Untold Stories | Pulitzer Center

Japan: Not Enough Jobs in Osaka

Shiho Fukada — Wed, 23 May 2012 19:45:50 +0000

Shiho Fukada, for the Pulitzer Center, Nishinari, Osaka, Japan

There are not enough jobs in the world. When you look at recent political instability, from the Arab Spring, to the London riots to the Occupy Wall Street protest, all have something in common—frustration over unemployment and anger towards the growing gap between rich and poor. Unsustainable employment, and the political turmoil it provokes, is a global crisis.

Japan used to boast its prospering and vast middle class. They were supported by stable jobs with a lifetime employment system. My father, now in his 70s, was one of those who held the same job for all his life. That practice came to a halt when the economy burst in the early 90s. As Japan’s economy still struggles to recover to this day, stable jobs have become things of the past.

An already scarce job market has gotten even tighter after the Great East Japan Earthquake in March 2011. Out of 330,000 evacuees, 120,000 people were reported to have lost their jobs. The actual number is estimated to reach 200,000 including self-employed people. Creating jobs is one of the biggest challenges the Japanese government currently faces.

After the 1995 Hanshin earthquake that killed over 6,000 people, many day laborers came to Kamagasaki, a neighborhood of Osaka, to look for construction jobs. The town used to be a thriving day laborers’ town, attracting workers from all over Japan. Today it is home to about 25,000 mostly elderly former workers, about 1,300 of whom are homeless.

Upon visiting Kamagasaki, one will immediately notice the neighborhood is “different.” The area of 0.62 square kilometers (about 0.24 square miles) is filled with graying men loitering, drinking on the street, pushing carts, carrying cardboard boxes, with no women in sight. The air is thick with body odor, alcohol, and cigarette smoke. I was intimidated every time I entered as I was stared at and yelled at if I pulled out my camera.

The center of the town is the labor center, where workers come every morning to look for jobs. Construction companies and middlemen for various odd jobs used to come to the center every morning to pick up day laborers. The day rate was negotiated on the spot. Katsuyuki, 65, a former carpenter, says, “When I arrived here 16 years ago, there were many jobs that paid 15,000 yen ($190) a day. Now, even if you have special skills like a carpenter, there are few jobs and the wage has been constantly declining. Carpenters used to earn 20,000 ($250) to 40,000 yen ($500) a day. Not anymore.” He has been homeless for seven years. “With no work and a decreasing day rate, I didn't know who to talk to and where to go in order to prevent living on the streets. It was my first experience of being homeless.”

Instead of coming to the labor center in the morning, many employers now seek workers through cell phones and the internet to which many unemployed workers have no access. Still, many workers come to the labor center every morning to look for the only job available there these days—government-sponsored jobs of mopping the floor of the labor center. Workers were happy to get this job. One man told me to come photograph him mopping the next day because he was really proud to be working.

Another job that is available is picking through garbage.

“You can work as a day laborer until you are 45 to 50 years old but if you don’t have skills after you turn 50, there is no work. You can’t get welfare until you pass 60, so it is very tough between age of 55 to 60 years old. “ says Takeshi, 58. “I leave the homeless shelter as early as 3 a.m. and bicycle around to pick through garbage and sell what I can. I sometimes travel around 50 km (30 miles) by bicycle.” He says he has been making a living by collecting garbage for five years and earns up to 700 to 1000 yen ($9 to $13) in good times. “I really want to work, but I’m giving up the idea that I will ever work again.”

Ivory Coast: Attempts at Reconciliation, But War Scars Remain

Austin Merrill — Tue, 22 May 2012 18:18:59 +0000

Austin Merrill, for the Pulitzer Center

Two hundred miles north of San Pedro lies Duékoué, a town of some 50,000 inhabitants that saw some of the worst fighting of the war. Duékoué is just south of the line that divided Ivory Coast’s government-controlled south from the rebel-held north during the conflict. The town is located in a very fertile zone—the whole area was once covered in dense forest—and cocoa plantations fan out from the city in all directions. (Rubber is being cultivated here as well, though not as extensively as in San Pedro. The cocoa plantations in the Duékoué area are newer than those further south, and so people have not begun replacing old cocoa fields with rubber in large quantities—not yet, anyway.)

