In the Country of Georgia, Babies were Stolen and Sold For International Adoption

“In the summer of 2016, a woman died in the Georgian capital Tbilisi, whom Tamuna Museridze believed to be her mother.

The mourning ritual lasted three days, relatives came and went, the priest said a prayer. They sat in a circle with the coffin in the middle.

Three weeks later, Museridze was opening cupboards and drawers in her parents’ empty house, when she took a white box from the shelf and found old passports and photos of her grandfather. Yellowed memories of a bygone era. Leafing through the pages, she came across her birth certificate. She read her parents’ names and her own, but then she was taken aback: Why was the date of birth wrong?

An old memory that she had long since buried surfaced – words that a neighbor’s child once shouted at her in an argument: «You don’t even know who your mother is.»

She called her aunt, her father’s sister. There is something strange going on here, she told her on the phone. But her aunt hung up without a word.

Eight years have passed since Museridze opened that box and changed not only her own history, but that of tens of thousands of people in Georgia. Parents, brothers, sisters – families, from Tbilisi to the Black Sea.

Museridze, 39, sits in a café in the center of Tbilisi, wrapped in a camouflage jacket with a pink fur collar that is nestled around her neck. She is a TV presenter and influencer – the outfits and bags she wears are sent to her by companies that pay her to advertise their products on Facebook and Instagram. This is how she finances her life and her fight for justice.

She lights a cigarette. «My whole life was based on a lie,» she says.

At first, Museridze thought this lie only concerned her – a secret, the kind every family has. But the deeper she dug, the darker the abyss into which she was gazing became.

For decades, mothers in Georgia had their newborns taken away from them and sold. Thousands of babies disappeared and became victims of illegal adoptions.

And everyone looked the other way.

Nobody wanted to know what was really going on in these maternity hospitals; how doctors colluded with dubious adoption organizations and sold children all over the world with forged papers; how obstetricians, cabdrivers, judges and politicians colluded to enrich themselves from child trafficking.

Until Tamuna Museridze opened the white box in her parents’ home and realized that the woman in the coffin, whom she had mourned in 2016, was not her biological mother.

«Entire generations in Georgia go through life bent over,» says Museridze, stirring four lumps of sugar into her coffee. They are weighed down by shame.

«Mothers are ashamed because they didn’t manage to fight for their children, and adoptees are ashamed to look for their biological parents because they were told they had to be grateful.»

Some mothers willingly gave up their children because they could not afford to raise a baby or did not want to, «but the majority of all adoptees were stolen.»

In 2017, Museridze created a Facebook group called «Vedzeb,» I’m searching. She wanted to create a support group for other adoptees. In 2021, she founded an NGO and became the face of a movement.

Eight women now work for the organization on a voluntary basis and comb through hospital archives. They have brought together over 1,000 families that were torn apart decades ago. Her Facebook group has over 250,000 members – in a country with a population of 3.7 million.

There are new entries from mothers looking for their children every day. For years, shame has kept their mouths shut, but now they are beginning to speak.

Some of the events date back to the 1980s, others happened shortly after the turn of the millennium. «The trade in children,» says Museridze, «has been going on for over 60 years.»

Her relatives begged her not to talk about this publicly, saying it would tarnish the family’s reputation. But there was no turning back.

In the café, she rolls up her sleeve and points to a tattoo on her forearm: «I bring drama,» it reads.

Her godmother told Museridze that she would never find her mother, even if she searched the entire world.

And so she began, following every lead, from the Georgian countryside to the U.S., and fell into a maelstrom of hope, fear and despair, until in the fall of 2024, six months after our meeting in the café, she would stand before the woman who gave birth to her.

She would look her in the eye. Stretch out her hand. Mother.

But the woman would shout at her.

 «I’m from here and yet I’m not.»

It is shortly before Christmas 2024, a late afternoon near Larnaca, a port city in Cyprus, 1,200 kilometers from Georgia. Panagiotis Souroukli, a law student, is sitting at a beach bar ordering coffee, the waves lapping lazily on the shore.

The 21-year-old Souroukli, grew up and went to school here. His parents are from a village outside the city.

He sports a carefully trimmed beard, speaks Greek and loves souvlaki. But he has sensitive skin and hates the sun. He doesn’t like beaches either, he says, he prefers the winters.

«I’m from here and yet I’m not.» He has the outline of Georgia tattooed on his right forearm.

The babies who were snatched from their mothers have long since grown up and are scattered all over the world, in Russia, the U.S., Germany or here in Cyprus.

For months, the NZZ tried to contact people affected by the adoption scandal.

Some don’t want to know anything about their true origins and keep the box of their past firmly closed. Others have suspected that something is wrong with their story for years. They sit in front of their computers, send DNA samples around the globe to search for relatives and despair over not knowing what really happened.

Souroukli is one of over a dozen Georgian children who arrived in Cyprus after the turn of the millennium. His adoptive mother Katja was unable to have children of her own after a miscarriage, so she and her husband Andreas decided to adopt.

