Could I adopt a Haitian child?

By Amelia Duarte de la Rosa - Special correspondent - Granma.cu

ONE can see this question repeated throughout the web.  A rapid Internet search on the situation of children in Haiti throws up disturbing results.  Millions of websites, blogs and pages note how to adopt these minors, as if the solution to the problem were to uproot them from their land.

The question increased after the earthquake when international humanitarian aid descended on the Caribbean nation.  In the midst of the chaos, many provided selfless assistance, but others took advantage of this cover to enrich themselves.

Prior to the quake, there were an estimated 380,000 orphans in the country.  According to UNICEF figures, 3.8 million infants were in a situation of extreme vulnerability in 2009 and, after January of 2010, one million children swelled the ranks of those without family care.

The disaster exacerbated their lack of protection and opened the gates to illegal adoption and human trafficking.

Even though international legislation prevents adoption proceedings in the case of military conflict or natural disaster, and adoptions in Haiti were suspended in 2007 due to the lack of legal guarantees, many governments gave the green light and facilitated those in progress.

The United States, France, Holland and Luxembourg headed the list of countries receiving dozens of young children.  The Barack Obama administration, for example, allowed emergency travel visas for Haitian children being processed for adoption, even when they lacked documents, and they were able to immigrate on humanitarian grounds.  The first group of Haitian orphans arrived in the United States just 10 days after the earthquake.

The speeding up of adoptions in the midst of disaster and without meeting international requisites endangered children’s rights, in addition to facilitating illegal acts.  There were incidents of the theft and kidnapping of minors, as well as abandonment once they had been transferred to other countries.  Trafficking networks existed previously in Haiti and increased with the situation.

By the end of January 2010, UNICEF had already denounced the theft of 15 children from Port-au-Prince hospitals.  None of them were orphans.  The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child and non-governmental organizations like Save the Children expressed concern over the thousands of children separated from their families.

This organization demanded effective measures to protect children from all forms of violence and exploitation, including sexual violence and kidnapping under the cover of adoption; at the same time it froze international adoption and instigated alarm mechanisms.

Priority was given to tracing families and the reintegration of children with their parents, extended families, or family friends prepared to look after them.  On the other hand, international adoption or children being taken in by foreigners requires an international agreement between the participating governments.

In relation to the current fate of infants, Haitian President Michel Martelly is promoting education at all levels.  Last October, four million began the school year – according to authorities – including 712,000 children beginning to benefit from free education.  The government also launched a program against extreme poverty, which seeks to guarantee the education of children with very few resources and to alleviate the burden of families living in vulnerable areas.

Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe and First Lady Sofía Martelly set in motion the Ti manman cheri program, the principal objectives of which are to improve school attendance and performance and promote women’s autonomy.  The program, benefiting children in 200 elementary schools, is financed by the Venezuelan government’s Petrocaribe regional solidarity project.

The question forming the title of this article has a response which does not appear on any website: the support needed by Haiti is not the adoption of its minors.  Poor children are not a merchandise needing adoption.  It is the task of the state and their families to shelter and protect them so that they can develop normally in their own environment. The country needs aid which respects its autonomy.

THE STORY OF A SMILE

It all began with a smile.  I was sitting on a stair landing and without me initially noticing her, a little girl was standing in front of me, staring fixedly.  I gave her a timid smile and that was enough for her to come closer. . "Bèl cheve," she said and immediately began to play with my hair.  She wasn’t even four years of age but looked like a simplified version of a young woman with bare feet.

I deduced that she didn’t live very far away and effectively, almost immediately three more children arrived in search of their playmate.  Within seconds, I was surrounded by young girls who smiled, sang, and played with my hair.  They decorated it with colored ribbons, showed me their dolls, assaulted me with questions and, from the little I could understand, I tried to answer them.  I resigned myself to showing them the camera and taking photos of them.

Not more than five minutes had passed when the reclaiming cry of a mother broke the spell.  The girls ran off happily toward her open arms.  They looked back once and said goodbye with a smile.

I couldn’t begin to imagine those small children with a mother in another country and speaking another language.  The future is uncertain for everyone, but there is nothing like returning to one’s mother, I thought.

