Mali: Children kidnapped to be adopted in France
Our fellow journalists at Le Monde Afrique , Laureline Savoye and Morgane Le Cam, have investigated for five years, with the cooperation of Kaourou Magassa, journalist for TV5 Monde, on the association Rayon de soleil de l'enfant etranger (RDSEE), the one of the largest approved adoption organizations in France and which is said to have been behind the adoption of more than 7,000 children around the world in the 1990s and against the wishes of biological families.
Mali, the Central African Republic, Madagascar, Haiti, Peru, Romania. So many countries affected by potential child thefts in the 1990s.
According to two journalists at Le Monde Afrique, the French organization RDSEE is behind the theft and adoption of children around the world.
A real child trafficking that would finally interest the French justice
On September 6, 2022, the Paris court finally called for the opening of an investigation for "concealment of fraud" after the filing of a complaint in June 2020 by nine French people adopted in Mali against their adoption organization and their former correspondent in Bamako: RDSEE and Danielle Boudault.
According to these complainants, the French organization, which is still approved by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Bulgaria, Chile, China, South Korea and India, would have "implemented schemes to allow the circumvention of the law in the aim of having them adopted in France, between 1989 and 1996” , reports AFP, “thus deceiving their parents, biological as adoptive”.
According to the investigators, the association “would have promised (to the biological parents) a temporary stay in France for the children”, and to the adoptive parents “RDSEE would have assured that the young Malians had been abandoned by their families of origin”.
" Archives show that French consulates and ambassadors alerted the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as early as the end of the 1980s about the association's questionable procedures, but the alerts were completely ignored," explains Morgane Le Cam, who indicates that " the Ministry of Foreign Affairs continued to issue visas to children adopted via RDSEE even though these children were not adoptable and illegal, according to the Malian authorities”.
The story of Marie Marre
Marie Marre , a doctor, fought for years to gather as much information as possible about the association's methods. Born in Mali, she was adopted in 1989 by a Norman couple.
On June 8, 2020 , this young woman and eight other French people adopted in Mali filed a complaint with the high court. But on July 7, 2020, the complaint filed for "fraud", "concealment of fraud" and "breach of trust", was dismissed by the Paris prosecutor's office.
"It's a complaint that bothers a lot of people," said Marie Marre at the time.
Although diplomatic tensions between Mali and France have continued to deteriorate for several months, Morgane Le Cam remains optimistic and said: "We have seen that Mali has been isolating itself diplomatically for months now, but our investigation into the adoption international community has little to do with the current drift in Bamako". This investigation could therefore weigh in favor of Bamako and the abused biological families.
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