From Thanh Nien News:
Years after their sons and daughters were ‘stolen’ and adopted abroad without their consent, a number of Vietnamese parents have finally been shown proof the children are alive and well. Now, their poor hill-tribe villagers face a moral dilemma.
At first glance, it looks like an ordinary family picture: a doting Caucasian father hovers over his two adopted Asian daughters in the living room of a comfortable suburban home. He holds the younger girl gently by her shoulders.
All three beam contentedly at the camera.
In a ramshackle home on Vietnam’s border with Laos, Cao Thi Thu looks at the image of her daughters with a mixture of joy and pain.
“I am just so relieved to see their faces again and to know they are alive,” says Thu, 37. “But my daughters were stolen from me and I want them to come home. My heart is broken. I miss them so much.”
For three long years, Thu has struggled to find out what happened to her two little girls. Officials had promised to educate and raise them in a children’s home in the provincial capital; instead, they sent the girls to live with adoptive parents in Italy.
The two girls – Lan, now eight and Luong, 13, – were among 13 children taken from the Ruc hill tribe in Vietnam’s Quang Binh Province in 2006 and sent overseas.
Early last year, the scandal was exposed by the South China Morning Post.
Like Thu, all of the parents had agreed to let their children attend the home, 100 kilometers away in Dong Hoi, after being visited by officials who offered the youngsters a better start in life. When the parents went to visit their children in early 2008, however, they were told they had been adopted overseas. Illiterate and only able to sign their names in a scrawl, the parents say they were tricked into signing papers that gave authorities permission to sell their children to families overseas.
Now officials in both Vietnam and Italy appear to be taking the case seriously, albeit with a degree of reluctance. A police investigation has acknowledged mistakes and irregularities in the handling of the adoptions and a new official inquiry has been launched in Vietnam, which Italian officials say they’ll monitor.
The head of the children’s home has personally apologized to Thu and the other Ruc. The officials have shown the aggrieved parents photos of their children living in their adoptive homes. The photos offered them the first real evidence since their disappearance that their children are alive and well.
As the families prepared for a fifth Lunar New Year holiday separated from their offspring, however, they remained determined to fight for their children’s return…
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