Infant House, Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia © EveryChild / Onnik Krikorian 2005

After mentioning children in residential care in a previous post I’ve just noticed that the Institute for War & Peace Reporting have two articles on a related subject — adoption in the Caucasus. In the first, Tamar Kadagidze looks at efforts to quicken the process of local adoption in Georgia. The article not only looks at reform being made in this area, but takes a look at the main orphanage in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. However, problems still persist.

Marina Girkelidze, 42, lives in the town of Ozurgeti in western Georgia. Shortly before the New Year, she came to Tbilisi, hoping that she would be able to adopt a child at last. “I’ve been to all official establishments in the past six years, and they’ve said there are no children to adopt,” she told IWPR. “Meantime, almost every day they show on television a child thrown away into a garbage bin or somewhere else. The orphanages are overcrowded, and any of these children could become mine.”

Marina decided to adopt a child six years ago and spent a long time compiling all the necessary documentation to submit to the care and fostering agency.

“All my documents are in complete order,” she said. “They even came to see me in my house to make sure that I was eligible to adopt a child. Since then, I’ve been waiting to be called. I have no right to find a child on my own, this would be an offence… My whole life has passed by in this waiting.”

Marina is one of many people who have spent years on a database of people wishing to adopt a child.

“The law has put numerous obstacles in the path of Georgian adoptive parents,” said Chichinadze. “They spend years waiting to be allowed to adopt a child. Imagine how strong the wish and hope of these people is, since they still come to us.”

A children’s home on Nutsubidze Street, in Tbilisi, is the only one in Georgia. Here, children abandoned by parents and orphans under three years are given refuge. The outside of the building looks impressive, but inside the plaster is falling off the walls, the lighting is dim and there is an unpleasant smell in the air. The only bright spot is a beautiful Christmas tree in the entrance hall - a present from a charitable businessman. Only the cry of a baby makes it clear that children live here.

Currently, there are 97 charges in the home. Two-thirds of them are children with disabilities.

[…]

According to official statistics, ten to 12 children are found abandoned in the street every year.

Meanwhile, as the socio-economic situation, as well as corruption, creates obvious difficulties and problems with adoption, Laila Baisultanova reports from Chechnya where the problem of child trafficking is becoming acute. If such problems exist in Armenia, they are significantly worse in war-torn cities in the North Caucasus as the article explains.

Ten years ago, I glimpsed the problem when I was riding in a taxi through the village of Assinovskaya in Chechnya. I saw six children standing in a line beside a wooden fence. When I wondered why they were standing there, the taxi driver answered, “To be sold.”

The driver said that mothers were unable to take care of the children, so they sold them to well-off people. “One girl has already been sold,” he said. “She was nice and beautiful with fair hair. They bought her because she was very small. These ones are bigger and no one wants to buy them.”

There was no way of verifying what he had to say, but evidence suggests that after a decade of conflict and turmoil in Chechnya, the number of childless families has risen drastically and people are ready to pay large sums to adopt a newborn baby - and frequently to resort to illegal methods to acquire one.

The problem is compounded by the fact that Chechen society considers illegitimate birth shameful and there is very little formal adoption. The transactions are extremely secret and good data is hard to come by. However, the Chechen prosecutor’s office has registered cases of children having been sold or illegally handed over to assumed adoptive parents.

On November 13 last year, prosecutors filed a case against an alleged criminal group charged with trafficking minors. If convicted, the three accused, all women, will face a sentence of between three and ten years in prison. They deny the charges against them and have been released on bail awaiting trial.

[…]

An investigator from the prosecutor’s office who has worked on this case said that one reason the problem arose was that there is no proper orphanage in Chechnya and unwanted babies were therefore looked after in Grozny’s maternity hospital or children’s hospital.

“Officials hand over these children to medical facilities under someone’s personal responsibility,” said the official. “The latter, in their turn, hand them over to people like [the women accused of buying a baby] for further adoption.”

Interestingly, there are many such cases of gynaecologists in hospitals doing the same although recent exposure of what really is trafficking by another name in the Armenian media have forced the government to crack down on corrupt officials who often violate the law for a suitable payment. Unlike Georgia, however, the government still appears to be doing little to ensure that local adoption is encouraged as much as it should be.

Adoptions of Armenian children by foreigners have continued largely unabated in the last two years, despite more stringent adoption rules that were set by the government in response to media reports questioning of the integrity of the process.

A senior official at the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs said on Thursday that 68 Armenian orphans found adopted parents abroad last year, compared with about 60 such cases reported in 2004. The latest figure is only slightly down from a record-high 76 adoptions reported by the authorities in 2003.

[…]

It is not clear why the adoption figures has not fallen significantly since 2003. The latest data was made public following a weekly cabinet meeting that approved a five-year government strategy of helping Armenian orphans and other vulnerable children. According to the Labor and Social Affairs Ministry, there are currently about one thousand children living in Armenia’s eight state-run orphanages and another 250 in five institutions run by private charities.

Incidently, much of the reason for reform of the Armenian law as well as crackdowns on abuse came about from the work of one Armenian blogger, Ara Manoogian at Martuni or Bust, who collaborated with Emil Danielyan at Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and later, with Edik Baghdasarian at Hetq Online. I posted about here.

Ara Manoogian over at Martuni or Bust has posted a story from RFE/RL stating that the number of international adoptions from Armenia has not been reduced. This is particularly significant given that the Armenian government introduced stricter rules governing the practive after Manoogian discovered that in most cases money, rather than the law and the best interests of the child, determined who was able to adopt.

Anyway, good to see that reform and investigations in this are are occuring in Armenia, Chechnya and Georgia although there’s no doubt that fostering and local adoption as well as attempting to reintegrating socially vulnerable children into their families should take preference over international adoption. Incidently, some work on children in residential care in Armenia and Georgia are linked to from a previous post.

Infant House, Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia © EveryChild / Onnik Krikorian 2005