Date: Mon, 28 Dec 1998
For the Hindustan Times
From: Fred Weir in Moscow
DIMITROV, Russia (HT) -- Seven year old Maxim claps his
hands and smiles delightedly as he rummages through a package of
New Year's treats brought by visitors from Moscow. The goodies
include a toy car, a chocolate figure of Ded Moroz -- the Russian
version of Santa Claus -- a bag of apples and a bunch of bananas.
``I hope he'll share it. None of the children here have
seen fresh fruit since last summer,'' mutters Nina Sergeyeva,
head doctor of the Dimitrov Specialized Children's Home, a
facility for severely disabled orphans.
Little Max, paralyzed from the waist down by a birth
defect and abandoned by his natural mother, looks radiant as he
chatters excitedly with Alyona, a Moscow professional woman who
has been helping out financially with his care for the past
couple of years.
But otherwise it's not a pretty picture. The orphanage,
which occupies the outbuildings of an old Orthodox hillside
monastery in Dimitrov, about 100 km north of Moscow, looks like
something Charles Dickens might have described.
About 120 children live in the combination
school-hospital, sleeping on narrow cots, four per tiny room,
amid peeling paint, fraying linoleum and rattling pipes. In a
small, cold common room, about a dozen kids crowd around
a single TV set -- with no adult supervision in sight.
``I know that many of these children wouldn't be
institutionalized in a Western country,'' Ms. Sergeyeva says.
``But here there are so few options for them.''
She admits that life in the orphanage is tough. Ms.
Sergeyeva is the only permanent doctor in the entire facility,
with just four nurses to help. None of the staff has been paid in
at least two months. Morale is extremely low, she says.
State funding, never very much, has virtually dried up
since financial crisis struck Russia last August.
``It's a lucky thing we have our own garden in the
orphanage. We still have some potatoes, cabbage and beets left
from last summer's crop,'' Ms. Sergeyeva says.
``Otherwise there would be very little. We haven't eaten
meat, cheese or eggs for months now.''
Despite the grim conditions, the children in the Dimitrov
home appear reasonably well cared for and their relations with
the staff seem warm and friendly.
That is not the case everywhere in Russia's vast network
of state orphanages, according to a report issued this month by
the non-governmental monitoring agency Human Rights Watch.
The result of a year-long investigation, the report
alleges that Russia's 200,000 institutionalized orphans are
subjected to systematic ``cruelty and neglect'' and are deprived
of their most basic human rights.
It says that Russian orphans are routinely mislabelled as
``ineducable'' and warehoused in closed institutions -- like the
Dimitrov facility -- where minimal resources are expended on
caring for them.
The report alleges a widespread pattern of abuse by staff
in Russian orphanages that includes beatings of children, sexual
assault, criminal neglect and punishment by public humiliation.
``The abuse in orphanages cannot simply be attributed to
Russia's economic crisis,'' says Kathleen Hunt, the report's
author. ``The problem of scarce resources does not justify the
appalling treatment children receive at the hands of the state.''
Photographs accompanying the study depict concentration
camp-like conditions in some Russian orphanages, including
starvation, filth, overcrowding and physical mistreatment. (The
entire report, with photos, is available on the internet at:
http://www.hrw.org).
Russian experts say the abuses cited in the Human Rights
Watch report are the exception rather than the rule, but admit
that the system is not working.
``In today's harsh economic climate many parents are
simply dumping their children on the state,'' says Maria
Ternovskaya, director of Children's House number 19, a clean and
apparently well-run orphanage in downtown Moscow.
``More than half the kids we get have parents somewhere.
The numbers are increasing every year, and the system is
overburdened''.
Ms. Ternovskaya says it is true that the state medical
commission is often too quick to diagnose a child as ``retarded''
or ``disabled''.
``Resources are stretched to the limit, and we have no
staff to bring up all these children properly,'' she says. ``The
easy way is just to say nothing can be done with them, and that's
what happens all too frequently.''
About half the children from Children's House 19 have
been given to foster families over the past year, an experimental
approach for Russia that Ms. Ternovskaya believes should be
widely adopted.
``We pay professional foster parents, often unemployed
women, to do what we cannot: give the children some sort of
normal family life,'' she says.
``It doesn't cost more, but it seems to work much
better.''
--
Gregory Schwartz
Department of Political Science
York University
4700 Keele St.
Toronto, Ontario
M3J 1P3
Canada
tel: (416) 736-5265
fax: (416) 736-5686
