Bangladeshi Children Wrongly Taken for Adoption in Netherlands

“Bibi Hasenaar has had two lives. One began in November 1976, when she was about four, arriving in the Netherlands to meet her adoptive parents. “I remember it vividly. There’s a photo of us at the airport with other children arriving from Bangladesh – it was published in a Dutch paper.” Her older brother Babu was there, too.

Her other life appears only in fragments. She remembers being in a children’s home with another older brother and having her food stolen by older children. “It was not a nice place to be,” Hasenaar says. Her only memory of their mother is her long black hair. But of the flight out of Bangladesh, she remembers every detail. At her kitchen table in the village of Muiderberg, 30 minutes’ drive east of Amsterdam, sipping hot water and fresh ginger, the 51-year-old slowly recounts the long journey that changed her life.

The plane, which felt huge to Hasenaar, who was malnourished and small for her age, was empty save for the four or five children who were being escorted for adoption. Babu was holding a black and white picture of his new family, but, Hasenaar says: “No one explained anything to me; I didn’t know what was happening.” She remembers a constant feeling of shock, interrupted briefly by awe when the plane took off and she realised they were in the sky. The only adult she recognised was an English woman she had seen at the children’s home in Bangladesh, who was there to escort them to their new families. At one point, Hasenaar became hysterical. “They tied me to the seat with a rope because I could not be calmed. I wasn’t allowed to go to my brother in the rows ahead; I just felt so alone.”

At Schiphol airport, things got worse. The children were taken to await the arrival of their adoptive parents. “It was a big room, and I felt very cold,” Hasenaar says. “They wouldn’t let me go to my brother.” To her horror, she soon discovered why: Babu had been adopted by a different family. Hasenaar began to cry inconsolably.

After three days with her new family, she was still in distress. “My new parents got in contact with the adoption agency and said: ‘It’s not possible for this girl to stay here – she is so sad and just wants to be with her brother.’” The couple who had adopted Babu agreed to take her, too.

But Hasenaar says she felt unwanted, both by her second adoptive family, who had only asked for one child, and by her birth mother, who she believed had given her up. Life in the Dutch village was completely alien. “I had to sleep when I wasn’t tired, eat when I wasn’t hungry,” she says. While Babu – who chose not to be interviewed for this article – adapted, Hasenaar says she has always been headstrong. “You can do what you want to me, but I don’t change my mind. So I think that was for my Dutch parents the most difficult part. Family life was awful.”

As a teenager, she strove for independence, taking on numerous part-time jobs. “I was also a little bit … crazy,” she laughs. “I have done things that are not good for you to print.” Even now, Hasenaar seems like a woman determined to enjoy life on her own terms. During a tour of the eccentric property she is renovating with Herman, her husband of 34 years, she says: “It used to be a commune, for people who liked to live off-grid … I would like to do that myself one day.” The huge garden is dotted with chickens and colourful hanging ornaments; in a field behind her house, there are two camels. She shows off a huge scar on her thigh where one of them recently bit her.

Hasenaar left home at 17 to be with Herman, whom she married in 1991. “He saved me,” she says, matter of factly. “And his family were so nice to me; they just accepted me.” She and Herman had children quickly, and Hasenaar was a mother of four by the time she was 26.

Sometime in 1993 – when she was in her early 20s, had two young children, and was working in a bar and studying part-time – Hasenaar began receiving letters from a person in Bangladesh claiming to represent her birth mother. The letters claimed that she had never intended to give her children up for adoption. “There was no internet then, no way of checking anything,” she says. Several letters arrived bearing the notary stamp of a Dhaka-based lawyer, asking for money to help with the case. After posting back the equivalent of a few hundred pounds in cash, Hasenaar heard nothing.

She contacted Wereldkinderen (World Children), the charity that had facilitated her adoption in 1976 while operating under the name BIA. “They told me that my mother was making it up because she was ashamed.” Hasenaar suggested she go to Bangladesh to investigate. “They told me it was dangerous to travel there, especially while pregnant, and that I would be seen by Muslims as an unbeliever. I was young and ignorant, and my adopted parents were always talking positively about the organisation, so I trusted them. I decided it would be unsafe to go.”

