‘They told my mother I died, but I was stolen and sold’

The second part of an investigation into global adoption examines the possible abduction and selling of thousands of Georgian babies

On a cold December day in 1990, Irma Dvalishvili gave birth to twin girls in the maternity hospital in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. Irma vividly recalls the doctor telling her that both girls were healthy, but the following day the family learned that one of the twins had died.

Different doctors cited different reasons. The hospital initially refused to give the body to the family, but after much pleading a wrapped infant was eventually handed over. Yet no-one checked the baby’s identity.

At the time, the family did not imagine they would ever come to ask whether their child was, in fact, still alive.

Now, 32 years later, Mariam Kobelashvili is searching with unwavering conviction for her twin sister. “If you have ever come across someone who looks like me, I am asking you from the bottom of my heart, please, get in touch,” Mariam said in a recent post on a Facebook group dedicated to reuniting Georgians with children suspected to have been snatched at birth.

The group, called “I Look For,” has allowed families across the nation to join the dots on a nationwide scandal that unfolded decades ago but is only now starting to crystallise.

In a scheme dating back to the 1980s, which seemingly ran to 2005, it’s believed thousands of Georgian babies were wrongly declared dead by hospital doctors and nurses before being sold for adoption on a black market.

The heartbroken families were rarely told in detailed terms why their children had died, and were instead left to pick up the pieces and move on with their lives. Their babies, meanwhile, grew up oblivious to the fact that they had been stolen from their true parents.

It’s only been through “I Look For” that these grieving parents have, many decades later, come to learn about the existence of their children, as confirmed by DNA tests.

‘High price’ for selling babies

Tamuna Museridze, who set up the Facebook group and started the emerging national conversation around baby abductions, says the underground adoption scheme operated in multiple hospitals across Georgia.

Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, boys were typically sold within Georgia itself for 1,500 maneti, the Georgian currency, while girls sold for 1,000 maneti – the rough equivalent of an average yearly salary.

After 1993, the market became global, with rich Western families paying extortionate prices for the kidnapped children, says Tamuna, who is searching for her own biological parents.

“Since 1993, 20-30 babies have been taken out of the country each month,” says Tamuna, citing adoption agency sources in Georgia who did not want to be named.

“As far as we know, the last case occurred in 2005. A high price was the reason they started selling babies abroad. Families from foreign countries were paying around $20,000”.

It was not until the dawn of social media that women across Georgia slowly began to realise that they weren’t alone in their experiences and had likely fallen victim to a nefarious, underground adoption scheme.

For Mariam, she began to investigate her twin sister’s apparent death after the growing avalanche of stories, similar to her own, became possible to ignore.

Upon requesting documents from an agency responsible for registering babies, called the Public Service Hall, Mariam discovered that neither the birth nor death of her twin sister had been recorded.

She also visited the hospital where she and her twin sister were born, but it said all patient records were destroyed after 25 years. This meant there were no documents to review.

Mariam’s suspicions have since been reinforced as she’s come to read more about the illegal adoption scheme, and she now believes that her twin sister was stolen from their maternity hospital.

“It is likely that we have shared the fate of many people who don't know what happened to their family members,” says Mariam.

Her experience is one that has been repeated across the country. Every day, Georgian citizens are sharing their stories on Tamuna’s Facebook group, with people relentlessly searching for their “dead” babies, sisters, and brothers.

When she decided to set up “I Look For,” Tamuna expected only a dozen or so people would join. Today, there are more than 200,000 members, she says.

The group was originally set up to help individuals adopted out of Georgia in tracking down the birth certificates of their biological parents. Yet it soon came to reveal that more than a 100,000 Georgians were searching for “dead” children or siblings believed to have been snatched at birth, says Tamuna.

“We realised that something was wrong when a boy contacted us and said he was adopted, and knew the names of his biological parent,” she adds. “He asked for help. We found the family. The physical resemblance between him and his brother was obvious, but the parents claimed that their son died in a maternity hospital many years ago. We did a DNA test and it was positive.”

This was one of the first cases, but hundreds more followed. So Tamuna continued to dig deeper.

“The doctors kept telling parents that their dead babies were buried in the hospital’s cemetery,” she says. “We contacted each maternity hospital to find out where these cemeteries were located. The investigation revealed that no hospital in Georgia had a cemetery.”

Tamuna’s team later contacted the state funeral bureau, which confirmed that maternity hospitals have never owned separate cemeteries.

Concerned and suspicious parents started to request information about their dead babies from governmental bodies, but they were unable to find any records of their children. Neither hospitals nor agencies were able to provide birth or death certificates.

Back from the dead

Natia Jafaridze’s story sounds unbelievable, even to her. “I am happy, I found my family, but it’s extremely stressful for me,” she says. “My biological family believed for 45 years that I was dead.”

Although she had known she was adopted for quite some time, Natia only decided to find her biological parents a few months ago, after the death of her adoptive mother.

“My cousin knew my real name, my place of birth, and the names of my parents,” Natia says.

Natia was able to find her family, but they believed she had died 45 years ago in a maternity hospital. Natia’s true father is dead and her mother has Alzheimer’s disease. Natia’s aunt, who resides in Greece, is the only person who has been able to comment on what happened 45 years ago in the maternity hospital of the small Georgian town of Kaspi.

“According to my aunt, the doctors told my mother that her baby had died and they buried it in the hospital’s cemetery,” Natia says. “No one doubted the doctor’s words, and no-one saw the baby’s body.”

This was the story that Natia’s biological parents believed. But in the version told to her adoptive family, Natia was abandoned as a baby.

“My adoptive family paid 600 maneti. If my parents had known that I was stolen, they would have returned me to my biological family,” Natia says.

Panagiotis Souroukli believes he is one of the abducted children who passed through the illegal scheme and was adopted by an overseas family. Now 19, he resides in Cyprus and has known for years that his parents paid $16,000 in 2004 to adopt him from Georgia.

But while he had “official” documents of his biological parents, and even an official Georgian name, these were all threads of a vast web of lies and deception.

“I always wanted siblings, so I decided to find my biological family,” Panagiotis says. But it turned out that the “parents” registered in his documents didn’t exist. He has also determined that there is no record of him in Georgia either – despite spending the first 16 months of his life in the country before his adopted family moved to Greece.

‘Robbed of our families’: the dark side of overseas adoption

Some 200,000 South Korean babies were adopted by families in the US and Europe from the mid-1950s to the late 1980s. Many suspect they were put up for adoption under false pretences and want the Korean government to lift the lid on the “mass child exports”.

As a result, Panagiotis argues that he must have been stolen from his real mother. “I think so, since I don’t exist in the Georgian system. My biological parents don’t exist. My life began in Cyprus when I was 16 months old,” he says.

Tamuna is frequently contacted from abroad. Adopted Georgians ask for help finding their biological parents. Usually, they have all the necessary documents, including their IDs. However, every time Tamuna tried to contact the parents, she was met with a dead end.

In light of the shocking revelations, Georgia’s ministry of internal affairs launched an investigation in September. The probe is being carried out under the first part of Article 143 of the Criminal Code, which refers to the trafficking of minors.

Some of the doctors suspected of being involved in this scheme have already passed away, others have retired, but some are still employed in hospitals throughout Georgia. It’s unknown whether the investigators have questioned them, and whether this scandal will ever be truly solved.

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