The Red Market (10 page)

In July 1999 thousands of Falun Gong practitioners registered their protest against the government ban at the Central Petition Bureau, giving their names and addresses along with their concern over their loss of human rights. Hua Chen, who goes by the name Crystal in America, was one of the first to register in Beijing. Just minutes after leaving the government office uniformed police officers cuffed her.

I meet her, ten years after her arrest, in a cramped office of a small Chinese publication that doubles as an activist hangout. Her English is perfect, due to years acting as a translator for a major American firm in Beijing. She looks considerably younger than her age and story of hardship would make me believe. She attributes her health to the daily exercises that comprise the bulk of Falun Gong doctrine.

She was sentenced without a trial to a forced labor camp and routinely handcuffed and beaten by guards who accused her of conspiring to overthrow the government. They released her after a few weeks, but she was arrested again in April 2000 when it was deemed that she had not learned her lesson. This time it would be six months of torture.

“The worst was when the guards put a tube down my throat and forced me to drink a liter of high-density salt water,” she says to me calmly. “They were doing the same thing to other prisoners, but only the ones who were Falun Gong. The drug addicts and thieves were treated much better than we were. They thought that a drug dealer could be reformed, but not a Falun Gong.” The liquid almost immediately sent her into shock as the salt diffused into her body. Later she learned that her cellmate died of the same procedure.

Every few months a doctor at the Gwong Detention Center would summon the three hundred Falun Gong prisoners at the clinic for a checkup. “They would take a vial of blood from each of us then send us back to our cells. The other prisoners were jealous that we were getting medical treatment, but they never gave us medicine. Only took our blood.” It wasn’t until years later that Crystal surmised they were logging her blood into a database for potential harvesting.

She said it was routine for prisoners to be transferred from one detention center to another, so she was never sure who was being executed, who was being set free, and who was just being transferred. “We had no idea what was going on. It was terrifying,” she says.

No one is saying the Chinese government went after the Falun Gong specifically for their organs, but it seems to have been a remarkably convenient and profitable way to dispose of them. Dangerous political dissidents were executed while their organs created a comfortable revenue stream for hospitals and surgeons, and presumably many important Chinese officials received organs.

In recent years kidney transplants in China have tallied almost half a billion dollars in revenue. Much of that money has been coming in as dollars from foreign sources.

Thomas Diflo, director of renal transplantation at New York University’s Medical Center, has long sympathized with the fates of his patients on the transplant list. For years he has sat helplessly as many of them died before they were eligible for a donor organ. But starting in the late 1990s some of his patients who had been stuck on dialysis appeared in his office with brand-new transplant kidneys. Under normal circumstances he would have been aware of any transplants performed in his jurisdiction. Eventually, some of them confided that they had bought donor organs from hospitals that said they used organs from executed Chinese prisoners. The operations had cost as little as $10,000.

When I asked him about his patients’ rationalization for buying organs he wrote to me, “The patients were not bothered by the source of their organs. They had a pragmatic ‘This guy’s going to die, I can be cured of renal failure’ approach.” However, they still needed his postoperative care once they returned to the United States, and he wasn’t sure if it was ethical for him to treat patients who had gone outside the system.

His quandary took him to his hospital’s ethics committee and eventually to testify in front of Congress in 2001 along with Guoqi Wang, the plastic surgeon who had harvested skin from living prisoners. With the international pressure on China, the number of foreign kidney-transplant patients seeking organs from prisoners has declined. However, it is unlikely that the domestic market has changed at all.

“As the number of executions across China appears to be shrinking somewhat, the number of organ transplants seems to be increasing, the number of Falun Gong victims would thus appear to be growing. Foreigners are no longer getting the organs—no doubt because of all the bad PR the regime has received—and it is wealthy Chinese nationals who presumably are the beneficiaries of the new organ order,” wrote David Kilgour in an e-mail.