One of Ivory Coast’s bloodiest slaughters occurred here at the end of the conflict, in late March of 2011, as troops loyal to newly elected president Alassane Ouattara began their sweep down from the north on their way to forcing incumbent Laurent Gbagbo from office. The rebels, which Ouattara was now calling the Republican Forces, had plenty of allies in Duékoué. Probably half of the city’s population was comprised of “foreigners” (anyone not indigenous to the area), and the vast majority of them were aligned with Ouattara. When the troops moved through town they were welcomed gleefully by that part of the population, a people who had long complained of discrimination and violence suffered at the hands of the locals.

What happened next is still hotly debated by the different ethnic groups in the Duékoué area. Those not indigenous to the area claim that their communities were attacked first, and they blame the well-armed local civilian militias that were loyal to Gbagbo, saying they teamed up with mercenaries from Liberia. The locals contend they had nothing to do with those attacks, but blame the foreigners for cooperating with the rebel troops and dozos (mystical hunters from northern Ivory Coast) in targeting civilians loyal to Gbagbo.

What is undisputed is that all over the Duékoué area communities from both sides suffered brutal attacks. Countless homes stand roofless, their walls blackened by fire or lying in a heap of rubble. Some villages resemble ghost towns, their inhabitants having fled and refused to come back. I spoke to numerous people who told stories of family members being shot or knifed to death right before their eyes. One young man said he was shot in the arm after running away from a soldier who had just sliced open his sister’s pregnant belly and left her on the ground to die. An elderly woman told me her daughter was killed by a stray bullet as they ran together to flee a gun battle. The old woman had to pull her three-month-old grandchild from her dead daughter’s arms before continuing her frantic search for safety.

Carrefour, a neighborhood on the eastern edge of Duékoué, was one of the hardest hit by the violence. International aid workers who were on the scene in the days immediately following the fighting reported that corpses littered Carrefour’s streets. The Red Cross estimated that 800 people or more were killed, their bodies dumped into at least three mass graves in the neighborhood.

We were invited to a peace and reconciliation festival that took place on a dirt soccer pitch right next to one of the mass graves in Carrefour. We arrived for the event in the late morning (it was scheduled to start, we’d been told, by 10 a.m.), and we were given a tour of three courtyards where women from different ethnic groups had been organized to work together to prepare meals for the ceremony.

“You see, we don’t have any problem with each other,” one of the women told me. She explained that they were preparing a variety of dishes, to be sure that all ethnic groups were well taken care of. “Our Malinké friends prefer leaf sauce, others like peanut sauce, others palm nut. We’re all going to eat together!”

Back at the soccer pitch, things were coming together slowly. Six large tents had been set up around the field, providing shade for a couple of hundred plastic chairs. By mid-afternoon the sun was fully ablaze, and a DJ had begun blasting music through several over-sized speakers. But only a few people had arrived, and aid workers were barking into their cell phones and hustling around in their 4x4 trucks as they tried to figure out why so few invitees had shown up.

Things finally got underway at about 4:30 p.m., and soon a procession of local government officials, religious leaders, and community chiefs were making their way to the microphone to offer their hopes for peace and reconciliation. But as I looked around I noticed that almost no residents from the neighborhood were in attendance. If you could have stripped away the festival organizers, local leaders, and representatives of the UN mission and other international aid groups, you’d have been left with practically no one. A number of people looked on from afar, hiding under the shade of a mango tree or the awning of a porch across the street. But only a couple dozen or so had actually approached the field or decided to take advantage of the many empty plastic chairs.

I walked up to a young man who was standing in the sun just behind one of the tents. He said his name was Deluxe Loa and that he was a 20-year-old student. He wore Converse sandals, a blue tank top, and a baseball cap with two long-barreled revolvers crossed over the bill. “Dodge City Kansas Police” was written over the guns.

“All the people of the neighborhood were invited, but they didn’t want to come,” said Loa, as another leader took the microphone in the center of the field and thanked everyone for coming together to embrace peace. “All those killings, and now these officials want us to reconcile. It’s a forced ceremony. We don’t want to reconcile. Too many people were killed.”

Loa said he was out of town when the attacks took place, but then he nodded at some of the young men lurking in the shadows behind him, a good distance away from the tents. “A lot of them were here,” he said. “Many of my friends were killed. And just two months ago two cousins of mine were killed in a bar in town. Soldiers just showed up and took them away. They were shot in the woods.”

Loa chewed on a tin cross that hung from a chain around his neck and looked back at the reconciliation ceremony, shaking his head. “We don’t want anything to do with this.”

