Document Number: 2007HANOI01820
From: American Embassy in Hanoi
To: Secretary of State
Date: October 2007
Subject: Vietnam September Adoption Issues Cable
{approximately half of this document is redacted}
Summary: During the month of September post [US Embassy in Hanoi] issued 65 adoption related immigrant visas. Post also significantly expanded its field verification of adoption cases. In the 14 cases we reviewed, significant fraud concerns were found in all 14 cases. In seven cases these issues led USCIS to issue Notices of Intent to Deny the I-600 petitions.
In all but three of the cases investigated, post saw a common pattern of children abandoned under highly improbably circumstances. In several cases, when interviewed by consular officers, the persons who supposedly found the abandoned children (“child-finders) completely disowned the statements in their original affidavits.
On September 19, Embassy Hanoi held its quarterly meeting with ASPs. The main focus of the meeting was to discuss the proposed new Vietnam Processing Initiative. ”¦ All of the agencies at the meeting welcomed the new initiative and felt that it would make processing simpler for PAPs.
Comment: USCIS had intended to have the policy cleared in time for the September 19 meeting. Unfortunately, the initiative is still pending final clearance at USCIS headquarters. This delay is creating confusion for ASPs and post has seen a rush of particularly troubling cases from certain ASPs trying to “beat the deadline.
3 Responses
I have been a longtime reader of VVAI, but I question the direction it has taken in the past year or so. I think my concerns are reasonable—so before you flame on, please read carefully and reflect!
I think it is clear (and has been for some time) that inter-country adoptions (not just from Vietnam, but all over) suffer from significant “irregularities”—that horrible things have happened in some cases, and that even in the vast majority of the cases, there have been goings-on that many people would be uncomfortable with, such as bribes, forged docs, and the like. Those who have refused to accept this by now are probably never going to be convinced, no matter what evidence will be presented.
And there is tremendous work to be done. I hope most who read VVAI would agree that task #1 is ensuring that when and if adoptions of Vietnamese children by foreigners resumes, these things never happen again. I don’t know how to do this, and deep down inside I fear it is not possible—so perhaps the answer is that such adoptions never resume—but one can only dream!
I also think that those people who are actually concerned about making the future a better place should seriously consider the possibility that there are people and organizations out there who seem like allies, but whose motivations are not the same as ours. For example, even though many VVAI readers may feel that the Schuster Institute has done the world a great service by telling these stories in the first place, in my opinion their goal has been to tell exciting, horrifying, and important stories. I do not mean to criticize them, as advancing one’s own notoriety is always a reasonable goal. But I see is no reason to believe that fixing things or making the world right is their goal. After all, they are journalists, not activists.
At some point, once you feel that you understand the problem, if your goal is actually to fix the future, you have to try to leave the past behind. Does more detail as to what hospital in what province had how many fraudulent cases in 2007 help us understand the problem? Does another detailed story of a child being sold help out? I don’t see how it does.
I think I understand why some adoptive parents want more and more detail. There is a belief that it will somehow lessen the pain or guilt if we know more of what happened in our particular hospital or province. But guess what? At the end of the day, if you want to be whole, you are just going to have to accept what happened at large, to accept that you will likely never know what happened in your particular case, to accept the possibility that your child might be devastated when he/she finds out, to accept that possibility that your child might not care at all, to accept that you have a duty to do what you can to make sure that this does not happen again, and to try to heal.
I think that is not the agenda of the Schuster Institute, and increasingly I feel that is not the agenda of VVAI. If there is a truly important horror story that has to be told, that adds something to the conversation, then tell it. But I have seen nothing like that on VVAI for some time. There is an almost gratuitous (or self-flagellant) focus on the past. Anyone who has followed this blog for some time understands what happened, and what it means for those of us who adopted from Vietnam. It’s time to struggle with the implications, and to try to move on.
PS: The only reason I use the name “Anon” is that I don’t want my son to find this in a few years via a Google search with my name attached—whenever and however the time comes, I want to discuss with him face to face.
Hi Anon,
Thank you for your comment.
I hear what you are saying, about not wanting to hear “horror” stories just for the gratuitous thrill of reading them. And I agree with you that our #1 priority should be preventing future fraud and corruption. However, I would argue that a careful look at the history of fraud and corruption in Vietnam is the only way to accomplish that priority.
It’s hard to read some of the stories of kidnappings, coercion and perhaps even murder that are mentioned in the FOIA documents. Some of the allegations are extreme and horrible. But unfortunately, what we saw happening before the 2002 shutdown in many cases repeated itself when adoptions reopened in 2005-2006. And will undoubtedly happen again if/when adoptions restart IF we are not on guard and know what to look for. The same agencies (perhaps with new names, but the same principle players), the same orphanages, the same provinces; the only way to prevent the fraud is to educate future PAP’s about these issues. And the only way I know to do that is to carefully document and analyze the horrible things that happened.
I agree… for those of us with children home, the primary job we have at this point is to come to terms with our own child’s history and to move on from there. We can not go back and fix past mistakes, no matter how much we may want to. But it is because of the regret and the anguish I felt over my first child’s adoption (from Cambodia) that I dedicated myself to preventing that kind of systemic abuse in future adoptions. In fact, that is the reason VVAI was created in the first place. So while you may believe we are deviating from our original direction, I would argue otherwise. We want to be a positive force for good in the adoption community. We believe in the miracle and the blessing that adoption can be. And we believe it is our responsibility as adoptive parents to advocate for better more ethical adoptions.
Right now, that means taking the time to read FOIA documents. If you don’t want to do that, by all means, take a break from reading our site and come back another time. We understand what it is to feel overloaded and fatigued from an almost constant onslaught of news about corruption and negative adoption stories. We all need to step back from time to time. And if you want to see more posts about struggling with the implications and moving on… please, consider contributing one yourself! We are here for the community and we believe all voices deserve to be heard.
In thinking about the article that has been posted by the Schuster Institute, the FOIA documents posted on their website, the exercpts from the documents that have been selected by VVAI and the two comments above, I am also concerned that we may be so compelled by the horror stories that we miss the opportunity the FOIA documents present for real positive change.
We know now that adoptions from Vietnam were ultimately shut down by the Vietnamese and no one was arrested or punished for trafficking or kidnapping. Based on the FOIA documents, we know that people at the US Embassy believed these thing were going on in Sept 2007 and their NOID program was not succesful in stopping it. We know that under the NOID program the embassy’s solution was to deny child visas and have the American adoptive families who received NOIDs return the children to their orphanages (and those the embassy had just accused of trafficking) and that birth families were not located. We know that the embassy suspected Vietnamese government officials of corruption and did not have a positive working relationship with Vietnamese officials.
We know that no one was arrested and no agencies were punished. And how many children were reunited with birth families from whom they were taken, which is what this is ultimately all about anyway? Few if any. We also know that the embassy was powerless to do any of these things and unable to work with the Vietnamese government to have any of these things done. Another thing we know is that the embassy, while supporting “Orphan First” publically, had problems with it apparently from the beginning.
In my opinion, the whole system of embassy oversight was a failure. But we are lucky, we get to see some of what was going on behind the scenes. Shouldn’t these FOIA materials be used by the embassies, and by us as activists, as a blueprint for what not to do? How should the NOID system be changed or scraped in favor of something that might work better to identify and punish the guilty and ensure that the solution does not ultimately compound the suffering of the individual children? If Vietnam (or other countries) are to be reopened for adoptions to the US, it seems clear that the same old system of oversight will lead to the same cycle of corruption.