SOCIETY-SERBIA: Children of War Look For a New Home

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Jan 30 2004 (IPS) - Marija is smiling for the photograph as her father hugs her and other family members look on.

“That’s my family, with grandpa visiting,” 12-year-old Marija wrote on the back of the photograph taken last summer in Germany where she has lived for the past five years.

The photograph was sent to the Team for Foreign Adoptions in the Serbian Ministry for Social Care as part of annual feedback from Serbian children adopted by foreign families.

Many of these are children orphaned in the course of the wars that tore former Yugoslavia apart in the 1990’s and left more than 250,000 dead on all sides – Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks.

More than 2,000 Serb children from Croatia or Bosnia orphaned during the wars were brought to Serbia in the 1990s. Many had no relatives there, and knew no one. Most were taken into social care institutions.

“There was a wave of interest among people from abroad in those years and hundreds of children were adopted,” says Nada Djuretic from the Team for Foreign Adoptions. The team gets annual reports from more than 600 children, but there is no central record on how many were adopted.

Djuretic says about 200 applications are pending from people who still want to adopt Serbian children. The applicants are from France, Switzerland, Greece, Cyprus and the United States.

“It is good to secure any kind of future for the children as it is not very bright for them here,” says psychologist Milena Stojanovic from the Team. “First we approve adoption into families of Serb origin who live abroad, but then also to the others. However, there are many people who oppose our work.”

Several groups out to maintain traditional Serb values oppose foreign influence, including adoption of Serb children by foreign families. They are backed by the nationalist-oriented Serbian Radical Party and the conservative Serbian Orthodox Church.

“If they go abroad, Serb children lose their origin, as they live outside tradition and Serb values,” historian Jovan Babic from the Serbian Radical Party told IPS. He shares the opinion of conservative groups who say Serbs are “shrinking” due to a low birth rate. More than a third of Serbia’s 7.5 million people are over 65.

Life is not easy for many Serbian children. Of the 1.9 million below 18, some 400,000 live on the verge of poverty, according to a recent study by the Ministry of Social Care, and Belgrade University.

Children without parents have little hope in Serbia where adoption is not a custom. Orphans are often raised by relatives.

The conservative tradition that “blood is thicker than water” means that many childless couples prefer to stay that way rather than bring “a stranger” into the family. Or, if they are young enough, they divorce and look for another partner in order to get children, care workers say.

Another difficulty is the adoption law that has not been changed for decades, says Zoran Milacic, head of the Belgrade Centre for Parentless Children.

The present law gives the children the right to know at age 16 who their biological parents are. “Many people who want to adopt children fear what might happen in their families some time in the future, with the turmoil the truth can bring,” Milacic says. “Few opt to tell their children that they were adopted.”

Only 80 children were adopted from this centre last year, and only 180 children were adopted in all of Serbia in 2002. More than 1,622 parentless children in Belgrade could be adopted. But they get little more than the care offered at such centres.

Children at such centres are later transferred to one of about 40 schools. But most remain marked as children who grew up in care centres.

The experience of neighbouring countries is discouraging local authorities from amending the law or encouraging adoption of Serb children abroad.

Thousands of Romanian orphans were adopted by foreign families after the fall of communism, Milacic says, but the practice was suspended in 2001 following reports of abuse involving children.