July 12, 2012

Granma.cu

Haiti, a peon of international politics

By Jean H Charles:


This connotation seems gratuitous but a preponderance of evidence will convince the reader that indeed Haiti is the quintessential victim of misfeasance and malfeasance from the international community with “centuries of invasion, blackmail, plain robbery of Haiti’s natural resources and the impoverishment of its people”.

The latest manifestation of that malfeasance is happening today. Edmond Mulet, the United Nations representative in Haiti has decided to use the leverage and the prestige of that august body to embark upon the Preval government mulette (a mulette in French or Creole language is a donkey that provides the only means of transportation for rural Haiti) to mortgage the next generation of Haitian children into squalor and ill governance. We will come back to this latest manifestation of misfeasance but, it is imperative to start at the beginning to understand the extent of the wrong committed by governments on both sides of the Atlantic upon the people of Haiti.

I will not dwell into three hundred years of hard labor upon countless generations of Haitian people to produce the sugar, the coffee and the coco sold all over Europe by the French merchants who accumulated enormous wealth on the backbone of men and women who were not paid one cent for their sweat, their tears and their sorrow. Instead “they were hung up with their heads downward, crucified on planks, buried alive, crushed in mortars, forced to eat excrement, cast alive to be devoured by worms and mosquitoes.”

I will start instead with the gallantry of a Haitian Spartacus, the man Frederick Douglass described as the best black known and moving hero of the Western world, Toussaint Louverture. He transcended the weeping and the vexation to become the father of a nation that was hospitable to all, hospitable to the old white masters as well as the newly liberated slaves. He wrote to Napoleon as a black emperor to the white emperor suggesting the building of a French Commonwealth in Haiti akin to the British Commonwealth that we have today, with a semi-autonomous Haiti that would respect the human rights of all the citizens within its territory.

The answer to Toussaint Louverture was an army of some 10.000 French soldiers, facilitated by a grant of $750,000 by the newly elected American President Thomas Jefferson, to re-establish slavery in Haiti. The protracted war and the destruction in infrastructure and in physical assets that followed set Haiti back to a scorched land as it won its independence from France in 1804. Some 100.000 lives were lost during the struggle.

To add insult to injury, Charles X demanded and exacted from the second and the third President of Haiti, Alexander Petion and Jean Pierre Boyer a debt of independence amounting to some 21 billion dollars in today’s money. It was not enough that their forefathers have labored for three centuries without pay; it was not enough they have won their freedom through their own bravura they must pay the planters for the slaves who were their prized possession.

To ensure that the odious contract was signed, French diplomacy took an active part in facilitating the secession of the country. Henry Christophe would have nothing to do with such stipulation; as such, he was denied the authority to rule over the entire country. The culture of acting patriotically internally while plotting externally with foreign powers for the spoils of the country has became the staple of successive Haitian governments until today under the Preval governance.

Haiti’s tradition of service and hospitality to liberators was greeted with a cold reception not a thank you by the same freedom fighters. Miranda and Bolivia received arms, food, and support from Alexander Petion on his way to liberate Venezuela, Bolivia, and Columbia from slavery. Yet at the first international meeting of Latin American States, Haiti was an uninvited guest. Even the Vatican, the pillar of moral authority, refused to recognize as well as sending educators to Haiti.

To repay the French debt, Haiti without financial resources had to borrow money at usurious rate on the French and the American market to meet that obligation. The country has been the theatre of international intrigues by the German, the Dutch and, of course, the French, who armed one faction against the other to ensure that peace and development was never on the agenda. Finally, to repay the First National Bank, the directors convinced the American government to invade Haiti and seize its custom entries as a guaranty for the unpaid debt.

I will quote J Michael Dash an expert on Haiti customs and culture to describe the outcome of the American occupation: ‘perhaps the greatest single lasting effect of the occupation was the centralization of state power in Port au Prince, the ostracism of the peasantry and the elite divided by class and color rivalry.’

We are living today the consequences of these policies adopted during the occupation. There was a fleeting moment of peace and prosperity during the Paul Magloire presidency during the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s. Magloire committed the mistake of trying to remain in power beyond his mandate as Rene Preval is trying to do now, extending his term beyond February 7, 2011. Magloire was forced into exile and the country has been in convulsion since.

