Idhanka.com

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Regardless of their motives, members of a U.S. Christian ministry who were arrested while trying to take a group of Haitian children into the Dominican Republic this weekend were in the wrong, a Canadian aid expert said Sunday.

Nine people from New Life Children’s Refuge were arrested and charged with child-trafficking after trying to cross into the Dominican Republic with 33 children late Friday for what members of the ministry said were unspecified “altruistic” motives.

But the head of a Canadian international development organization said Sunday that even if the ministry was trying to help the vulnerable children, there are major problems with the idea of removing young earthquake survivors from their homeland.

“Even if this wasn’t child trafficking, from a child-protection perspective this is wrong,” said Rosemary McCarney, president of Plan Canada, an organization that has been working to improve the lives of children in Haiti for 36 years.

“We should not be removing children from Haiti.”

The leader of the Christian ministry, identified as Laura Silsby, said that the group’s aims were entirely altruistic and that they were only seeking to seek help for the children in the Dominican Republic, CNN reported.

Border police “saw a bus with a lot of children. Thirty-three children. When asked about the children’s documents, they had no documents,” Haitian Culture and Communications Minister Marie Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue said.

Some of the older children had spoken to aid workers and “say their parents are alive, and some of them gave us an address and phone numbers,” said Patricia Vargas, head of an international centre caring for the youngsters.

Vargas said officials at the Haitian Institute of Social Welfare, which deals with adoptions, told her “most of the kids have family.”

Workers from aid groups and other non-governmental and religious organizations have poured into the country in the aftermath of the Jan. 12 quake.

More than 170,000 people are estimated to have been killed in the disaster, leaving hundreds of thousands of orphaned children.

“When there has been an emergency, people’s first instinct is to rush in and help. While they may be well-intentioned . . . it is not the appropriate thing to do in that kind of chaos,” said McCarney, referring to attempts to take the children out of Haiti.

“The wrong thing to do is to try to create permanent solutions for these children at this stage. What we want to do is get these children into safe places in their country.”

She said there were no problem with the Canadian adoptions that have taken place since the disaster, since they had all been in progress before the earthquake struck.

The Haitian government has tightened travel restrictions for children following the quake. Officials said Sunday the prime minister will now have to sign off on every minor’s departure abroad.

Other officials have voiced fears that child traffickers could take advantage of the chaos to slip out of the country with children in illegal adoption schemes.

There is also concern that legitimate adoption agencies may rush to take earthquake orphans out of the country before proper checks have been conducted to confirm their parents died in the quake.

McCarney is urging aid workers to consider the repercussions of removing the children from the devastated country without proper documents.

“What if something happened in downtown Calgary or Saskatoon? How would we feel if well-meaning groups rounded up children that looked vulnerable and took them to Minnesota?” asked McCarney on Sunday. “It’s no different. We’re all parents.”