INDONESIA: Fears are growing for children orphaned in the tsunami disaster after a senior UN official warned of credible reports that criminal gangs in Indonesia are offering them for adoption or exploitation.
Ms Carol Bellamy, executive director of UNICEF, said yesterday that organised syndicates were exploiting the crisis in Aceh province. "They have been using sophisticated technology such as SMS messages to people throughout this region offering children for adoption," she said, citing reports from UNICEF's partner agencies in Indonesia.
Indonesia said it was investigating the child-trafficking rumours but that there was as yet no evidence to substantiate the reports.
Cdr Gen Suyitno Landung said officers were paying particular attention to Medan, a city south of Aceh. "They've been tasked to check refugee camps as to whether children there were evacuated with their families or with other people," he said. "The data will be compiled and crosschecked." On Monday the government banned Acehnese under-16s from leaving the country.
The Medan-based Aceh Sepakat Foundation has found evidence that 20 Acehnese children have been smuggled out of the province since the disaster, according to yesterday's Jakarta Post newspaper.
It quoted an Aceh Sepakat manager, Mazria, as saying that the children were allegedly whisked to Malaysia and the city of Bandung in West Java by an unnamed organisation in Medan.
Gen Landung said traffickers posed as members of a charitable foundation, as relatives or as a foster parent. The Jakarta Post also reported that an unnamed foundation was offering Acehnese children for fostering via mobile phone text messages.
Indonesian social affairs ministry data says about 35,000 Acehnese children lost one or both of their parents in the disaster. A spokesman said the department was doing all it could to prevent child-trafficking. "We are taking these reports very seriously and are doing all we can to prevent the children who lost their parents . . . from becoming victimised again," he said.
In Sri Lanka, UNICEF says there are no confirmed cases of abduction but it is working with the government to register every child in the country's makeshift refugee camps.
The teams have already finished in Galle and Batticaloa and plan to have covered the whole country within the next five days.
MS Laura Conrad, press officer of Save the Children, said there had been a few "fairly unsubstantiated reports" of adults in eastern Sri Lanka making false claims to be children's parents. - (Guardian service)