The Duvalier father and sons maintained their criminal grip on the throats of the Haitian people for thirty years with the overt support of the American government under the pretext that they were a bulwark against communism in the region.

The Haitian people’s liberation day of February 7, 1986 was of a short stay. The populism of Jean Bertrand Aristide and Rene Preval that followed the militarism of Henry Namphy was concocted in Washington at the White House and in New York at the United Nations.

I was at the meeting at the White House when the Clinton Administration designed the Haitian plan in the 1990s; such a plan destroyed the Haitian rice industry. To my suggestion that Haiti should engage in its natural agricultural vocation, the answer was swift and unequivocal. ‘Agriculture is for Mexico, Haiti is for small assembly industries’. I was again at the White House lobbying for the withdrawal of the embargo against the country. The answer was a stronger embargo, causing major destruction to the flora for future generations.

The international community in spite of its outpouring of financial support (10 billion dollars) after the devastating earthquake of January 12, 2010 is charting a dangerous course for Haiti’s rebuilding. With the Strategic Plan of National Recovery (PSSN) an elite group of intellectuals from the Diaspora and the motherland has labored in Santo Domingo to chart a course to rebuild Haiti. Yet through sheer arrogance bordering hubris, neither the Haitian government nor the international community has called upon this select group to share their findings with and incorporate their vision into the making of the new rebuilt Haiti.

The political parties, the civil society, the intellectual elite, the political candidates, the masses have all been united in refusing to go to the polls under the Preval government. The streets of the cities are rumbling with protest. All his elections have been flawed, stolen and disfranchised. He is inimical to the concept of political mouvemance. His claim that he wants to deliver power to an elected president is as hollow and shallow as his ten years of governance. In fact, the only time there was a minimum of decent standard of free and fair elections in recent times in Haiti, was during a transitional government. The transition of Ertha Trouillot produced a free election that gave the power to Arisitide, and the transition of Latortue organized the election leading Preval into power.

As president, Preval has exhibited a glaring indifference to the needs of, and the solutions to the problems haunting the Haitian people. He has never visited Cape Haitian, the second city of the Republic of Haiti. He would have seen an historical city that has sunk into decrepit and physical decay due to lack of public hygiene, population pressure and no minimum care from the national government. With the hurricane and the rainy season on the horizon, countless lives will be destroyed. The camps are a fetid hotpodge of physical and psychological no man’s land, where the unnatural is happening: mothers throwing their children into the garbage because they are so overwhelmed and so despondent.

The United Nations is now the new oppressing force in Haiti, the enforcer behind which the western powers are hiding to continue the malicious practice of doing wrong to Haiti. Having lost some three hundred members, I would like to believe sharing this thought of Frederic Douglass that sharing in common a terrible calamity and this touch of nature would have made us more than countrymen, it made us kin.

This election is a breaking point to change the practice of treating the majority of Haitian people as peons. Handing the baton to Preval to conduct the presidential and the legislative elections will seal Haiti into a life of squalor and ill governance that has been its lot for the past fifty years. It will, as said Andrew Flold, condemn future generations of Haitians to remain enslaved by poverty and desperation.

The United Nations’ credibility is at stake these days. A recent news report has indicated that a major drug dealer, who is consolidating Guinea Bissau as a hub for drug transshipment, has found refuge in the United Nations compound, where he has plotted his next move into power. Facilitating the status quo in Haiti after fifty years of ill governance with a government that has little interest in and little concern for the Haitian people is detrimental to the very essence of what the United Nations should stand for.

Some two years ago, the Haitian people have tried to storm the Haitian palace to force Preval to resign, because they were hungry while the food was rotting at the port. The UN occupation forces repelled the assailants. The critical mass of Haitian people revolting this time might be too large for any UN forces to contain!

I am seeing at the horizon the debacle that happen in Saigon/Hanoi some sixty years ago! History is unfolding in front of our very eyes. Stay tuned!

