Baptists in trafficking row may face US trial

HAITIAN officials said last night they are thinking of sending a group of US Baptists home for prosecution after they were arrested trying to take 33 children out of the country without government permission.

Officials said they hoped to quickly resolve the case while also sending a strong message that child trafficking will not be tolerated.

Haiti’s communications minister, Marie-Laurence Jocelin Lassegue, said Haitian and US officials were discussing the idea of trying the Baptists in the US because Haiti’s court system was crippled in the devastating January 12 earthquake, which destroyed the justice ministry building and killed many government officials.

Since their arrest last Friday near the Dominican border, the group has been held inside dingy concrete rooms in the same judicial police headquarters building where ministers give disaster response briefings. They have not yet been charged.

A lawyer representing them claimed yesterday that they were being treated poorly and that one of them, a diabetic, fainted and was hospitalised. Jorge Puello, in the Dominican Republic, said they weren’t being given adequate medical care and food.

While the Baptists said they were only trying to rescue abandoned children from the disaster zone, investigators were trying to determine how the Americans got the children, and whether any of the traffickers that have plagued the country were involved.

Aid workers who interviewed the 33 children said some have surviving parents, and that some were desperate to be reunited with their families.

The Baptists’ Haitian Orphan Rescue Mission was described as an effort to save abandoned, traumatised children. Their plan was to take 100 children by bus to a hotel at Cabarete, a beach resort in the Dominican Republic. The children ranged in age from two months to 12 years.

They were stopped at the border for not having proper paperwork and taken back to Port-au-Prince, where the children were taken to a temporary children’s home.

In Haiti, a long tradition of foreign military intervention coupled with the earthquake that destroyed much of the capital, have made the issue of foreign adoptions emotionally charged. Of 20 Haitian parents interviewed in a tent camp yesterday, just one said she would not give up her children to give them a chance at a better life.

“Some parents I know have already given their children to foreigners,” said Adonis Helman, 44.

“I’ve been thinking how I will choose which one I may give.”

“My parents died in the earthquake. My husband has gone. Giving up one of my kids would at least give them a chance,” said Saintanne Petit-Frere, 40, a mother of six. “My only fear is that they would forget me, but that wouldn’t affect my decision.”

Haiti’s overwhelmed government has halted all adoptions unless they were in motion before the earthquake amid fears that parentless or lost children are more vulnerable than ever to being seized and sold.

Sex trafficking has been rampant in Haiti. Prime Minister Max Bellerive’s personal authorisation is now required for the departure of any child. Without documents and concerted efforts to track down their parents, children could be forever separated from family members able and willing to care for them.

“For UNICEF, what is important is that for children separated from their parents, we do everything possible to have their families traced and to reunite them,” said Kent Page, a spokesman for the group in Haiti. “They have to be protected from traffickers or people who wish to exploit these children.”

The Idaho church group’s spokeswoman, Laura Silsby, conceded she had not obtained the proper Haitian documents, but said the group was “just trying to do the right thing”.

The disaster inspired them to move more quickly than they had initially planned to start a shelter for 200 boys and girls in the Dominican Republic, where they hoped to build a school and chapel and work with US adoption agencies to bring in parents.

The children are now being cared for in an orphanage run by Austrian-based SOS Children’s Villages, where spokesman George Willeit said workers were searching for their families. “One (9-year-old) girl was crying, and saying, ‘I am not an orphan. I still have my parents.’ And she thought she was going on a summer camp or a boarding school or something like that.”

Those arrested include members of the Central Valley Baptist Church in Meridian, Idaho, and the East Side Baptist Church in Twin Falls, Idaho. They are part of the Southern Baptist Convention, which is America’s largest Protestant denomination and has extensive humanitarian programmes worldwide.