The letters stopped. With few options left, Hasenaar focused on raising her family. Then, in the summer of 2017, a friend sent her a link to a documentary. It was about children who had been adopted in the Netherlands, and a man who had discovered he had been taken from Bangladesh without his mother’s consent. “He talked about missing children,” Hasenaar says. “I immediately got goosebumps.”

An elderly woman appeared on screen, holding an old newspaper. Hasenaar could barely take in what she was seeing. “There were at least four children described as ‘missing persons’ in that newspaper. I looked at the pictures and said to myself: ‘That’s my brother.’ And then: ‘That’s me!’ I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”

She dug out her adoption papers, which she had never closely examined before. She realised her date of birth was wrong, and she was listed as having arrived alone. “It felt so surreal,” she says. “All of a sudden, everything changed. I always felt that there was nobody in the whole world who wanted to take care of me, or who was missing me. And I realised, looking at those pictures … my mother, she really was trying to find me.”

Six months earlier, in January 2017, a man named Abdel Kader heard that a documentary crew, alongside a charity, was looking into the possible disappearance of children from Bangladesh’s Tongi region 40 years earlier. Kader knew he had to approach them with his own family’s story.

Tongi, situated on the outskirts of Dhaka, was once home to the Dattapara camp for refugees of the 1971 war. The brutal nine‑month conflict, during which East Pakistan broke away and became an independent state, was one of the bloodiest of the 20th century. It was the result of the Pakistani army’s violent response to Bengalis seeking self-rule, and saw mass rape, ethnic cleansing and airstrikes that razed entire villages to the ground.

By the time Bangladesh had won independence in December 1971, hundreds of thousands had been killed and millions more displaced. To resettle slum dwellers in the capital, three camps were set up; one of these was Dattapara. Conditions at the camp were deplorable, and in 1975 various NGOs – including Oxfam, World Vision and the Salvation Army – arrived to provide aid. In the years after the charities left, the camp grew into a slum, and a sense of despair still lingers today: a high school sits on the mass burial site of a genocide.

In the middle of the small bazaar of Tongi’s Ershad Nagar neighbourhood stands a set of tall iron gates bearing the letters “TDH”. The building, now used to administer ad-hoc health services, such as Covid-19 vaccines, was once the site of a children’s relief programme run by Terre des Hommes Netherlands (TDHn), a European NGO. Local families claim that in the 1970s the programme was used as a cover to kidnap young children for adoption abroad. TDHn denies these allegations, saying it was not and has never been an adoption agency.

After becoming displaced during the war, Kader’s family arrived in Tongi – and never left. They were incredibly poor. There was no chance of employment at the camp, and Kader’s mother, Samina Begum, a widow in her early 30s, had been left to care for three young children. Her situation was distressingly common, and like most of her neighbours, she survived on handouts from local charities, including TDHn, which distributed food and rations from a building inside the camp.

In autumn 1976, when Kader was 16, his mother was approached by men claiming to be TDHn foreign aid workers who told her they ran a children’s home within the camp where she could enrol her two youngest children, Bablu and Rahima, aged five and four. Wary, Begum turned them down, but then different men, some Bangladeshi but one described by Kader’s family as a white man, all claiming to work for TDHn, kept returning with promises. Other mothers had done the same thing, they told her. The children would be fed and educated, they said. The home could provide medical care. TDHn says the organisation did not run a children’s home and did not mandate staff to engage in adoption-related work.

Kader says that after being assured she could visit and that the children would be returned to her when they were older, Begum finally gave in.

The following week, she went to the building where she had dropped her children off, but the guards wouldn’t let her in. Though she was briefly allowed to see Bablu during one visit, the week after that they told her the children’s home was temporarily closed. In the third week, they said her children had been taken to another location. In a state of panic, Begum demanded to see Bablu and Rahima. In response, Kader said she was threatened with a gun and told never to come back. Begum would later learn that her children had been taken to the Netherlands for adoption and now went by their middle names, Babu and Bibi. She never saw them again.