May 29, 2010

caribbeannetnews

Bahamas Blog International

Haiti and the adoption issue

By Jean H Charles:


Some forty years ago, upon graduation from Columbia University School of Social Work, I was eager to engage in the kind of hard core advocacy championed by my late professor cum community organizer, George Bragger.

He had convinced the then mayor of New York City, John Lindsay, through theoretical essays and street demonstrations, that black people coming from the south of the United States to escape inhospitality in their hometowns were as American as apple pie and as such deserved decent housing, a solid education and upward mobility.

I wanted to replicate the same engagement for and towards the newly formed Caribbean immigrant population migrating into New York City from Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana and Haiti.

I enrolled in the Association of Black Social Workers to network with and synergize the movement in the black community. My enthusiasm was dampened, though, by the leadership of the then president of the association, the late Ciney Williams, who strongly opposed the adoption of black children by white parents.

Coming from a culture where the national ethos through self-determination has long overcome the per se prejudice of black-white racism, I felt uncomfortable with that policy. My own reasoning told me that a child, irrespective of the color of her or his skin, needs a window of opportunity of 16 to 18 years in a stable and secure home to turn into a well adjusted and mature individual, ready to face the vagaries of life.

In fact, some forty years later the damages of that policy are staggering. The few black children adopted by or born into a mixed or white family turn out to be like… say, Barack Obama! They are as American as apple pie, and as black as Frederick Douglass.

Fast forward to the adoption issue in Haiti; the debate is already fierce amongst this huge tragedy that has caused almost a million orphan children. The issue is whether the Haitian government and the adoptive countries should develop a liberal policy towards facilitating as many adoptions as possible while eliciting a stringent method of monitoring of post adoption follow up to weed out child exploitation. A cursory visit, more frequent at the beginning, less frequent later, will delineate the bad apples from the good ones.

UNICEF has indicated there might be more than a million orphaned children after the earthquake. Haiti does not have the means to handle such a large number of displaced children before the earthquake, voire after the tragedy. The large amount of sympathy from all corners of the globe that engulfed the country should not be dampened by the alleged issue of child exploitation launched by the public relations machine of the same UNICEF.

The Haitian government recently detained ten US Baptist church members, who were trying to cross the border to the Dominican Republic with 33 alleged orphaned children without the proper exit documents. They spent some time in jail on the serious offence of Mafioso pending a judicial determination on the criminal intent of the missionaries: child snatcher’s or misguided do-gooders?

All indications are that they fall within the range of the latter.

They have no history of child exploitation, they were bringing the children into an orphanage in the Dominican Republic, and they even have the authorization, albeit not written, of the children’s parents. The Haitian government is flexing its muscle on the back of the missionaries to demonstrate some remnant of effective power and leadership that it has failed to exhibit before and, above all, after the earthquake.

The scope of the international media that should focus on the three million displaced persons has been displaced to zero on the fate of the jailed missionaries. The jazzy and controversial story of the white Americans languishing into a Haitian jail after a devastating earthquake is spicier than the fate of the mothers and the children deprived of food, shelter, and water. The sooner this travesty of justice ends, the better it will be for the millions of orphans and quasi orphans no longer secured of their immediate and long range future.

May reason, conscience and good faith prevail! God’s thunder is still on display! The mistreatment of the Haitian people, the mistreatment of its children in particular by its own government, as well as by the international community is repugnant to His benevolent magnitude!

Note: A Haitian judge has released pending further investigation the missionaries from the Haitian jail. One step for justice, two steps for common sense.

February 13, 2010

caribbeannetnews

Bahamas Blog International

White "Savior-Afflicted" Christians, Black Haitian Babies: This Won't End Well

By devona walker:

Would the Baptists accused of taking Haitian kids out of the country illegally have tried to pull this off in a predominantly white country? Doubtful.

Utah missionaries taken into custody on kidnapping charges

This story is particularly troubling. Ten white missionaries, from Idaho no less, went down to Haiti. In the chaos and the destruction, they just grabbed some young Haitian children and tried to leave the country with them. They were found out when they tried to cross the border into the Dominician Republic. Now, they are stuck in a Haitian prison, sending home cell phone pics and videos and cloaking themselves in the “Lord’s work.”

