By Regeneration
Ministries
Promoted from Diaries.
Do you remember the television documentaries a few
years back, featuring young Romanian children, abandoned in metal cribs, wasting
away in anonymity and neglect? Such images energized many in the west to find
ways to help - but unfortunately, 17 years after the fall of Communism,
Romania
continues to struggle to find solutions that actually work.
In their bid for accession into the European Union
(due to take effect on January 1, 2007) abandoned children are once
again the last priority. Told by the EU to clean up their human rights
violations, the Romanian Parliament banned all foreign adoptions, determining to
manage the children through Romanian adoption, foster care, or re-unification.
For many abandoned children in
Romania these
new laws continue to relegate them to a childhood without love or
stability.
Tragically, many of the abandoned children are
not sought for adoption by Romanian families due to a longstanding cultural
prejudice – they are of Roma descent, and in Romanian society, the Roma people
are often despised and viewed as inferior. As a
result, many children are being consigned to an uncertain childhood in foster
care. Many others are forcefully returned to their neglectful birth families,
which the government cheerfully labels “family reunification.”
Regeneration
Ministries recently learned of
an incident, verified by photographs, involving one such “reunification.” An NGO
working with abandoned babies in a pediatric hospital reported that one of the
children they cared for, a one-year-old girl, was sent back to live with her
birth family. Five months later, she was discovered on the side of a road,
barely alive and suffering from multiple bruises and cigarette burns. This
incident shows how disastrous the government’s policy of putting biological ties
above children’s welfare can be. Without the option of international adoption,
the future for these innocent children remains
bleak.
But
Romania’s
children are not without advocates in high places. The US Commission on Security
and Cooperation in Europe, chaired by Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas and
co-chaired by Congressman Chris Smith of New Jersey, has held recent hearings on
Romania's new law, as well as its treatement of abandoned and special needs
children. The Commissioners are unanimous in their call for Romania to change
its draconian policies. Click here for the full press release from the Helsinki Commission.
NGOs seeking real solutions for
Romania’s
children testified before the European Parliament this spring, and EU members
are beginning to see the reality of discrepancies between official government
testimony and the situation on the ground. In July of 2006, 56 % of European
Parliament members passed Written Declaration 23, urging
Romania to
reconsider pending adoption cases cut short in 2004 when all foreign adoptions
were banned.
This
summer, thirty-three NGOs concerned
with this issue posted an ad in the UK
Financial Times, imploring the Romanian government to make changes more
suitable to improving child welfare. The ad yielded a few encouraging
developments, most notably a growing dialogue between the charities and the
National Authority for the Protection of Children's Rights. But in many
"unofficial" ways, NGOs are experiencing the government's ire, and are now
facing a swirl of red tape and procedural difficulties. It seems many of the
bureaucrats in Bucharest care more about
saving face with the EU than saving their own children.
One of the Romanian NGOs which has
begun speaking out is Fundatia Casa Sperantei, or Hope House. Started a decade ago by a young Romanian woman, Corina Caba, Hope House has overseen the care of over two hundred abandoned
children, finding adoptive families in
Romania, placing
them in foster care, or caring for them at Hope House Orphanage in
Oradea.
Though her reputation is impeccable, Ms.
Caba started running into difficulties with the authorities after testifying in
Brussels before the European
Parliament, and signing off on the aforementioned ad in the Financial
Times.
Just last week, Ms. Caba’s organization
was slandered when a scurrilous article in the
Bucharest paper Gardianul, criticized the NGOs who placed the ad. In the
article, government officials accused NGOs of having “impure” motives, and
asserted that a Hope House volunteer had “stolen” an abandoned baby from the
nearby Pediatric
Hospital in order to sell the child
to an adoptive family. No effort was made to verify these “facts,” and in a
meeting with the various foundations in
Oradea last Friday, the local child
protection officials admitted no such incident had occurred.
The question is, will Romania allow its
desire to be seen as an up-and-coming Eastern European nation divert its
attention from taking responsibility for these forgotten children? Or will
Romania simply
be satisfied to sweep the children under the rug, and silence those who dare to
speak out? Vulnerable children, who cannot speak for themselves, deserve our
utmost efforts to secure a healthy, wholesome life for them - before it is too
late.
To learn more about the
situation in
Romania,
and to find out how you can assist Hope House and other similar organizations,
visit RMRomania.org.
© 2006
Redstate, Inc.