Kidneys have long been the mascot for organ transplantation. Every human is born with two, but can survive perfectly well with one. When kidneys fail, they generally fail together. Despite their seeming spareness, the organ is not an unproblematic commodity. Organ harvesting industries exploit the bodies of disadvantaged people around the world. In profit-driven markets the poor are exploited and alienated from their flesh; in government-run programs the state takes control of human bodies and erases any illusion of free will.

Like all red markets the trade in internal living organs desperately lacks transparency along the supply chain. In India and Iran (not to mention Egypt, Brazil, and South Africa) brokers manipulate the price of organs so that consenting sellers get the least possible profit for their tissue and sell only in the most desperate situations. In China, identities of organ sources are shrouded in secrecy, but evidence of the secret detention camps and on-demand executions has managed to filter out. If true, it makes buying an organ there tantamount to supporting a revival of the Holocaust. And in the United States the transplant list is so slow, the operation so expensive, and kidney transplants marketed as so necessary that many people feel they have no option but to travel abroad to illicit markets.

While solutions to the overall problem will be complex and nuanced, any plan must include a heavy dose of radical transparency. As we shall see with international adoptions, privacy regulations allow criminal organizations to flourish. Simply opening all records and letting anyone inspect the sources of organs could radically change all organ politics. Since only hospitals can perform the operations, it should be easy to regulate the transaction. Though they would still exist, brokers and middlemen would have less leeway to take advantage of desperate people. China would have to publicly admit crimes against humanity to sell human tissue, and US hospitals that are in the business of buying and selling human body parts would have to be open about where they get their tissue in the first place.

The playground outside Malaysian Social Services (MSS), an orphanage implicated in more than one hundred cases of kidnapping for profit. Though the orphanage ceased its international adoption program in 1998, the police in Chennai, India, are still trying to locate the whereabouts of the missing children. The police say that MSS reaped several hundred thousand dollars in illicit profit for kidnapping children and selling them into the adoption stream.

A
FTER HOURS HUNCHED
behind the wheel of a rented Kia, flying past cornfields and small-town churches, I’m parked on a Midwestern American street, trying not to look conspicuous. Across the way, a preteen boy dressed in silver athletic shorts and a football T-shirt plays with a stick in his front yard. My heart thumps painfully. I wonder if I’m ready to change his life forever.

I’ve been preparing for this moment for months back in my home in Chennai, India, talking to khaki-clad officers in dusty police stations and combing through endless stacks of court documents. The amassed evidence tells a heartrending tale of children kidnapped from Indian slums, sold to orphanages, and funneled into the global adoption stream. I’ve zeroed in on one case in particular, in which police insist they’ve tracked a specific stolen child in India to a specific address in the United States. Two days ago, the boy’s parents asked me to deliver a message to the American family via their lawyer, seeking friendship and communication. But after traveling across ten time zones to get here, I’m at a loss for how to proceed.

The dog-eared beige folder on the passenger seat contains the evidence—a packet of photos, police reports, hair samples, and legal documents detailing a case that has languished in the Indian courts for a decade. There’s a good chance that nobody in this suburban household has a clue. I wait until the boy ambles around to the back of the house, then jog over and ring the bell.

An adolescent Indian girl with a curious smile answers the door. “Is your mother home?” I stammer. Moments later, a blond woman comes to the door in jeans and a sweatshirt. She eyes me suspiciously.

ON FEBRUARY
18, 1999, the day Sivagama last saw her son Subash, he was still small enough to balance on her hip. Sivagama—who, like many in the state of Tamil Nadu, has no last name—lives in Chennai’s Pulianthope slum, a place about as distant from the American Midwest culturally as it is in miles. Children play cricket in bustling streets swathed in the unbearable humidity that drifts in from the nearby Indian Ocean. Despite the congestion, it’s considered a safe area. Unattended kids are seldom far from a neighbor’s watchful eye.

