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TIM PADGETT
In Haiti, the western hemisphere's poorest country, one in 10 children under age five will die before they reach that birthday due to plagues like malnutrition. Who, then, can blame destitute Haitian mothers when they so often ask visitors from richer nations to take their sickly, underfed toddlers back to the U.S. or Canada or Europe to live? And who can fault those affluent folks for wanting to follow their inner Brad-and-Angelina, swaddle those kids on the spot and head for the airport -- especially after the earthquake that ravaged Haiti last month and left those children more vulnerable than ever?
There are just two problems with that impulse, one that's fairly obvious (or should be to anyone from a country with rule of law) and another to which foreigners are too often oblivious. The first is that it's patently illegal, as 10 Baptist missionaries from Idaho found out Thursday, when Haitian authorities formally charged them with criminally abducting 33 poor Haitian children they had tried to ferry out of the country in a bus, with no proper documents, for adoption in the U.S. Many if not most of the youths, it turns out, weren't even orphans; they were simply kids whom desperate parents said they could no longer support. The Americans deny the accusation and insist their efforts were humanitarian. But Haitians like Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive have called them "kidnappers."
The second and perhaps more serious downside to taking a Haitian youngster off a mother's beleaguered hands, or taking even a genuine orphan, without lawful process is that it harms the country's children more than it helps them. That's because --and here's the part that members of the Haitian elite like Bellerive would rather forget -- it only encourages the rampant trafficking of children for which Haitians themselves are to blame. Some 300,000 of Haiti's youths, for example, are child slaves known in Creole as restaveks. Most fall into these straits because their penniless parents give them up to more affluent Haitian families, who are notorious for keeping them illiterate, heaping grinding labor on them and subjecting them to physical and sexual abuse. The sort of verbally agreed upon transfer of minors that took place between Haitian families and the U.S. missionaries "is too often how child trafficking occurs in Haiti," says Joan Conn, executive director of the Jean Cadet Restavek Foundation, which provides restaveks refuge in Haiti and abroad.
That's partly why the missionaries' arrests touched such a raw nerve in Haiti -- and why the Haitian government felt compelled to make an example of them. Many had expected authorities to release the Americans, who were arrested on Jan. 29, with a slap on the wrist. That's what prosecutors in the north African nation of Chad eventually did in 2007 after arresting six French NGO workers accused of attempting to airlift 103 children from that war-torn country for adoption in France. But in recent years Haiti's political class has come under increasing international criticism for turning a blind eye to the child trafficking scourge. Indicting the misguided missionaries was a way to show that it is serious about applying the law for a change.
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