Ivory Coast: Attempts at Reconciliation, But War Scars Remain

Austin Merrill — Tue, 22 May 2012 18:18:59 +0000

Austin Merrill, for the Pulitzer Center

Loa chewed on a tin cross that hung from a chain around his neck and looked back at the reconciliation ceremony, shaking his head. “We don’t want anything to do with this.”

Kazakhstan: U.S. Interest in Global Hub on the Caspian

Joshua Kucera — Mon, 21 May 2012 16:47:35 +0000

Joshua Kucera, for the Pulitzer Center, Aktau, Kazakhstan

With a languid seaside vibe and camels roaming the outskirts of town, Aktau today hardly feels like a hub of global transportation and trade. But if the government of Kazakhstan gets its way, this port city on the Caspian Sea will eventually become a busy crossroads of Europe-Asia transcontinental commerce.

Until recently, Aktau didn't even exist. The Soviet Union founded it in 1961, calling it Shevchenko, after a 19th-century Ukrainian poet who was exiled near here. Shevchenko was a center for uranium mining, and far from being a transit hub, it was designated a “closed city” by the Soviets. There wasn't—and still isn't—any passenger train service here.

The collapse of the Soviet Union not only opened up Aktau, but also the entire former southern border of the USSR. The EU, the Asian Development Bank, China and the U.S. have all sought to capitalize on these newly opened borders by developing ambitious plans to stimulate transportation and trade between Europe and Asia via Central Asia. And Kazakhstan, hoping to get in on the action, is placing its bets on Aktau.

The government has set up a “special economic zone” at Aktau's seaport, with low tax rates for businesses located there. It has made plans for a massive expansion of the city, a development called “Aktau City” that is supposed to extend for miles from the current northern edge of the city. It's improving rail links south to Turkmenistan and Iran and north to Russia, and expanding the capacity of the seaport and airport. Aktau is also the main base for the country's nascent navy, which recently took delivery of its first proper warship, a missile boat called the “Kazakhstan.”

And for Kazakhstan's leaders, the U.S. is a key to jumpstarting Aktau's development. Faced with massive logistical headaches inherent in fighting a war in distant, landlocked Afghanistan, the Pentagon has set up a series of transport routes through Central Asia and is looking to expand them. In addition, as it looks for a way to stabilize Afghanistan after it starts pulling out in 2014, the U.S. State Department has pledged to set up a “New Silk Road” of transcontinental transit that will center around Afghanistan.

Kazakhstan is positioning Aktau to take advantage of both those U.S. priorities, as a node on the military transport network and on the future New Silk Road. The U.S. already ships military cargo through Aktau, but Kazakhstan is proposing a substantial expansion of that transit, which will in turn help Aktau develop its port, said Birzhan Keneshev, deputy governor of the Mangystau region (which includes Aktau), in an interview. “This is a good opportunity for the U.S. military to send goods through our seaport and airport. We will get good experience in organizing multi-modal transportation businesses, which we have not had until now in Kazakhstan,” Keneshev said. “It's a good way to set up some joint ventures with the American side, with logistics companies, and get this experience.”

Kazakhstan also has attempted to dovetail its plans for Aktau with the U.S.'s vision of the New Silk Road. American diplomats, promoting the New Silk Road, frequently quote Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India saying “I dream of a day, while retaining our respective identities, one can have breakfast in Amritsar, lunch in Lahore, and dinner in Kabul.” Kazakhstan's ambassador in Washington, Erlan Idrissov, has adapted that phrase on a transcontinental scale, imagining a day when one can have "breakfast in Amritsar, lunch in Aktau and dinner in Dusseldorf."

Neither the U.S. or Kazakhstan governments are commenting publicly on their negotiations over this new cooperation. In a statement, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said: “Kazakhstan is ready to contribute to implementing the [New Silk Road] initiative in the form of some new projects. One of them is the Transportation and Logistics Center (TLC) in Aktau Sea Port.”

The U.S. has long seen potential in Aktau, even before the development of the Afghan transit routes. One 2009 diplomatic cable released by Wikileaks was titled “THE STRATEGIC IMPORTANCE OF AKTAU SEA PORT.” Another, from 2008, compared Aktau's role on the New Silk Road to that of Samarkand on the original Silk Road: “Aktau is still a sleepy town...Its growth potential, however, is significant...The Kazakhstanis see Aktau as a potential "capital city" of the Caspian region, the central point for transportation, regional educational cooperation, and even tourism. If the cross-Caspian route is the new Silk Road for Central Asia, Aktau may yet prove to be its Samarkhand.”