Kader, 63, suffered a stroke in March 2023 that left him unable to move properly and struggling to breathe. But when describing what happened to his mother, fury enters his voice. “Listen, my mother was a fighter. From that moment, trying to find ways to get her children back consumed her life.”

He remembers going with his mother to the police station so she could report what had happened to her children. “She was literally thrown out,” Kader says angrily. “We were poor. It was difficult to get our voices heard.” Undaunted, she approached a lawyer for help, and asked a local journalist to place a picture of her missing children in a newspaper – the one that was featured in the documentary Hasenaar saw.

Samina died in 2008. “My mother was a strong woman, but fighting the system for so long took its toll on her,” Kader says. Once energetic and joyful, she became withdrawn and fell into depression. “She stopped talking and eating. There were days where I couldn’t even recognise her. In the process of losing my siblings, I felt I had lost my mother, too.

“I was only 16 when they were taken. That day changed my life forever,” he says. “My father died during the war, so my mother was all we had. I was a lot older than my siblings and it was often my job to look out for them, so when they were taken I felt partly responsible. There were three of us siblings, and then all of a sudden it was just me. I felt very alone,” he says.

Hasenaar and Kader had their first phone call in 2017. It was a conversation fractured by translation issues, but laden with emotion. Hasenaar wept as her brother told her their mother had died. A few weeks later, the siblings were reunited at the airport in Dhaka. “I couldn’t believe my eyes when I first saw Abdel,” Hasenaar recalls. “He looked exactly like my brother Babu. They even dressed and spoke in the same manner. When we reached the village where I am from, everyone came out to welcome me. They told me how much I looked like my mother, and that made me really happy.”

n finding out the truth about her mother and the circumstances of her adoption, Hasenaar has also unearthed details of a scandal, mired in the turmoil and poverty of Tongi, and decades-old allegations of an adoption ring. Samina Begum was one of dozens of mothers who made the allegations against TDHn. All claim they handed over their children believing it to be for temporary care, only to discover that they had vanished abroad to be adopted by strangers. The charity says it investigated the claims and found them to be “wholly incorrect”, adding that many local people wrongly understood TDHn to be an adoption agency, which it was not. But Begum was seemingly undeterred and is described as having built a coalition of mothers to fight for the return of their children.

“Samina was incredibly brave,” says Sayrun Nisa, another mother who lives nearby and also claims her child was taken. The group of mothers that Begum had convened protested outside TDHn offices. “She knew how to make a lot of noise. She would tell us that we couldn’t just sit by and do nothing. That we had to fight to get our children back,” Nisa says.

The “boarding school scam”, as it is often referred to, is well known to those who work in international child protection. It is a simple, brutal trick played on families in desperate circumstances. “Generally, the scam works best in locations where poor parents commonly send children to a ‘boarding school’, ‘orphanage’ or similar for food, shelter and education, often where the majority of children are there temporarily – a kind of safety net for poor families,” says David M Smolin, an expert on illegal international adoption practices, who lives in Alabama.

Smolin cites examples in Nepal and Cambodia. “Sometimes the parents know the child is going to a foreign country but understand it to be a kind of study-abroad opportunity, and expect that they will have continuing contact.” He knows this because he and his wife decided to adopt two girls from India in 1998. As soon as the girls – then adolescents despite being listed as aged nine and 11 by the adoption agency – arrived, the couple realised from their agitated state that something was seriously wrong. “About six weeks after their arrival in the US, my wife and I received information from another adoptive family suggesting that the mother had not consented and that the father was not – as we had understood – dead,” Smolin says.

