Thursday, February 28th, 2008
Well I am entering the sixth month of my Fulbright in Ukraine. Technically, I have four left to go, but I submitted an application for an extension of two months for my project so I may be here until the end of August.
The extension project will be related to migration, although not necessarily directly to human trafficking. My proposal is to conduct the necessary interviews and gather research on the rise of xenophobic violence and attitudes in Ukraine in order to produce a single, encompassing document that provides the reader with statistical data as well as the sociological research that has been following the rise of xenophobic attitudes, especially among the youth. I would be working with many of the organizations and actors in the Diversity Initiative, a coalition of the International Organization for Migration, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Amnesty International, the Congress of Nationalities of Ukraine, Youth Human Rights Movement, the East European Development Institute, and the Security Liaison Officers in Embassies in Kyiv. The coalition now has 30 member organizations who are combining resources to identify the problem, come up with possible solutions, and present these findings and solutions to the government.
Their efforts have already yielded some results, including the creation of separate task forces in the Ministry of Interior, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). In fact, just yesterday it was announced that the Ministry of the Interior is initiating creation of an inter-agency working group on fighting xenophobia and racism. Ironically, I couldn’t find the article in English, but for my Ukrainian-reading friends out there, here it is in Ukrainian. Basically, these government offices that have started work or are involved in combating xenophobia and racism will become part of this encompassing interagency group that is supposed to serve as a “mechanism.” Hopefully this will result in some hard steps such as actually prosecuting someone who commits these crimes under Article 161 of the criminal code, which provides for punishment for hate crimes. Despite the rising occurrence of racially-motivated crimes, not one person has been prosecuted under this law, and it is often swept under the rug as “hooliganism.”
That was a huge divergence, but essentially my project would be to combine the available studies and statistics with original research in order to produce a report that will make this information useful as it will be collected in one document. And I would have two months to do it. I should find out towards the middle or end of March whether or not I got it.
As far as my current research, it has been an exciting month. From February 13th to the 15th, the United Nations Global Initiative to Fight Human Trafficking held the Vienna Forum at the Austria Center in Vienna, which I was fortunate enough to attend. I completed a seven-part series on the sessions I attended for The Human Trafficking Project- they will be posted over the course of the next week so if you’re curious about the information I was able to obtain while being at the Forum, it’s all there. Here are some pictures from the conference:
This was the last session I attended on Friday on gatehring statistical data about human trafficking, which is one of the biggest challenges of the field for many reason. I actually had to break the post on the session into two parts because there was so much interesting information from the panelists.
This was the reception on the first night of the conference at the Hofburg Palace, which was absolutely beautiful inside, as you can see. About 1,500 people attended this conference and came from many fields and regions.
Ok, one more picture from Vienna and this is mostly for fun. When I was at the airport while I was waiting to return to Kyiv. I was sitting with a colleague of mine of the OSCE in Kyiv, when she looked over and said,
“Elise, you follow Ukrainian politics, right?”
Me- “Yes, of course.” (a snarky comment about Ukrainian politics being the bane of my academic existence for the last two years may not have gone over too well here, so I held it back)
Tetyana- “Look over there”
And so I turned my head, and low and behold, Oleksandr Moroz was standing there with his assistant (well, at least I think she was his assistant). Now most of you probably have about zero interest in this guy, but Moroz was the once popular head of the Socialist Party here in Ukraine (different from the Communist Party). He provided some key support to Yushchenko during the Orange Revolution, but then after a fallout and a controversial deal with the Regions Party after the 2006 elections brought him to become Speaker of the Rada that year, he lost a lot of influence. In fact, his party did not make the 3% threshold in the last elections and so he is no longer in the Rada. But I marched right up to him and in my best teeny-bopper-meeting-Justin-Timberlake over-excited bumbling Ukrainian, I asked him for a picture, which he agreed to, probably relishing in feeling famous again. He actually flew coach too, which is either a testament to his socialist principles or to his dwindling bank account.
The following day was the competition for the Telders International Law Moot Court Team that I have been coaching since October. It was held at the Supreme Economic Court of Ukraine, which is quite an impressive, modern building not far from my apartment. These students had been working extremely hard on their presentations, and they blew the other teams out of the water when it came to presenting their oral arguments. They were professional, polite, and as the head judge commented to me later, unshakable. Their score was enough to earn the team the prize for Best Oralist for Respondent, but, unfortunately, combined with their score on the written memorial, we fell into second place by just three points. We were really disappointed, but seeing as how this was my first time coaching and this was their first time competing, I think we did alright.