The U.S. has already provided aid to Kazakhstan's navy in Aktau, donating coast guard vessels and renovating facilities for the new naval academy. It has also shipped over 15,000 containers of cargo to Afghanistan via Aktau, the majority of military cargo that enters Afghanistan from the north.

U.S. Army Col. Robert Timm, defense attache at the embassy in Kazakhstan, acknowledged that the Pentagon was interested in expanding its activity in Aktau. “We're eager to talk to any governments in the region about options and opportunities that increase access for U.S. and allied throughput into and out of Afghanistan, and that would include Aktau,” he said in an interview. “They have a plan to develop this multi-modal transit hub out there...Insofar as the development of that creates opportunities for us, we're interested in looking at that.”

Aktau's growth into a global trade hub is far from a sure thing. It's not clear whether the U.S. is serious about its New Silk Road strategy, or if it is merely a rhetorical tool to make it look like Washington isn't simply abandoning Afghanistan. The government in Kazakhstan also is fond of proposing grand schemes, on which follow-through can be lacking.

At the edge of what is supposed to be Aktau City stands a monument commemorating President Nursultan Nazabayev's ribbon-cutting of the project. But the monument is dated 2007, and the subsequent financial crisis slowed down Aktau City's construction: there is still almost nothing there, and even the monument is crumbling, large tiles already having fallen off.

The gulf between the government's lofty rhetoric and Kazakhstan's often difficult reality was perhaps illustrated most vividly in the nearby oil town of Zhanaozen, where in December labor protests erupted into violence which left 17 dead, according to official figures. The episode has for the first time exposed the government's vulnerability to social discontent and highlighted the fragility of its ambitious development schemes. Trials of both protesters and police are currently ongoing in Aktau.

Rubber May Take Crown as King of Ivory Coast's Economy

Austin Merrill — Fri, 18 May 2012 18:14:04 +0000

Austin Merrill, for the Pulitzer Center

Cocoa may not reign supreme for long. Ivory Coast is the planet’s largest producer, last year putting out a record 1.5 million tons, just under half of the world’s crop. But rubber is now coming on strong in the country, and we saw surprising evidence that it may not be long before rubber overtakes cocoa as king of Ivory Coast’s economy.

Vast swaths of forest have been cleared around the port city of San Pedro to make way for young rubber trees, which are planted in perfect rows and start producing at about seven years of age. Just north of town we spent a morning with Youkou Gnagbi, a 58-year-old planter who has four hectares of farmland. Nearly all of it used to be cocoa and coffee, but he’s been slowly converting all his acreage to rubber.

“I still have some cocoa, but I’ve been mixing rubber trees in with it,” he told me. In a few more years, once those rubber trees have matured, he’ll cut down the rest of his cocoa. His coffee trees are long gone. “Rubber produces more than cocoa or coffee, and the work is easier,” he said. “Soon rubber will replace cocoa country-wide.”

It was a theme we were to hear all over the west. In Ivory Coast cocoa is harvested about six months of each year. Rubber brings about the same price per kilo to the farmer, but it produces 10 months of the year. And if rubber plantations are well-maintained, the trees can produce for many years more than coffee or cocoa trees, which give out after around 25 years.

Gnagbi is busy passing along his rubber knowledge to his sons and nephews, who followed along as we took a tour of his plantation. The rubber trees all swayed slightly to the south, reflecting the prevailing wind patterns in the area. Each tree had a black plastic cup affixed to its side a few feet off the ground, and a young man who worked as a tree bleeder went from tree to tree, cutting diagonal lines into each tree’s bark. At a quick glance it could have been a grove of maple trees in Vermont, tapped for syrup. A milky sap ran down into the cups, where it would be left to solidify over the course of three days before being gathered in piles of baseball-sized plugs of pure rubber to be sold to local processing plants.

I bent down to pick up a plug that lay at the base of one of the trees, but all the men around me shouted a warning: “Don’t touch it—it stinks!"

I dropped the plug and smelled by fingers. The stench was quite bad, but there was a faint hint of the smell of a new car tire in it. The man walking next to me flashed a gap-toothed smile when he saw my reaction.

“It really does stink,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “But it smells like money.”

Rubber May Take Crown as King of Ivory Coast's Economy

Austin Merrill — Fri, 18 May 2012 18:14:04 +0000

Austin Merrill, for the Pulitzer Center

I bent down to pick up a plug that lay at the base of one of the trees, but all the men around me shouted a warning: “Don’t touch it—it stinks!"

