CORRUPTION and rule-breaking have plagued the adoption of Cambodian children to foreign
countries in recent years, according to NGOs who warn the system is open to abuse.
Officials, including within the Ministry of Social Welfare and the Council of Ministers,
are accused by some NGOs of taking bribes to approve adoptions.
Some children adopted abroad are not orphans, sources say, and Cambodian "middlemen"
are feared to have bought children from poor families for the international adoption
process.
Foreign adoption agents have also been active in Cambodia, and been permitted to
personally take children out of the country, contrary to the law.
Since 1991, it has been legally banned for children to be released into the custody
of intermediaries, rather than directly to adoptive parents who come to Cambodia
to pick up the children.
The government does not know the whereabouts of many youngsters adopted to foreigners,
"and doesn't have any guarantee that these children are even alive," according
to one NGO source.
Officially, adoptions require the approval of several government departments, the
Council of Ministers and the Prime Ministers.
The reality, according to NGOs, is that graft is common and adoptions have been approved
by high-ranking officials without going through the normal screening.
International adoptions have been suspended by Cambodia several times, but always
continued. Their numbers have been small but growing - official figures are 49 last
year and 20 so far this year. France and the United States have been the biggest
receivers of Khmer children.
The Secretary of State for Social Affairs, Suy Sem, was recently given a list of
nine named foreign adopters who said they had paid money to Cambodian government
officials. In all, 14 officials were named in the list, which was included in a letter
to Suy Sem from an NGO worker.
The letter came as pressure mounted on the government to take action from some NGOs.
Three weeks ago, the Ministry of Social Affairs closed the gates to Phnom Penh's
Nutrition Center, the main state-run orphanage for sick or malnourished children,
which is the subject of many of the allegations.
Guards were stationed at the center, preventing foreigners and even some ministry
staff from entering. One foreigner, sent away, exclaimed: "But I've already
paid $5,000 to [a senior ministry official]," according to a witness.
The ministry is now permitting access to the center - which had earlier descended
into "anarchy", by its own admission - for people who have been approved
to adopt.
Earlier, in January, after NGOs warned the situation was getting out of control,
the ministry froze all inter-country adoptions.
The freeze soon thawed. Subsequent adoptions included that of a Cambodian baby who,
according to one NGO worker who monitors adoptions, had been bought by a middleman
from a poor, rural family for several hundred dollars. The child went to a Belgian
family.
"I'm sorry, but this is trafficking," said the NGO representative, who,
like most contacted for this story, requested anonymity.
"There are people making money from this. Why do foreigners come here? They
know...they can come here, pay money and have a child."
Last year, the going rate was $1500 for an adoption application to be approved within
15 days, according to the chief of another NGO.
But he disputes that adoptions have become big business. Corruption is small-scale,
he says, though "nothing is done without payment."
He, and other NGO workers, acknowledge that most prospective adopters have good intentions.
But they warn that short-cuts in the adoption process - and the influence of money
- can make a dangerous mix, opening the system to abuses.
Most adoptions have been from Phnom Penh's Nutrition Center, though others have been
made from the privately-run Cambodia House (formerly Canada House) and provincial
orphanages.
Last year saw a rapid increase in adoptions. Of the 87 international adoptions made
between 1993-95, according to officials, 49 were made from the Nutrition Center last
year.
Charles Fejto, director of the French organization ASPECA, which funds the Nutrition
Center, confirmed there were cases of children being put in the orphanage for several
days before being adopted.
He said this was apparently done to satisfy adoption rules, but he was unsure of
where the children originally came from. Asked if they had been bought from poor
families, he said: "I don't know. I don't say it doesn't happen, but I don't
know."
Fejto said he was aware of foreigners adopting children from the orphanage without
going through the Ministry of Social Affairs but who had the necessary paperwork
from "very important" people.
The adoptions "go through very quickly," he said. "I cannot do anything.
I am not a lawyer, I'm outside of politics...[but] I think it's strange to have a
law that says something...and some children can go abroad without these procedures."
Center manager Yuon Sovanna said that, of the 49 international adoptions made from
the orphanage last year, most went to France (29 children) and the US (10), and the
rest to Australia, Canada, Germany, Belgium or Switzerland.
Sovanna said most adopters had not come to Cambodia before choosing a child. "They
decide to adopt children only after they see photographs of them...when the adoption
is approved, they come to pick up their children."
Fejto confirms at least one such recent case, of a Canadian family who wanted to
adopt a Cambodian girl they saw in a "catalogue".
Several NGO workers are critical of the staff and conditions at the Nutrition Center,
alleging some staff regularly seek payment from adopters, and that mismanagement
and poor standards are common there.
"You cannot separate adoption and the Nutrition Center," said one. "The
adoption problems reflect mismanagement of the Nutrition Center...and the type of
shopping for children that goes on there."
