Sierra Leone parents seek children adopted by Americans in late 1990s, saying no consent given

allWestAfrica
June 4, 2010

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone (AP) — Balia Kamara’s mother sent her to a center in northern Sierra Leone so the 5-year-old could receive an education and food, and stay out of harm’s way during the West African country’s brutal civil war.

The mother visited Balia at the Help A Needy Child International center, known as HANCI, regularly for two years until 1998, when the children there were taken to Sierra Leone’s capital for medical examinations. They never returned.

Parents of about 30 children at the center say they only later learned that the children had been adopted by Americans and sent abroad without permission.

“We were reluctant to hand over the child,” recalled Balia’s mother, Mariama Jabbie, in an interview with The Associated Press. “When they told us that they were going to educate her up to college level, we decided to hand her over. That was how they were able to entice us to do so.”

In 2004, the center’s director and two of his employees were arrested and charged with conspiracy to violate adoption laws. Those charges against them though ultimately were dropped and the case disbanded, according to court records.

Now more than a decade after the children disappeared, Sierra Leone’s government said late Wednesday it is setting up a national commission of inquiry to re-examine the case of the HANCI children following years of pressure from their biological parents.

The American agency that facilitated the children’s adoptions maintains it has no knowledge of any wrongdoing on the part of their staff in the West African nation.

Last month, the children’s biological parents stormed the office of Sierra Leone’s social welfare minister, demanding the government help them find a way to communicate with their children. A spokesman for the parents, Kassim Kargbo, said they had traveled from villages in the north nearly 100 miles from the capital.

The parents also published an open letter to President Ernest Bai Koroma in a local newspaper. They asked Sierra Leone’s government to reopen the case against those who ran the HANCI center where the children were staying.

Sierra Leone is not the only country where there has been controversy over whether parents have given sufficient consent for adoptions. Guatemala suspended international adoptions for nearly two years after the discovery that some babies were being sold.

In Argentina, the government confirmed that hundreds of children were taken from dissidents and raised by military families or others that supported the ruling military junta in the 1970s and early 1980s. El Salvador has worked to reunite children who were also separated from their families during that country’s civil war and adopted by foreign families.
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The legal process for the adoptions was approved at the time by Sierra Leone’s government, as well as by the U.S. State Department, she said. “We’ve heard nothing officially from anyone from Sierra Leone for years,” she added.

But the children’s birth parents say that adoption was never mentioned, nor was a trip out of the country. For years they never knew what had become of the children and feared they may have been killed during the war. Not until 2004 did they learn they were adopted by Americans, Bakarr said.

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