While I don’t believe these folks were actually engaging in human trafficking, as very often happens in poor countries. Whether it’s for sex or body parts (check out this, this, and this on the organ trafficking business.), but it is a very real issue.

What strikes me strange here is sheer arrogance, the blindness of white privilege and the blatant ignorance of "so-called" Christians. Even if the children were in fact orphans, and it appears that some weren’t, who on Earth would waltz into a country, ingore their laws, and honestly think they could just grab the nearest babies they found and walk away with them?

The answer: White Americans in a poor black country.

They would have never tried these shananigans in Croatia or any other predominately white and poor country in the world. It’s as if the history of slavery and the history of European colonialism has been entirely missed.

Now, sure there must be something to say for the pure motives here. They were perhaps motivated by their desire to save children, some of whom may die. You can argue they simply wanted to give these children a better life. But where? And with whom? Removing a child from their culture, their family, without the consent of that family, sounds less like Christian empathy than “soul snatching.” And what they were just going to cart them back here without birth certificates or papers? And then put them into the U.S. adoption system? Even if they were eventually adopted by a good Christian family, it's not THEIR family.

And how did Haiti become such a poor country anyway? Wrought by corruption, delapidated infrastructure, disease and malnutrition? It is somewhat due to the same white savior complex from which these fools in Utah appear to suffer.

The U.S. military took down president Aristide, deported him to Central Africa, and took over Haiti with hired thugs and death squads, then used the UN and the NGO squads to deflect charges of terror, racism and imperialism.

The U.N. remains there, but not to protect Haitian rights and the sovereignty, but to clear the road for corporations that build sweatshops, trans-national corporations that rape the countyr of its gold, iridium, copper, oil and diamonds. And of course the oil companies there do whatever the hell they please.

But when that massive earthquake hit the country, we were all just entrhalled by the level of poverty. We shook in our boots at the idea that some folks were forced to drink their own urine in order to survive. And one of our sanctified “white saviors,” Pat Robertson, tells the world that disaster in Haiti has nothing to do with corporate, greed, colonialism, or our constant meddling in the governing of other countries. No, it’s because the Haitian people made a pact with the devil. Nice.

02/04/2010

theloop21

Missionaries charged with kidnapping Haitian babies

By Anthony L. Hall:


Yesterday, 10 Baptist missionaries from the United States were formally charged with conspiracy and child kidnapping for allegedly trying to abscond from Haiti with 33 children.

They were arrested a week ago today while crossing the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The missionaries claim that all of the children were left homeless, and in some cases orphaned, by the January 12 earthquake. And that they had proper authorization - such as could be granted by Haiti’s fractured government.

Yet they now face 5 to 15 years in prison and remain in custody pending further determination by an investigative judge; i.e., no bail!

But, even for Haiti, this is surreal:

First and foremost, instead of inciting moral indignation, this story fills me with hope. After all, if law enforcement in Haiti is already functioning well enough to apprehend white-collar criminals, this must auger well for Haiti’s rapid recovery.

It’s just too bad the police do not appear to be doing as good a job of arresting the violent criminals who are preying on the millions of displaced women and children now living in tent cities all over Haiti.

Then there’s the almost farcical scene of these missionaries in court pleading that they were engaged in the work of the Lord, not in child trafficking. But am I the only one who thinks it’s crazy that these folks are being prosecuted for attempting to whisk 33 kids off to a better life when there are probably a thousand times that many desperately wishing, waiting for that opportunity...?

Whatever the case, this story is an unfortunate distraction; not least because the international media are now focusing far more on the fate of these 10 missionaries than on the fate of 10 million Haitians.

Frankly, this judge would be well-advised to release these missionaries on humanitarian grounds as soon as possible – recognizing the good, even if misguided, intentions of the defendants, as well as the overriding welfare of the Haitian people.

“That judge can free you but he can also continue to hold you for further proceedings.”

This, according to Reuters, is the damoclean hope the prosecutor offered the missionaries at their hearing yesterday. I have to think, though, that the judge will find in fairly short order that the dysfunctional nature of life in Haiti alone raises reasonable doubts about their guilt.