Another NGO source said recent events at the center include a Belgian man being given
approval in December to take a girl overseas for three months for health treatment;
yet to return, there was uncertainty about her whereabouts.
Also, at one stage, two soldiers were taking two children - a boy and a girl - out
of the center two nights a week. The soldiers said they would adopt the children
but, when a foreign aid worker challenged their nighttime behavior, they disappeared.
The children had refused to say what happened to them while out of the center.
Several sources say the care and medical treatment of children at the orphanage has
at times been appalling. For instance, when the majority of children there got scabies,
a nurse shaved their heads with the same razor, cutting some of them - potentially
spreading the HIV-Aids virus, which a number of them have tested positive for.
The food at the orphanage is said by one NGO worker to be poor, and many children
are heavily sedated without reason. Over the last Khmer New Year, children aged 1-5
were locked in the building without nurses.
Several NGOs questioned why ASPECA - whose director, Charles Fejto, lives in France
and spends three out of every nine weeks in Cambodia - has not done more.
Fejto replied that until recently his designated manager, Sovanna, held little real
power.
ASPECA recently began supplementing the wages of the orphanage nurses, he said, and
would "say good-bye to" any who did not work well.
ASPECA had increased its funding of the center from about $1500 a month a year ago
to $4000 a month now, and "we will see the difference."
Suy Sem, the Secretary of State for Social Affairs, was too busy to talk to the Post,
as was his deputy, Hong Themm. But Touch Samon, director of the ministry's Social
Affairs Department, said the Nutrition Center had been in a state of anarchy.
"People went there to select children before submitting [adoption] applications
with the department," he said, but denied that children were removed without
official clearance.
Security had been tightened at the center, and other precautions were being taken
to address "inefficiencies" in the adoption process.
The ministry was setting up a special adoption unit, which would draft a new adoption
law, he said.
Samon denied corruption was common in adoptions, or that applications had been approved
without thorough examination.
He confirmed the ministry did not know the whereabouts of some children adopted overseas,
but it had no evidence that any had gone to improper people.
Samon said the ministry's January suspension of international adoptions followed
concern about "improper acts" by Cambodian middlemen.
"We also received information from abroad regarding adopted children who were
being sold abroad...," but scrutiny of adoption dossiers had not identified
any such cases involving Cambodian children.
The ministry was no longer allowing intermediaries, foreign or Cambodian, to file
applications or receive adoptive children, he said.
Asked why such a ban - required by law since 1991 - had not been enforced earlier,
he said: "We acknowledge loopholes in the practice of the law since 1991."
Samon confirmed that the ministry's recent action had also been, in part, because
of concern about two American adoption agents, though it had no evidence they had
acted improperly.
Charles Fejto told the Post that the two had added to the "very bad" situation
at the Nutrition Center.
"What I saw myself was two cases of American citizens coming here and taking
- I don't say buying - many children together," he said, adding that it was
very dangerous for groups of children to be taken away by adoption agents.
He would not identify the two, who he said had "all the approvals from the two
Prime Ministers".
However, sources said the two were Elsie Webber - a biographer of Second Prime Minister
Hun Sen and a former refugee aid worker - and Lauryn Galindo, from a Hawaii adoption
agency.
Webber, from Texas, could not be contacted for comment. Adoption officials, and advisers
to Hun Sen, said they did not know how to contact her.
Galindo, contacted in Hawaii, strongly denied any wrong-doing in an eight-page reply
to Post questions.
Acknowledging that her name had appeared in a Cambodian government document alleging
"illicit activities", Galindo released a copy of a February letter to Secretary
of State Suy Sem expressing her "shock and dismay" at this.
Galindo, from the Adopt International agency, said she was subjected to yearly registration,
and criminal record checks, in the US as a licensed adoption agent.
Over the past nine years, she had been involved with hundreds of adoptions from 12
countries, placing children in 26 US states. All her adoptive families had to be
screened by US authorities.
In Cambodia, she adopted out four children last November, and nine in April this
year. The only "unpleasant person" she had encountered in Cambodia was
Charles Fejto, who made comments about her work which were "libelous in nature."
In response to questions, Galindo said she had never paid money directly to Cambodia
officials, but had made donations to the Nutrition Center and paid "a reasonable
gratuity" to "several assistants" in Cambodia.
"Having been the victim of slander already, please excuse me for being unwilling
to be more specific about monies paid and to whom...I have nothing to hide, I just
cannot see any benefit of such disclosure."
Galindo said she took her responsibilities very seriously, and aimed at providing
loving homes to children.
"I am confused that NGOs are critical of my work...why didn't anyone attempt
to contact me to inquire about my activities or even to offer helpful advice? I feel
I am a reasonable, approachable person, and would welcome alliance with others who
wish to better the plight of children in the world."