“It really does stink,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “But it smells like money.”

Ivory Coast: Where Does Chocolate Come From?

Peter DiCampo — Thu, 17 May 2012 16:26:34 +0000

Peter DiCampo, for the Pulitzer Center, Ivory Coast

The story begins innocently enough. Fertile soil attracts labor from far and wide. Factories provide employment, farmland is plentiful, and for a time the economy of Ivory Coast booms as a much-desired commodity – cocoa – is exported across the globe.

But the story of cocoa has never been an innocent one. So valuable in the Aztec court that it was used as currency, blood has been shed over cocoa profits since Europeans first developed a taste for chocolate. Over the past two centuries, farming and production have moved from country to country, from the Caribbean to West Africa, always dependent on rich farmland and cheap labor.

Ivory Coast’s ethnic strife is the most recent chapter in cocoa’s troubled history. Initially migrant workers from across West Africa were invited to the country to share in its farmland, helping Ivory Coast become the world's top producer. (Today it provides some 40 percent of the world's crop.) But once the economy went sour in the 1980s, cocoa profits were more jealously guarded. Land disputes erupted, sparking xenophobic violence that became a 10-year civil war.

With the cessation of post-election violence last year and the ascendance of a new government, the war is supposedly over. But new attacks are still carried out between rival factions; thousands of people still live in refugee camps; and those who return to their destroyed homes swear vengeance. As always, cocoa production continues through the strife — but reconciliation and a true end to conflict may still be a long way off.

Nicaragua: LGBT Community Threatens to “Out” Lawmakers in Fight for Equal Rights

Tim Rogers — Wed, 16 May 2012 21:30:47 +0000

Tim Rogers, for the Pulitzer Center, Managua, Nicaragua

Nicaraguan politics has always been a bareknuckle, anything-goes affair. But gay rights activist Marvin Mayorga is about to deliver a political punch that some consider a low blow even by Nicaraguan standards.

In an effort to pressure—or perhaps embarrass—Nicaraguan lawmakers who have excluded homosexuals, bisexuals and transgender individuals from the country’s new family code, which defines a family as the legal union between man and woman, Mayorga says he is going to “out” some 20 congressmen whom he claims are “living secret lives” as closet homosexuals. Mayorga, who represents an activist movement known as the Sexual Diversity Initiative for Human Rights, says he will release his list on Thursday morning during a protest in front of the National Assembly, where LGBT activists have been protesting to little effect for the past month.

Officially, none of Nicaragua’s 90 lawmakers identify as homosexual, bisexual or transgender. But according to Mayorga, more than 20 percent of legislators—mostly men, he says—are not being entirely forthright about their sexual preferences. He says many of the lawmakers on his list are married with families of their own.

Mayorga, too, is not being entirely forthright when it comes to explaining how he compiled his list. When pressed on the matter, Mayorga refused to explain the methodology of his list-making, limiting his response to oracular comments about how his sources in the gay community have provided information on which lawmakers are “living secret lives behind their mansion gates.”

Mayorga says his group’s tactics are fair play in a political system where lawmakers have all the power to determine the rights of the LGBT community and refuse to listen to any input from those whose lives they are affecting with their legislation. He says lawmakers are “public figures” who should be subject to full disclosure, not only of their personal finances, but also of their bedroom behavior. But mostly, Mayorga admits, his “outing” campaign is a guerrilla politics tactic to use the power of information—or perhaps the power of defamation—in a human rights struggle that has made no forward motion after a month of respectfully waving rainbow flags in the street outside the National Assembly.

If lawmakers are going to meddle in the family lives of the LGBT community, Mayorga says, then the least they can do is return the favor.

“Some could possibly see this is a form of blackmail, but if we are all equal under the law in Nicaragua, then why are politicians legislating against the gay minority?” Mayorga demands.

In a conservative society where political and religious discourse have become helplessly intertwined, many Nicaraguans do object to the threat of publically sweeping out the
congressional closet. Congressman Eliseo Núñez, head of the opposition Nicaraguan Democratic Bloc (BDN), says the LGBT community is wrong to target a handful of lawmakers for representing the will of Nicaragua society, which he says is “80 percent conservative.”

“The gay community has not done enough to permeate the public opinion of society, and that is reflected in the National Assembly,” says Núñez, who says he’s not gay.

