Haiti

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Haiti mother tells of giving twin sons to U.S. missionaries

February 3, 2010 -- A mother in a remote village outside Haiti's main earthquake zone has told how she allowed her twin sons to be taken by American missionaries now under investigation for child trafficking, because they promised to provide a life of hope and opportunity for her children. Maggie Moise, who has eight children, said she was contacted by a local man who works in an orphanage in her village and was told that "some white people" wanted to help her family. Ten Americans affiliated with two Baptist churches in Idaho were arrested on Friday while trying to take the busload of children out of the country without documents or permission. The group, who are being held at the headquarters of Haiti's judicial police, have not yet been charged, but Haiti's prime minister, Jean-Max Bellerive, has described them as "kidnappers" who "knew what they were doing was wrong".

Yesterday, Moise, who lives in the village of Calebasse, an hour and a half's drive from the centre of Port-au-Prince, described how she agreed to let her nine-year-old-twin sons, Volmy and Kimley, leave with the Americans for the Dominican Republic. "They said they wanted to go with our children and told us 'don't worry, everything will be fine'," she said. "They put the names of the children on a paper and asked me to sign the paper to accept. The white woman told me: 'Don't worry, you will be able to access your children.' They showed me a brochure of the place where the children would be going to live. They told us they were going to help my boys. I gave them my boys because there is nothing for them here."

She identified the woman as Corinna Lankford, one of the Baptists currently being detained in jail, and said a local man named Isaac had acted as a go-between. Neither Isaac nor the orphanage's director, Phillippe Murphy, a Haitian American, were present there today and workers said they knew nothing about the missionaries' activities. As many as 20 of the children who were with the 10 Americans when they were arrested are thought to come from Calebasse, which is in the Fort Jacques mountains south-east of Port-au-Prince. The Baptists said they had planned to take abandoned children orphaned in the earthquake and raise them at a new orphanage in the Dominican Republic. But according to locals, none of the children taken from Calebasse were orphans nor even particularly desperate. Few houses in the village have suffered any damage in the quake.

Meanwhile, as medical teams in Haiti today pressed ahead with a major campaign to vaccinate thousands of children, a Swiss court said that at least $4.6 million in Swiss bank accounts which had previously been awarded to charities must be returned to the family of Haiti's former dictator, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier. The decision was reached hours before the quake, on 12 January, but only published today, prompting the Swiss government to issue an emergency decree to keep the money frozen in a Swiss bank until a new law can be passed allowing it to be donated to aid groups in Haiti.

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U.S. missionaries in Haiti charged with child abduction

February 4, 2010 -- Haiti has charged 10 U.S. missionaries with child abduction and criminal conspiracy for allegedly trying to smuggle children out of the country. If convicted they face lengthy jail terms, says the BBC's Paul Adams at the court hearing in Haiti's quake-hit capital, Port-au-Prince. When stopped on the border last Friday, they said they were taking the children to a Dominican Republic orphanage. But it has emerged some of the 33 youngsters had parents who were alive. The five men and five women, most of them from Idaho, were due to have a hearing earlier in the week, but that was postponed because of a lack of interpreters. Haiti's Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive has labelled the Americans "kidnappers".

Residents in the village of Callebas told an Associated Press news agency reporter they had handed their children over through a local orphanage worker who said he was acting on the Americans' behalf. The worker is said to have promised the families that the missionaries would educate their children in neighbouring Dominican Republic. A number of parents in the badly-damaged village said they would find it difficult to provide for their children if they came back.

The mission's leader, Laura Silsby, has said her group had met a Haitian pastor by chance when they arrived last week, and that he had helped them gather the children. She also admitted that they did not have the proper paperwork. "Our intent was to help only those children that needed us most, that had lost either both their mother and father, or had lost one of their parents and the other had abandoned them," she said from her jail cell on Wednesday.