with her, she is normal, so of course I love her more. But if I had another normal child I would give him away for a better place to live," she said.
Some of the parents or relatives offering children or babies wanted more money, others less, some wanted more guarantees of the child's safety, others less, but all were prepared to offer them up in the hope that the financial support I would give would buy a better home for them and the rest of their family.
Their cases reveal in stark contrast the growing wealth gap in an EU candidate country that is struggling to convert a Stalinist command economy to capitalism and join the 25-country bloc in 2007. It also exposed the difference between the reality and the sanitised version that for whatever reason is being presented by Brussels.
The recent press attention in Romania has forced some local authorities to suggest that they may re-open children's homes which Brussels, prior to Romania's projected EU entry, shut down. Mr Scheele, of the EC delegation in Romania, however, is hoping this will not happen. "This is not the issue and large residential institutions are not the answer," he said. "Hard cases make bad law and an occurrence like this rightly arouses emotions, so that people tend to make suggestions without a real investigation of the causes and of the real size of the problem."
George Roman at Save the Children believes that with or without children's homes little will change. "The truth is that the authorities are unable to cope with this problem. They always open investigations after media reports about cases of child trade but stop the moment the media's attention moves elsewhere. They have a mentality of 'let's pretend we do something because media and the West are monitoring and watching us'.
"Poverty is not a good reason to give your child away and people who are doing this should suffer legal consequences. Since trading in human beings was adopted in 2001 only two people have been sentenced. On a political level there is no will to enforce the law.
"Even when it comes to court we are often wondering why we bothered. What do you tell the little boy who was tortured by his father in a furious rage when an adoption deal with an Italian family fell through? The father is an animal, yet the courts slapped him with a £20 fine. It is absolutely outrageous, and shows us how far we still have to go."
On another note, I quit watching Law and Order last nightafter a story about stolen children from Africa being found in wealthy white New Yorkers' homes.
Propaganda.
This story is the one they should be telling.
Of course, the Democrats' "solution" for such evil would be "negotiations through the UN."
Yes, but is she classy?
What a steaming pile. There is a choice, several in fact. Isn't John Edward whining about raising taxes to care for America's poor, deprived, and starving children? Then could he explain why America is the only country who drives itself to the poorhouse.
We pollute the environment. Etc, etc, etc.
It's really really bad here in America. Really bad. Worse place on Earth. That's what John Kerry says. He was in Vietnam you know. And surfs and flys and has a Harley and a really rich wife. But his life is crappy! Worse than than all the people in this story.
So, I don't believe any of this. Romania is a really nice place. It's better than America. John Kerry said so.
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