As a teenager, Souroukli started asking questions. He wanted to know why his biological mother hadn’t kept him and was looking for clues. During the pandemic, he teamed up with Georgian journalists and found answers: «My life began with a crime.»

According to what Souroukli knows today, he was born in Georgia in January 2003 and was taken away from his biological mother, «who must have been from the area around the border with Abkhazia,» as an infant. He spent the first 15 months of his life with a stranger in Tbilisi until he was handed over to his Cypriot parents at the beginning of May 2004 in a hotel in the capital, which is now home to a cosmetics store called «Black Market.»

«There is a photo of this moment when everyone is gathered together,» says Souroukli: his adoptive parents Katja and Andreas, the babysitter from Tbilisi «and the people from the Frank Foundation,» the organization that officially arranged the adoption. They procured the papers containing Sourouklis’ surname, Rukhadze, and the address of his birthplace.

Both of them forged.

«A large number of children were shipped from Georgia all over the world via this organization, including to Russia and from there to the U.S.,» says Souroukli, «a network of fraudsters who made money from child trafficking.»

He is not afraid of the truth, on the contrary. He has that in common with Museridze, the influencer: The injustice that happened to them as babies drives them.

«How can you steal children?» asks Souroukli, looking around. The sun has set, the sea lies before him, black and heavy like a carpet. Inside the restaurant, a lone Christmas tree twinkles. «What kind of people sell children?»

Souroukli flew to Georgia for the first time in 2022. He looked at the faces of older women on the streets, «I thought I might bump into my mother at a crossroads.»

Maybe it’s you? Or you? «But she doesn’t even know I exist,» he says quietly.

Since then, he has been to Georgia eight times, sent in DNA samples, found distant relatives, even tracked down the daughter of the babysitter with whom he spent his first months.

«I’m very close to finding my parents,» says Souroukli. He would finally be able to look them in the eye, perhaps return to Georgia, where the winters are colder, just as he likes. But when asked what would happen to his adoptive parents, who have been raising him for 20 years and are now waiting for him to join them at dinner, he goes quiet.

Would they let him go?

Skeletons in Georgia’s closet

It is freezing cold on this March evening in Tbilisi. The protests that will shake the country in the coming months are already bubbling beneath the surface. The Georgians are faced with the decision of whether to tie themselves to Russia or align themselves with Europe. Georgia’s future is at stake.

The 20 women who are now gathering in front of the parliament building, however, are concerned about their past.

They are looking for sons and daughters they thought were dead, born decades ago, lost in the dormitories of Georgian maternity wards. Some of them are carrying transparent folders under their arms, faded files, silent witnesses to a roaring injustice.

At the invitation of a member of parliament, their stories will be heard for the first time today. Inside the building, heavy chandeliers cast their light on carpeted corridors and anxious faces. Now they tell their stories, which begin differently but all end the same way: The heavily pregnant mothers went to the same maternity hospital in Tbilisi where Museridze was born. The children they gave birth to died in the days following their birth, or so they were told.

They now know that they were lied to.

In the Soviet Union, to which Georgia belonged until 1991, birth was strictly regulated. No one was allowed into the delivery room, no husband, no relatives. After delivery, the newborns were separated from their mothers, who only saw them for breastfeeding. This made it possible for doctors to steal the babies unnoticed.

«They suddenly said it was dead,» says one of the mothers with a trembling voice. She had bribed the cleaning lady earlier to briefly hold her child in her arms and had been sure it was healthy.

Tears, reddened faces, murmurs of agreement, then resigned nods.

One woman says she demanded that her dead child be autopsied. She was put off for three months, then the head of the maternity ward called. He spoke of a misunderstanding and said the child had long since been buried.

The women surrounding her make the sign of the cross. ”

****************************************************************************************

“In a report from 2023, the Federal Council admitted that there had been «irregularities» and «abuses» in adoptions from 10 countries of origin, including Sri Lanka, Romania and Chile. Too much attention was paid to the needs of the adoptive parents and too little to the situation in the countries of origin, the government stated.

A group of experts is working on tightening regulations and reducing the number of countries of origin permitted for adoptions. There are apparently also discussions about a complete stop to international adoptions, as is already the case in the Netherlands.

From today’s perspective, it is almost unimaginable how authorities brought children from all parts of the world to Switzerland for decades without careful scrutiny, in the firm belief that they were doing good.

In reality, it was often the other way around: It was not the children who were rescued, whether from Ethiopia or Bangladesh, but the adoptive parents who fulfilled their desire to have children and did not always want to look closely at how their happiness came about.

Museridze races past lonely villages, vineyards, car repair shops, then, suddenly and majestically, the mountains of the Caucasus. A short time later, she is standing in her Gucci sneakers in the living room of an elderly couple in Georgian no man’s land. While Nodari gets up and fetches some liquor, his wife Nana speaks little. Her face, however, speaks of sorrow.

The birth certificate of her missing daughter lies on the table in front of her.