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Monday, February 11th, 2008
Well, I am supposed to be packing for Vienna, but I got caught up in some headlines and here I am, finally posting to my blog. I had to pick the cobwebs off first, but I think this will work 
Yesterday, I headed out to Komarivka to visit the kids again. This time I was greeted by a new little guy I hadn’t seen before. Geoff thinks he may be new to the orphanage. His name is Zhenya, and he has the cutest cheeks I had ever seen and eyes like little saucers. I wish I had a picture of him, but I didn’t have my camera with me. After walking around with me outside, we went into one of the rooms where a bunch of the younger children were watching some cartoon movie about birds going to war. There he sat on my lap, and we watched the movie with the other kids. Natasha and Anya were there. Zhenya tried to share his chewed gum and half-eaten banana with me, but I politely refused and pinched his cheeks.
Geoff and I spent much of the drive there and back discussing developments in the Ukrainian adoption system over the last decade or so. I was able to contribute to the conversation through some of the research I had done at La Strada focusing on child trafficking and exploitation.
First of all, there are three kinds of adoption: domestic- which involves parents and children of the same nationality in the same country; intercountry- which involves the child moving to another country other than the one it resides in regardless of the parent’s nationality; and lastly there is international- which involves parents of a different nationality than the child, who may or may not reside in the same country that the child resides in.
Examples:
Ukrainian child adopted Ukrainian parents living in the U.S.: Intercountry, but not International
Ukrainian child adopted by U.S. parents living in Ukraine: International, but not Intercountry
Ukrainian child adopted by U.S. parents living in the U.S.: International and Intercountry
Perhaps today you saw the article in the NY Times about the families having difficulties bringing children whom they’ve adopted from Vietnam to the U.S. Some families in California that are having a very difficult time bringing back children they have adopted from Vietnam due to restrictions placed on the process by the U.S. government.
Twenty-one entry visas for children have been rejected in the last two years, according to the State Department. More than half the denials have come since last October, prompting complaints that the department is singling out individual cases to embarrass the Vietnamese government into changing its adoption process…
The State Department says it is making sure babies are legitimately available for adoption.
“It would be unforgivable for us to look at a case and think something is wrong, then to let it go,” said Michele T. Bond, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for overseas services. Ms. Bond said Vietnam had never posted a schedule of adoption fees, as required in the bilateral agreement, and said documentation on how some babies came to be orphaned “is unreliable.”
The State Department warning said that embassy personnel had seen “an increase in the number of irregularities appearing in orphan petitions and visa applications,” and “significant increases in the number of abandoned children” in two provinces, including Thai Nguyen, where the three contested babies were adopted.
Now the families have gone through some extreme and expensive measures of ensuring that the babies have not been adopted or abandoned under falsities or coercion including hiring high-priced Vietnamese lawyers and staying in-country for months at a time.
Newsweek printed an article earlier this month on what was going on in the international/intercountry child adoption scene noting that intercountry adoptions have decreased over the last few years, and the article quotes lawyers who blame UNICEF for this fact stating that the agency is placing too much emphasis on trying to find ways of ensuring children stay within their own culture and, where possible, their birth family.
There is no argument over the need for adoptive homes—UNICEF estimates that there are 143 million orphans in the world—or the unprecedented interest among Westerners eager to adopt. And children’s advocates of all stripes agree that when possible, children should be raised by their own families and in their own cultures. But there seems to be a discrepancy over what qualifies as “when possible.”
The other thing that their should not be discrepancy over is the use of adoption for exploitative purposes. This is from a document entitled, “Measures to Counteract Child Trafficking And Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in Ukraine.”
In recent years many abuses and illegal acts connected with child adoption have occurred. This form of alternative family care has been turned into a profitable business by traffickers, particularly as adoption has become ‘globalised’, with a rapid increase in intercountry adoptions of children born in countries with less developed legal structures to protect them, who are offered to couples who are unaware or unconcerned with the measures employed to facilitate the adoption.
