February 26, 2002

Adoptive parents, kids languish in Cambodian limbo

Baby-trafficking allegations stall process

By Steve Friess
Special for USA TODAY

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia -- A bright yellow nursery has been ready for months on the other side of the globe. There are closets full of clothes and toys received at three baby showers, a dangling mobile of animals that would play "Imagine" if anyone were there to crank it up, and quilts padding the crib that were stitched by a recently deceased great-grandmother.

All that's missing are the twin babies promised to Steve and Liz Fitzgerald of Brookline, N.H., six months ago, then officially granted to them in October by an adoption decree issued by the Cambodian government.

Now 7 months old, Benjamin Sarin and Abigail Saron remain in their impoverished Southeast Asian homeland, unable to receive visas to come to the USA -- and stuck in limbo along with dozens of orphans poised to be adopted by eager American parents. Some, such as the
Fitzgeralds, are so frustrated by the delay, and by watching the children growing up in monthly pictures sent by the orphanage, that they've flown here to be with children they may not be able to take home.

These families are caught in an adoption process that U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service officials say may be rife with baby-trafficking. Allegations that some Cambodian orphans have been stolen from or sold by their desperately poor families have resulted in an
agonizing moratorium for as many as 250 American families who expected to be settling into their new lives as parents by Thanksgiving.

INS officials say there may be some movement this week, because the head of a task force sent to Cambodia is due back to Washington on Wednesday with recommendations to INS Commissioner James Ziglar.

Whether the news is good or bad, any concrete information would come as welcome relief in a stalemate characterized by complaints that INS and U.S. Embassy officials have been unresponsive and occasionally callous.

The INS issued the moratorium on orphan visas on Dec. 21, putting a halt to arranging the "visa appointments" between parents and embassy officials that are the final step toward landing the visa. The agency kept the 32 appointments scheduled with families through January
and allowed the children involved in those cases to come to the USA, but parents who weren't
so lucky to have been given those appointments now must wait.

"We believe that, in many cases, children have been bought and have been taken through either threat or coercion," INS spokesman Bill Strassberger says. "The situation in Cambodia is such that the country has shown serious indications of trafficking. The levels of graft and
corruption that goes on there have combined to create an adoption industry."

Cambodian adoptions have become increasingly popular since the country's civil war ended in 1997. The figures aren't huge -- 407 of the 19,240 overseas adoptions occurred there in fiscal 2001 -- but that figure was poised to grow fast as word got out that the adoptions could be done in less than six months, and that very young infants were available. Those anomalies, though, were the factors that sparked concern and suspicion among the embassy and the INS, Strassberger says.

Many prospective parents insist that they don't want to adopt children whose mothers are looking for them. Yet in a country as disorganized as Cambodia, they question how an investigation can be done to determine where the children came from, and they fear that the outcome could be that these children are deemed unadoptable. If so, they're most likely to simply languish in squalid orphanages.

"The orphanage, by our standards, was horrific," says Mark Corkery of Atlanta, who went with his wife to Cambodia in mid-January to be with the twin boys assigned to them in July. "There were no diapers, they're all running around half-naked, you see urine and kids
lying in poop. Everyone has runny noses. They obviously need medical attention they're not getting."

Concerned about the children's health, the Corkerys, like the Fitzgeralds, ignored warnings from the INS and adoption agencies not to go to Cambodia while the moratorium was in place.

The tactic of going overseas to the children has both parents and adoption officials split.

"We wondered if it would be better to be here or there to put the pressure on, but we also didn't want to antagonize our government by going there in direct contravention to their wishes," says Eileen Christian of Downingtown, Pa., who has been assigned a now-7-month-old girl that she and her husband have named Kelly.

That concern was echoed by the head of the Fitzgeralds' adoption agency.

"The Fitzgeralds took it upon themselves to go to Cambodia against our advice and against all kinds of government alerts, so they're pretty much on their own, " says Vicki Peterson, executive director of the Waltham, Mass.-based Wide Horizons for Children.

"Although I can understand that they were very anxious to have their children with them," Peterson says, "it didn't seem wise for them or anyone to go when there are major investigations going on."

Yet others question how couples, many desperate after failed pregnancies and insemination attempts, can stay at home when they're missing crucial months of their child's life.

"We've had to legally tell our families we cannot tell them to go or not to go, but as an adoptive parent, I'd be on the first plane over there, too," says Jeannine Smith, founder of Reaching Out Thru International Adoptions in Cherry Hill, N.J.

The families' cause has been championed by the Congressional Coalition on Adoption, a group of more than 100 members of Congress who are pressuring the INS to end the moratorium.

"Closing down adoptions arbitrarily because of suspected corruption would be like closing down the banking system because a bank was robbed," says Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., co-chair of the coalition, who has adopted two children. "The appropriate remedy is swift
prosecution of those doing the corruption."

Aside from the adoption slowdown, though, many prospective parents have complained that INS and embassy officials have been rude to them. Christian, for example, complained that one official flippantly told her that she could just move to Cambodia if she wanted to be with the child.

Strassberger acknowledges that communication was poor early on, but he says improvements have been made. Ziglar met with about 30 prospective parents and relatives who protested at the INS offices in Washington on Feb. 14. Many, including Mark Corkery, acknowledge that the meeting helped.

Yet the suggestion to move to Cambodia is, in fact, the only surefire way for these parents to hang onto the children assigned to them even if some evidence of baby-trafficking is unearthed. Under U.S. law, regardless of how the children came into the orphanage, they are automatically eligible for a visa if American parents have lived with them abroad for two years.

Some are planning to do so. Steve Fitzgerald, a science teacher at Nashua (N.H.) High School, says he'll quit his job at the end of the school year and teach in Phnom Penh if it means that he and his wife can keep the twins.

"Plenty of people live outside the U.S.," Liz Fitzgerald says. "It'll give us an opportunity to live in our children's birth country and get a sense of the culture. We don't really have a choice. These are our children."

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