So when Sivagama left Subash by the neighborhood water pump a few dozen feet from their home, she figured someone would be watching him. And someone was. During her five-minute absence, Indian police say, a man likely dragged the toddler into a three-wheeled auto rickshaw. The next day, police believe, Subash was brought to an orphanage on the city’s outskirts that paid cash for healthy children.

It was every parent’s worst nightmare. Sivagama and her husband, Nageshwar Rao, a construction painter, spent the next five years scouring southern India for Subash. The family never gave up hope that he was still out there alive. They employed friends and family as private detectives and followed up on rumors and false reports from as far north as Hyderabad, some 325 miles away. To finance the search, Nageshwar Rao sold two small huts he’d inherited from his parents and moved the family into a one-room concrete house with a thatched roof in the shadow of a mosque. The couple also pulled their daughter out of school to save money; the ordeal plunged the family from the cusp of lower-middle-class mobility into solid poverty. And none of it brought them any closer to Subash.

In 2005, though, there was a lucky break. A cop in Chennai heard reports of two men arguing loudly about kidnapping in a crowded bar. Under questioning, police say, the men and two female accomplices admitted they’d been snatching kids on behalf of an orphanage, Malaysian Social Services (MSS), which exported the children to unknowing families abroad. The kidnappers were paid
10,000, about $236 per child.

According to a police document filed in court, the orphanage’s former gardener, G. P. Manoharan, specifically confessed to grabbing Subash; records seized from MSS show that it admitted a boy about the same age the next day—the same day Nageshwar Rao filed his missing-person report. He was adopted about two years later. The surrender deed, a necessary document that establishes that a mother can no longer care for her child and has relinquished claims on him to an orphanage, which I reviewed along with similar documents for other kids, is a fraud, police say: The conspirators changed the child’s name to Ashraf and concocted a false history, including a statement from a fictitious birth mother.

From 1991 through 2003, according to documents filed by Chennai police, MSS arranged at least 165 international adoptions, mostly to the United States, the Netherlands, and Australia, earning some $250,000 in “fees.”

Assuming the Indian police have their facts straight, the boy his parents seek has a new name and a new life. He most likely has no memory of his Indian mother or his native tongue. Most international adoptions are closed, meaning the birth parents have no guaranteed right to contact their child, and the confidentiality of the process makes it difficult to track kids who may have been adopted under false pretenses.

After Subash disappeared, Sivagama fell into a deep depression. Ten years later, she’s still fragile, her eyes ringed by heavy dark circles. At the mention of her son’s name, she breaks into tears, dabbing at the corners of her eyes with her sari.

“Why should we pay like this,” she pleads, “for what criminals started?”

And why would a crowded orphanage conspire to steal children off the streets? Perhaps Subash was viewed as particularly adoptable due to his light skin and good health.

BACK IN CHENNAI
, I hoped to learn more, and negotiated my tiny black Hyundai past an endless stream of lorries, rickshaws, and stray cattle toward the outskirts of the city, where MSS is located. After the initial round of allegations, MSS closed the orphanage and no longer does international adoptions. However, it still runs several social programs and a school for young children.

I pulled up outside the bright pink building, got out, and peeked through the wrought- iron gate. A man in a crisp white shirt promptly intercepted me and then introduced himself as Dinesh Ravindranath, a name I recognized from police reports that list him as an accomplice in the kidnappings. He said he has been running MSS since his father died in 2006. He’s also its lawyer.

Ravindranath told me that the investigation of his organization—which made headlines in India—has been blown out of proportion; he’s the real victim here. The police, he alleged, have been using their investigation to extort money from the institution. “The law says that we cannot ask too much about the history of a woman who wants to give up her child to adoption, so we have to accept children on faith,” he said.

But surrender deeds obtained during my search bear the signatures of MSS officials alongside those of the suspected kidnappers, who have admitted to handing over multiple children under different aliases. When I pressed Ravindranath about the fees the suspects told police they’d received from MSS, he claimed the situation was misconstrued. “We give the women two or three thousand rupees [about forty-seven dollars] when they come here out of charity, not as a fee for kidnapping,” he said. “This happens everywhere. We are only the scapegoats.”