In some cases, mothers or parents are paid to sell their babies or young children. There are numerous cases of birth certificates or similar documents being forged to show that babies belong to someone other than the birth mother. Child trafficking for illegal adoption is a problem in Ukraine. After the collapse of the USSR, a large number of foreign citizens waiting to adopt children came to Ukraine. At that time, the procedure was very simple: after filling out the forms, a foreign citizen could adopt a child from a regional (oblast) adoption centre. As there was no relevant legislation to regulate this, a large number of minors were thus taken abroad.
Thus, when there were no regulations to monitor the welfare of the child, it left an easy route for traffickers to bring children abroad to be exploited. Now Ukraine has much more strict regulations regarding foreign adoption, and in fact, closed the foreign adoption procedure down all together for some time in the 90s after it was discovered doctors were involved in the criminal sale of newborns from hospitals.
While I can see the frustration of these families, and the fact that they have put forth the effort to try to ensure they are not taking part in parents either knowingly selling their children or unknowingly losing their children, it is also a balancing act that only works if the two countries practice transparent and well-documented procedures for conducting foreign adoptions. The kind of money Western families are willing to pay for foreign adoption may seem like a testament to their love for their child, but they could also be unknowingly contributing to a new kind of trade in children driven by unprecedented profits. Alexandra Yuster of UNICEF hits this point in the Newsweek article-
“We’re concerned with the commercialization of vulnerable children,” says Yuster. “It gives an incentive to intermediaries to look for the kind of children these families most want to adopt.” Some poor mothers are tricked into relinquishing healthy babies, while disabled and older children living in state institutions are left out of the foreign adoption loop because there’s no profit incentive to match them with families. “Adoption is supposed to be about finding homes for children, not finding children for families,” she says.
The only catch here is that some countries, such as Ukraine, actually allow foreigners to adopt children with severe problems earlier. For example, according to Ukrainian adoption legislation, normally a foreigner can only adopt a child once he/she has been “in the system” for more than one year, except in the case that the child has special needs such as HIV, Down’s Syndrome, impairments of brain activity, heart diseases, etc. In fact, it was explained to me that in fact some foreign families are actually shown and must reject two or three children with these problems first before they are shown children in full health.
Now this balancing act tips against the children in another way when children are able to be adopted and there are foreign families who want to adopt them, but rules, regulations, laws, or immigration problems forbid the adoption from occurring and the children end up remaining in state care for extended periods of time. The fact that a foreign company is coming in to replace the heating system so that the children don’t have to walk around inside the orphanage with their coats on is revealing as to what kind of priority and funding the state puts into institutional care for its orphans in Ukraine.
On the other hand, most of these children at Komarivka have families. They are called “social orphans”. Some of them even go home during the holidays to spend a day or two with their parents. For whatever reason, either the parents themselves or the state has deemed them unable to care for the children and so the children live in this home. So it is not outlandish to think that children, under better economic circumstances and social support structures, could care for their children themselves, going back to UNICEF’s point.
I realize this post hardly settles the issue, and I feel a bit biased in one direction because I have now had the chance to see how these children live under state care, and how many of them end up stuck in orphanages for extended periods of time with no one to look out for them once they are 18 and out on their own. And how much they love to just walk around holding hands or sit against me while we watch a movie- it’s a starvation for affection like I have never seen. At the same time, I am pulled in the other direction by my research, which has shown that the commercialization and profit margin of criminal activity mixed with foreign adoption is driving a trade in children, and families are either losing their children under coercive circumstances or giving up their children at the thought of gaining money from this increasingly lucrative process.
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Sunday, February 3rd, 2008
I hate posting about the bad stuff in Ukraine. There are so many good things to report about Ukraine’s development and people and culture. However, among the organizations that I work with, specifically the IOM which does work and research on xenophobia in Ukraine, there has been a disturbing increase in racially-motivated violence in Kyiv over the last few years. Or at least, more of it is finally being reported by the victims. I wouldn’t post about this to instigate trouble or cause Ukraine bad publicity if I didn’t feel this particular issue is something that is causing serious harm and even death to foreigners in Kyiv.
Last week, a young asylum-seeker from the Democratic Republic of Congo was killed on his way to the grocery store near the Nivkiy metro station. He was stabbed 15 times, and died before even getting medical attention. The attack occurred on a Sunday evening, around dinner time, and there were many witnesses to the crime. So far, there have been no solid arrests and the police have not cited racial motivations. Whenever crimes like this happen, where people of obvious foreign origin are attacked, beaten, harrassed, and even killed, the authorities will label it as “hooliganism.” It has gotten to the point where they are issuing warnings at work that there will be public demonstrations by Nationalists and for our foreign coworkers to be careful to avoid these scenes.