They discovered that the children had been taken after their mother placed them in a children’s institution for what she believed was temporary care. But it took six years for the Smolins to establish the truth. “The most shocking thing was that no one seemed to care that our adoptive daughters might have been, in effect, kidnapped,” he says. “The agency did not seem to care, the governments did not seem to care, other adoptive parents did not seem to care, and the psychologist we consulted did not seem to care. It shocked us that you could have stolen children in your home and no one would think that was a problem.”

It was only with the help of the prominent Indian activist Gita Ramaswamy that the Smolins were able to find the girls’ mother, who said that, when she discovered her children were gone and asked for them back, she was told that the orphanage had spent a lot of money on the care of the children, and named an impossible sum that would be required for her to get them back. Of course, this was not correct; but, again, without literacy, lawyers, a certain status in society, she was powerless.

“What happened to us and our daughters profoundly changed our understanding not just of adoption, but the world,” Smolin says. “We realised for the first time the depth of injustice in which some people count, and others simply do not.” The couple helped the girls reunite with their mother, and Smolin has since dedicated much of his career to exposing enforced adoption.

Nigel Cantwell has worked on international adoption for more than 30 years. He identifies the “boarding school scam” as one of a number of methods used to secure illegal adoptions. Others include falsely informing a mother their child is stillborn, obtaining consent by manipulation, falsifying documents, and straightforward abduction.

He says: “From the 1950s to the early 1970s, international adoption was driven by a humanitarian response to the perceived problems of newly decolonised countries, and to war and disaster. But then this saviour ideology was rapidly reinforced – and even overtaken – by the realisation that intercountry adoption was a means of family formation.”

International adoptions from developing countries to the west began to rise in the 70s. “The received wisdom is that there were fewer children to adopt nationally because of better access to contraception, and the diminishing stigmatisation of single mothers.” There was no effective legal framework in place. “It was the wild west,” he says. “Undocumented children were being taken across borders, their identities completely wiped out. The process was increasingly tainted by deliberately illegal, demand‑led, nasty actions.”

Adoption from Bangladesh seems to have mirrored the pattern identified by Cantwell, moving from emergency response to a business model. One horrifying element of the 1971 conflict was the use of ethnic rape as a weapon of war against Bengali women, leaving thousands of forced pregnancies in its wake.

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The government responded by introducing emergency legislation that permitted late-term abortions, and the Bangladesh Abandoned Children Order, which allowed foreigners to adopt the thousands of “war babies” who had been left at orphanages around the country. In 1972, hundreds travelled to do just that, arriving in a chaotic country assembling itself from the ruins of war. Prospective parents would arrive at orphanages and pick their baby from a row of cots.

Within a few years, there were a number of charities formally organising the adoption of Bangladeshi children to foreign countries. Soon, older children were routinely available for foreign adoption, too. Adoptees were often transferred to the care of new parents with little more than a piece of paper confirming their name and orphan status. In other cases, charity workers were apparently open about making up the details of children in their care, to hurry along the bureaucratic process.

It’s hard to establish an accurate number of Bangladeshi adoptions abroad during the 1970s. Children were sent to countries including Canada, the US and the UK. Official figures show that between 1975 and 1979, 454 children were adopted in the Netherlands alone. Many, like Bibi Hasenaar, came from Tongi.

What went wrong with the Dutch adoptions during this period remains the source of major dispute between the former country director of TDHn, Moslem Ali Khan, who also worked for BIA, and the dozens of families who maintain their allegations that he and TDHn stole their children, claims that they both deny.

Several of the mothers still living in Tongi repeat these claims when interviewed for this article. One woman, now 80, says she was tricked into giving her son over to men claiming to work for TDHn, and has not seen him since. Another witness claims to have seen a truckload of children being driven away from Tongi in the summer of 1977 as parents chased the vehicle, crying. One mother claims that her newborn baby went missing weeks after she turned down men claiming to work for TDHn; that she returned from the bathroom to find the baby gone from its cot.”

‘My mother spent her life trying to find me’: the children who say they were wrongly taken for adoption
[The Guardian 8/11/23 by Rosie Swash and Thaslima Begum]

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