The problems with adoption are certainly widespread. Over the past decade, scandals in Delhi and the Indian states of Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu have exposed severe breaches of adoption protocol and claims by parents who have lost children to foreign families. The promise of lucrative adoption fees motivates orphanages to create a steady supply of adoptable children. It costs about $14,000 to bring a child to the United States from India, not including the standard $3,500 fee to the orphanage. In the most egregious cases, once-respected agencies get wrapped up in child trafficking, and well-meaning American families never realize they’re not adopting a child—they’re buying one.

The scandals aren’t limited to India. In 2007 employees at the French charity Zoe’s Ark were arrested trying to fly out of Chad with 103 children they claimed were Sudanese war refugees; police later determined that most of the kids had been stolen from families in Chad. In China’s Hunan province half a dozen orphanages were found to have purchased nearly one thousand children between 2002 and 2005, many of whom ended up in foreign homes. In the spring of 2008 an ABC News team discovered that some institutions in the region were still purchasing children openly for $300 to $350.

In 2006 celebrity watchers were riveted by Madonna’s adoption, from a Malawi orphanage, of David Banda, a child who is not, in fact, an orphan. In January 2009 workers from the Utah adoption agency Focus on Children pleaded guilty to fraud and immigration violations; according to a federal indictment, they had imported at least thirty-seven Samoan children for adoption after misleading the birth parents and telling prospective adoptive parents that the kids had been orphaned or abandoned. After an earthquake turned much of Haiti into rubble, several members of an Idaho-based Christian church group were arrested trying to take children out of the country without permission.

“This is an industry to export children,” says Sarah Crowe, UNICEF’s media director for South Asia. “When adoption agencies focus first on profits and not child rights, they open up the door to gross abuses.”

The Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption, which addresses this type of criminal exploitation, was ratified by fifty countries—the United States signed on in 2007—but the pact is toothless, according to David Smolin, a law professor at Alabama’s Samford University who has adopted two children from India. “The Hague itself has the weakness of relying on [the] sending countries to ensure that the child was properly relinquished,” Smolin told me via e-mail. “Receiving countries cannot afford to simply take the sending country’s word.”

Smolin should know. His adopted kids were placed in orphanages in Andhra Pradesh by their birth mother to receive an education—a practice not uncommon among India’s poor. But the illiterate mother was tricked into signing a surrender deed at the outset and was later turned away when she tried to regain custody. The girls, nine and eleven, had been coached to say their father was dead and their mother had given them up, but they eventually told the Smolins the truth. The American adoption agency refused to look into the matter. By the time the family tracked down the birth parents, six years had passed, and the girls had acclimated to life in Alabama. Although the kids remain here, the Smolins opened up the adoption; they have traveled to visit the Indian family and kept in regular contact.

Smolin has since retooled his legal career, and he is now among the nation’s leading advocates of adoption reform. The Hague convention’s biggest flaw, he notes, is that it doesn’t cap the adoption fees paid by rich countries. “If you don’t sharply limit the money, all of the other regulations are doomed to failure,” Smolin says.

Police, lawyers, and adoption advocates in India echo this sentiment. “If you didn’t have to pay for a child, then this would all disappear,” says Deputy Superintendent S. Shankar, the lead investigator in Subash’s case who requested that his full name not appear in print.

When the Chennai police first linked Subash to the United States based on MSS documents, they called Nageshwar Rao into the station to identify his son from a photo lineup. He quickly pointed to a snapshot police say they recovered from Ashraf’s orphanage file that had been taken just days after he had been admitted. Subash was lying on a comfortable bed, dressed like a Western child, recalled Nageshwar Rao, as he reclined on a plastic deck chair in his cluttered abode flanked by Subash’s teenage siblings Sasala and Lokesh. “Even after almost six years, I recognized him immediately,” he says.