| January 4th, 2005 06:47 PM |
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| kath |
Reuters
Jan 4, 2005 — By Thomas Atkins
GENEVA (Reuters) - The United Nations said on Tuesday it was concerned children orphaned or separated from their parents by Asia's tsunami may be falling prey to criminal gangs bent on selling them into slavery.
The U.N. said it had received reports of adults posing as foster parents and children being shipped from Indonesia to Malaysia for sale, adding to worries about a "tsunami generation" of children also under threat of disease and hunger.
U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF) officers were alarmed when a colleague in Kuala Lumpur received an unsolicited mobile phone text message offering children to order, UNICEF spokesman John Budd said by telephone from Jakarta.
"Three hundred orphans aged 3-10 years from Aceh for adoption. All paperwork will be taken care of. No fee. Please state age and sex of child required," the message read.
Although the message mentioned no fee, Budd said: "If you read that text message, and if it is true, then either they have 300 orphans for sale or they have the capacity to seize children according to orders received."
Children account for at least a third of the 150,000 people killed by the Dec. 26 tsunami. The killer waves ripped children from their parents' arms, battering some to death and leaving others to survive alone.
"SHATTERED LIVES"
"Dec. 26, 2004, is a day that will be remembered for broken homes, shattered lives and a generation haunted, and when we think of children, we think particularly of what the trauma will mean in the coming years," said Wivina Belmonte, a UNICEF spokeswoman in Geneva.
Aid workers in tsunami-hit countries hope to head off outbreaks of diarrhea or measles, which can kill children or weaken them so they succumb to other ailments.
Many children were in a state of shock after losing parents or siblings and needed psychological counselling, said Belmonte.
"We probably underestimated the impact on children. Many people are already talking about the tsunami generation," she said.
"Children were not able to cope with the rush of water in the first days, and since then, they are the first hit in terms of poor access to water and poor access to food, so we suspect that the numbers … of fatalities will rise."
Up to half the population in some affected areas is under 19.
Belmonte praised Thailand for reopening schools soon after the disaster, saying they were the ideal place to deal with the trauma.
"Part of survival is making sure that they deal with the nightmares, they deal with trauma, that they can deal with what it means that their parents and brothers and sisters aren't around," Belmonte said. (For more news about emergency relief visit Reuters AlertNet www.alertnet.org email: [email protected]; +44 207 542 2432)
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| January 4th, 2005 08:23 PM |
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| M.O.W.A.T. |
The more I hear about people like this, the better I like my dog. |
| January 4th, 2005 08:43 PM |
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| kath |
ain't it da truth???????
scumsuckers....now they say a child has been taken from the hospital, possibly by a pedophile..... |
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