Museridze hands Nana a tube to collect saliva for a DNA sample. Nodari drives ahead and points the way to the old house where his daughter was born 40 years ago, which is now nothing more than wasteland in the middle of nowhere.

The building has long since been demolished, but Nodari, a father without a child, remembers it well: This is where he heard that his daughter had not survived the birth. He runs his hand through his snow-white hair. Is it possible that she is alive?

He thanks Museridze and gets into his car. As he bumps along the gravel roads, exhaust wobbling out, one cannot help but wonder how all these children could have disappeared without anyone having noticed. How is that possible?

Georgia wasn’t the only country in which children were routinely taken. There were the «niños robados» – the stolen children – in Spain. It is estimated that 300,000 illegal adoptions took place in the country, beginning under Franco and continuing until 2001. In Ireland, where illegitimate pregnancies were long considered shameful, over 50,000 mothers were deprived of their children and given up for adoption, until 1998. Similar things happened in Chile and Korea. In Switzerland too, thousands of children were taken away from their parents and raised in foster families. There, too, no one claims to have known about it for years.

Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, babies were sold within the country for the price of 1,500 Georgian maneti, an annual salary at the time.

Later, the business became international and prices rose. Parents paid up to €30,000 euros for a child in the 2000s.”

Frozen Baby?

“«Of course there were parents who resisted and wanted to see their child,» says Museridze. Many were put off, «and if they didn’t give up, an infant’s corpse was taken out of the freezer and shown to the families.»

Various sources reported that they were shown a dead baby. Who would argue with that?

A frozen baby as proof.”

Reunion

“The DNA app, which she opened first thing every morning, reported a match. It was the moment she had replayed over and over again on her hypnotherapist’s couch: What if I find her?

That year, thanks to matching saliva samples, Museridze met one of her second cousins who was living in the U.S. She looked into the faces of relatives she had never known existed. But she couldn’t find her parents.

And she still doesn’t know what happened after she was born. Was she stolen or willingly given up for adoption?

«The saddest moment in my life was when my daughter was born,» Museridze says as her voice falters. «I looked at her, a small, helpless creature. And I realized that I was alone when I was born – with no one to hold me when I cried.»

She says this in the parking lot behind the hospital in Tbilisi. The place where her mother gave birth to her 40 years ago.

«It’s scary to know that babies were sold here,» says Museridze, looking around. A circular saw screeches in the background as the wind picks up.

The building she was born in was demolished long ago. Today, cars are parked where men once waited, unable to join their wives in the delivery room.

They wrote down the names and dates of birth of the children they never met in paint. Their writing is still visible on the weathered walls today. «Samo,» it says in yellow lettering, and next to it in black: «Saba Sabashvili, born May 16, 2006.»

Museridze points to a brick building with crumbling walls, where the hospital guard used to live. According to her, he’s the one who signed the documents for the babies who were stolen from the maternity hospital. «He pretended to be the children’s father,» says Museridze.

She walks around the house, steps in front of a barred window and knocks on the pane until an old woman with narrow eyebrows opens it. The security guard no longer lives here, she says, he lives around the corner, next to the bakery.

Yet another trail to follow, like thousands of others in the past.

Once there, she opens a gate to an inner courtyard. Soviet-era cars are rusting in the corner, a dog barks until the residents come out of their houses: a woman in slippers with a golden buckle and two men, one with a smoldering cigarette between his lips. His father had worked in the maternity hospital, the man says, «but he did not sign any documents.» The woman in the slippers adds that she was also employed there as a midwife.

Museridze asks if she had heard about the stolen babies.

The woman touches her chin as if deep in thought. Her nails are painted silver. She heard that children had been sold there. «But that was before I worked there.»

And perhaps this is the answer, in all its banality, to the central question of how children could disappear unchallenged.

The answer wears slippers with a golden buckle, stands in a backyard between rusty Ladas and a barking dog, has silver nails and does what she has done all her life. She looks the other way.

Months pass before Museridze opens a garden gate to a house in Sugdidi, a small town in western Georgia, on a late summer’s day last year and embraces a 72-year-old man she has never seen before, a former dancer at the Georgian State Ballet, Gurgen Khorava.<

«I was,» she would later write on Instagram, «amazingly calm that day.»

Khorava is her father.

Eight years have passed since Museridze opened the white box in her adoptive parents’ house and plowed through the history of her country with her research.

Now they look at each other, laugh and look for familiar features in the creases of their faces. They spend the whole afternoon together, Khorava plays the accordion, Museridze laughs into her camera and posts videos on Facebook.

She finds out that her father didn’t know he had a daughter. Museridze was the result of a fleeting affair with a woman he lost sight of.

After that, we can no longer reach Museridze. She does not reply to our messages. She posts pictures with new cousins, hugs her half brother, in between photos of Armani shoes and videos of demonstrators in the streets of Tbilisi protesting against the Putin-friendly government.”

In Georgia, babies were stolen and sold for adoption for decades

[NZZ 1/31/25 by Pascal Amri and Sacha Batthyany ]

REFORM Puzzle Piece