Last October, four Asian tourists were not lucky enough to get one of these warnings.
Earlier this month on the same day that ultra-nationalists joined a mass march in favour of recognising the WWII-era UPA Ukrainian Insurgent Army, a Bangladeshi man was brutally murdered in Kyiv in an apparent racially motivated attack, while three Chinese girls were stabbed in a separate incident.
Ukrainian officials are loathe to admit that this rising tide of violence against foreigners is racially or nationalistically motivated, preferring to categorise all such attacks as common hooliganism, but the organised nature of the violence and numerous eye-witness accounts of individual attacks, citing large groups of teenagers screaming racial epithets, would seem to confirm that this is a far bigger and more sinister issue than simple youthful excess.
This kind of violence happens more often than people realize, and the IOM and UNHCR are taking more steps to document and expose this dark trend. Whether or not Ukraine is willing to step up and respond will be another story. As far as I have heard, it was originally the Jewish Lobby, which has strong organization, that was able to get President Yushchenko to react to this problem.
This article was written a year ago in RFE/RL:
Russia/Ukraine: Analyst Says Racial Violence On The Rise
State Of Ukraine
As for Ukraine, Butkevich feels the situation is worsening rather than improving.
Butkevich notes that law enforcement agencies are doing a better job at combating the problem of ethnic violence and that there has been a rise in arrests over the past four years.
“Neo-Nazi violence in Ukraine is something that gets almost no media attention, which is mostly focused on what happens in Russia,” Butkevich said. “But over the past three years it has really gotten very bad. And this is after years of neo-Nazi violence almost being not even a problem in Ukraine.”
In Ukraine, where there are fewer Muslims and foreign students than in Russia, Jews are the primary target for neo-Nazi groups. Most of the attacks occur in Eastern Ukraine and in Kyiv.
And the police response has been wholly inadequate, according to Butkevich: “I have to say [that] as many positive things that have happened over the past year — I’m not denying the progress — the way that the Ukrainian law enforcement officials have reacted to this problem makes the Russians look good.”
The article highlights the response problem, although I don’t know if the problem is mostly a Jewish problem anymore. While Jewish people are still being attacked, people from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East are the easiest to spot in Ukraine as far as foreigners are concerned. Tatar Muslims and Roma are also targeted. Even if they can speak the language(s) really well, they have a difficult time dealing with the police. I have American friends, of Asian descent, who have been detained for no reason for hours before being released because, often, the companies or organizations they work for step in. I know people from Africa and the Middle East who are jumped and beaten as often as once a month. And the people who attack them make no qualms about expressing their dislike for foreigners, whether in groups or by individuals.
The big issue is going to be when Euro 2012 comes to town. The government is spending millions on improving the structure and aesthetic qualities of its cities, however an issue like this could blow Ukraine’s chances of being considered a modern country for a long period of time. If fans are attacked or unprotected, all of Europe will be watching.
And aside from this future consideration, the present considerations are enough. It is not just that these attacks are happening, but also that these attacks are going unanswered. Foreign students and workers will not want to come here if they are not safe and are warned ahead of time that the police will not respond in case something happens because this kind of violence is not taken seriously. Just the foreign students that come and study here alone spend millions of dollars on tuition, living expenses, etc. I already know of a UK citizen of Zimbabwean decent who is cutting his stay in Ukraine short next month because he is violently attacked on the streets on a regular basis. His company had to hire a driver to take him to work because it is not safe for him to walk on the streets. The US State Department Country Report on Human Rights in Ukraine details other such accounts.
I am not calling Ukrainians racist, but even if small groups of Ukrainians are committing this violence, especially if it is in an organized fashion with intent to harm people based on their race or ethnicity, it needs to be responded to and it needs to stop. It is also not to say Ukraine has done nothing, but the trends are clear that it is not enough. And me saying all of this hardly means a thing; that is to say it has to be Ukrainians that unite their fellow Ukrainians to respond to this terrible crime (like this and this). I will say that if Ukraine cannot get this problem under control, it will never move forward as a European country or a responsible member of the international community.
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