With the fall of the Ceaucescu regime in 1989, Romania, although newly liberated, became synonymous with the appalling conditions within its State-run orphanages and institutions. In the early 1990’s the international community was galvanised into action to alleviate the worst of the distress. NGO’s and individuals from all over Europe worked hard to fundraise to improve the lot of the orphans, and foreign volunteers worked in many of the orphanages to help with the care of the children.
Do you remember the Romanian orphans? Shaven headed and starving, TV and newspaper images of their emaciated bodies shocked us all in the early nineties following the fall of Ceausescu. Do you ever wonder what happened to them? Did rich foreigners adopt them all and take them away to a life of luxury?
Sadly, most of them are still there, older now but still living in conditions that have scarcely changed since the early nineties. Following pressure from the EU, resources were put into the area of child protection in Romania, but nobody seemed to understand or even care that the so called "Ceausescu's children" were growing older to a point where they were now young adults and were therefore being left behind in the reform process. The Romanian government and the EU effectively wrote off about forty thousand persons in some of the worst institutions in the world. Many of the sights that shocked us so much in the early nineties can still be seen today, with starving young adults living in grossly overcrowded and inadequate conditions. Access to fundamental basic human rights such as education and adequate diet are denied to these victims.
Why has this situation not been resolved? Didn't we send millions of dollars worth of aid to Romania over the years?
All the aid that poured into Romania in the early 1990s provided short-term relief to the residents of Ceausescu's concentration camps, but it did nothing to sort out the long-term future of these innocent victims of a cruel and uncaring regime. For their lot to improve, a huge input of resources and effort would have been required on the part of the Romanian government, but to date this government has done very little in this area. Their preferred option has been to juggle statistics to show progress towards reform, but without actually spending any money or committing any other resources to the problem. In July 2002, at a meeting between FOR and Romanian government representatives in Bucharest, the minister in charge admitted that his government had no budget and no policies for reforms in this area. This admission was in marked contrast to the official government line at the time -- that the problem was well on the way to being solved. The EU, to its shame, accepted the official line and refused to acknowledge that there was a problem, and allowed Romania's accession to EU membership to progress unhindered. Had the EU at that time imposed the reform of these concentration camps as a condition of EU membership, the problem would have been solved by now, and much of the needless deaths and suffering could have been avoided.
Why would the EU adopt such a callous attitude? Surely the European Parliament has a human rights focus? Did they not know of the problem?
The European parliament and the commission have been aware of this problem for many years, but have chosen to ignore it in the headlong stampede to enlarge the EU. Agencies such as FOR and Amnesty International have reported to various arms of the parliament, but enlargement has always taken precedence over human rights issues in Brussels.
Alarmingly, the European Commission appears to have been understating the magnitude of the problem in their reports to the parliament. In February 2005, in the course of a meeting in Brussels between FOR and the Romania desk of the European Commission, we were advised that the problem in Romania was relatively small, and that only 5,000 persons were in institutional care under the ANPH department in Romania. FOR representatives met with Romanian government personnel in Bucharest a month later to try to verify these figures; the Romanian side advised us that 19,000 persons were in institutional care under ANPH alone, and that this figure excluded large numbers of young adults still under the care of the Child protection department as well as those in psychiatric hospitals and under the care of other government departments.
Our estimate is of numbers in excess of 40,000, a far cry from the blatantly misleading figures being quoted by the civil servants in Brussels. In any other business, the personnel involved would be fired if they understated the facts around such an important issue, but in the institutions of the EU no such forms of censure appear to exist.
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