The lawmaker notes that some progress has been made to address the individual liberties of the LGBT community. For example, in 2008, the National Assembly repealed Article 204 criminalizing homosexual relations. Other recent advances under the Sandinista government, which seems to be fighting a constant internal conflict between the revolutionary ideals of its youth and the conservative convictions of its old age, are new public health regulations to protect everyone’s access to health services, regardless of sexual orientation, and the creation of a special ombudsman’s office for sexual diversity.

But those advances have come more as hesitant concessions than revolutionary strides. And virtually nothing has been done to address old societal prejudices—even in the National Assembly.

“Even if the gay community outs all 90 lawmakers on Thursday, they aren’t going to win swing the vote in their favor,” Congressman Núñez says. “In fact, they’ll probably just polarize society even more.”

The LGBT community is already divided on the outing efforts. “I think that forcing lawmakers out of the closet is absurd,” says “Maria, who wished to remain unidentified. “I am a lesbian and I want to be able to tell the world that without being blackmailed into doing so. I don’t know which lawmakers are gay, but I respect their right to remain in the closet. It took me a long time to come out of the closet and it was painful for me to tell my family.”

Forcing people out of the closet, Maria says, is nothing more than a “gay inquisition” that “violates people’s dignity” and ultimately “makes us in the gay community the same as those who discriminate against us.”

Nicaragua’s forthcoming family code, expected to be passed into law this week, defines families as unions between heterosexuals. It excludes all forms of sexually diverse couples and denies homosexuals the right to get married, adopt children or enjoy any other connubial comforts or tax benefits.

Though gay marriage has never been legal in Nicaragua, rights advocates claim the new family code will only institutionalize old prejudices. For a Sandinista government that likes to gush about how it is restoring people’s rights and promoting revolutionary change, the family code fails on many counts, activists argue.

“Lawmakers have to represent the population, and the population is all of us,” says Samira Montiel, the Sandinistas’ special ombudswoman for sexual diversity. Montiel says she is not swayed by the argument that “Nicaraguan society is not ready for this” because it’s the role of the government to create a legal framework for social inclusion and equality, even if it means going against the conservative tendencies of society.

For Montiel, respecting the rights of the gay, lesbian and transgender populations is about being consistent with revolutionary principles—ones she hopes the Sandinista Front would live up to.

“In Latin America, the principal advances in the area of respect for sexual diversity have come from governments on the left, so we can’t expect anything less from this government,” she says.

Nicaragua: LGBT Community Threatens to “Out” Lawmakers in Fight for Equal Rights

Tim Rogers — Wed, 16 May 2012 21:30:47 +0000

Tim Rogers, for the Pulitzer Center, Managua, Nicaragua

If lawmakers are going to meddle in the family lives of the LGBT community, Mayorga says, then the least they can do is return the favor.

“Some could possibly see this is a form of blackmail, but if we are all equal under the law in Nicaragua, then why are politicians legislating against the gay minority?” Mayorga demands.

“The gay community has not done enough to permeate the public opinion of society, and that is reflected in the National Assembly,” says Núñez, who says he’s not gay.

But those advances have come more as hesitant concessions than revolutionary strides. And virtually nothing has been done to address old societal prejudices—even in the National Assembly.

For Montiel, respecting the rights of the gay, lesbian and transgender populations is about being consistent with revolutionary principles—ones she hopes the Sandinista Front would live up to.

“In Latin America, the principal advances in the area of respect for sexual diversity have come from governments on the left, so we can’t expect anything less from this government,” she says.

Ethiopian Adoption Boom Shadowed by Allegations of Fraud

Kathryn Joyce — Wed, 16 May 2012 20:36:51 +0000

Kathryn Joyce, for the Pulitzer Center

The number of Ethiopian children adopted by families in the U.S., Canada and Europe has increased dramatically, prompting some Ethiopians to dub adoption the country's new export industry. That increase, however, has brought stories of corruption, child trafficking and mounting evidence of fraud. In 2011, Kathryn Joyce accompanied an "adoption searcher"—independent researchers who track down birth families of adopted children—to meet a woman who had relinquished one of her seven children for adoption. She's one of many Ethiopian parents who gave up children to adoption agencies, thinking the children would come back after finishing school abroad. Cases of "child harvesting," or unethical recruitment of children, as well as fraudulent paperwork discovered by adoption searchers have tarnished the reputation of Ethiopian adoption agencies. In retaliation, some agencies threaten adoption searchers with legal action, imprisonment and, sometimes, death.