In any case, the charge of child trafficking becomes patently absurd when one considers that the missionaries had parental consent (in some cases); and moreover, that they were involved in trying to help poor Haitian children long before it became fashionable.

Not to mention that even if they were tried and convicted, former President Bill Clinton, who is now the de facto leader of that country, would procure an immediate pardon. This is, after all, the roving American ambassador who flew all the way to North Korea to procure the release of just two Americans who were convicted on equally dubious charges.

So, point made: Haitian children are not for sale! And a religious calling to “save the children” does not confer the right to circumvent the laws of poor, earthquake-ravaged Haiti to do so.

Now, for the sake of their country, I hope foolish pride does not prevent Haitian authorities from disposing of this case with dispatch.

NOTE: Many people are accusing these missionaries of cultural and religious arrogance. But I’ll bet that these are the same people who praised Madonna for taking kids from their poor parents in Malawi by promising that she could give them a better life - complete with Kabbalah indoctrination no doubt.

February 5, 2010

caribbeannetnews

Bahamas Blog International

Parents 'reclaim' children in Haiti abduction-adoption row

WASHINGTON, USA (AFP) -- The 33 infants and children that an American Christian group tried to smuggle out of quake-hit Haiti are being reunited with their families, the US-based aid group now caring for them said Tuesday.

The children were picked up last week by members of an Idaho-based Baptist group called New Life Children's Refuge who tried to take them across the border to the Dominican Republic where they planned to establish an orphanage.

But some of the children are not orphans at all.

A woman who identified herself as the mother of one of the 33 children caught up in the process of ten members of a US Christian group charged with child-trafficking speaks to the press. AFP PHOTO

"The parents now are coming to the village to reclaim their children," Heather Paul, the CEO of SOS Children's Villages USA, told NBC's "Today Show". "We already hear that many are saying that we have parents."

Police seized five men and five women with US passports, as well as two Haitians, as they tried late Friday to cross into the neighboring Dominican Republic with the children aged between two months and 14 years.

The case came to light as authorities in the capital Port-au-Prince expressed concern that some Haitian children may have fallen prey to human traffickers or been misidentified as orphans.

Paul said the children had been in poor condition when her group first received them but that they appeared to be on the mend.

"They came quite traumatized, as you can imagine, for a number of reasons. First, the devastation of the earthquake and then the mystery or confusion of their family's disappearance."

"They're getting better," she said.

Paul added that while in the care of the US Baptist group, the children, "weren't well dressed, they were dehydrated. They needed medical assistance."

She said the case underscored the need for stricter rules and greater vigilance in dealing with children in Haiti.

"I don't know all the facts, but if they were good intentions, they've certainly gone awry," she said.

"I think this is proof positive for all those people around the world who would like to adopt Haitian children, that we must wait on the right registration."

Laura Silsby, head of New Life Children's Refuge, has insisted the group's aims were entirely altruistic.

"We came here literally to just help the children. Our intentions were good," she told AFP from police detention. "We wanted to help those who lost parents in the quake or were abandoned."

In Port-au-Prince, interim prosecutor Mazar Fortil said the Christians may face a charge of criminal conspiracy in Haiti as well as possible charges of kidnapping minors and child-trafficking.

US consular officials visited the detained Americans and brought them food and insect repellent, but relatives back in the United States said they had hoped American officials might have done more.

"I've seen them on TV and they look like they're in good spirits," Sean Lankford, whose wife and 18-year-old daughter were among those held, told NBC.

He said he had not been able to speak to them since their arrest and was concerned that they had not received better treatment in detention.

"First off, you know, I think they were required to give them food and water. I mean, the basic essentials for life. And they were to help them to contact counselors on their behalf -- at least to give them the ability to do that. They were late in doing that," Lankford complained.

"I appreciate everything they have done. I know that it took them a while to find them first off. I know also that there's a lot of needs that are happening in Haiti," the Meridian, Idaho resident said.

But he added "as a dad and a husband, you know, I just want to make sure that my wife and my daughter have everything that they need, and my friends there have everything they need to stay healthy while they work through this, and while we try to help them work through this."

caribbeannetnews

Bahamas Blog International