First teach Greece to respect children and innocent babies, then come lecture others.
Now, even a summary research will reveal that Greece has not just been a major source for the sale of children, but also a nauseating hub and consumer market for this barbarian criminal practice... Reading the below both makes me want to cry and to puke, honestly.
High time for regime change in the uprooted, zionist- / bankster- / freemason-controlled nation formally known as Greece, I would say. Honest Greek patriots (not zionists masquerading as such) can ask the IRGC's Quds Force for assistance anytime, I'm sure they'll be able to help.
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Mothers forced to sell their children: Mail reveals the distressing human toll of Greece's Euro meltdown
Published: 23:32 GMT, 11 May 2012 | Updated: 12:13 GMT, 15 May 2012
The economic crisis across Europe has perhaps been most keenly felt in Greece, where people have taken to the streets in violent and emotional protests against the austerity measures imposed on the nation.
In this heartbreaking dispatch from the streets of Athens, SUE REID finds mothers who have been forced to sell their own children in the battle for survival.
Once a month, usually on a Saturday, Kasiani Papadopoulou packs a bag with children’s presents and takes the bus from her one-bedroom flat in a dusty suburb of Athens up into the cool hills outside the Greek capital that overlook the sea.
The 20-mile journey is an emotional one for her, but she would not stop making it for anything in the world.
A young widow of 30, she travels to see her two daughters and son — aged 14, 13 and 12. Kasiani was forced to give them away a year ago when her money ran out and she was unable to pay for their food, her rent or send them to school with shoes or books.
Effects of austerity: Juliana Tsivra with her mother Maria. Maria used to work in a bakery but lost her job more than a year ago
At the charity home where the three are now cared for, the children excitedly shout ‘Mama’ as they run down the steps to greet her. Her eldest daughter, Ianthe, hugs her tightly and gives her a kiss.
When, a few hours later, it is time to say goodbye, Kasiani is always close to tears. The youngest, Melissa and Markos, cling to her before she leaves to go home alone.
‘It is not easy for a mother to leave her kids,’ she says to me, her voice cracking with emotion when I spoke to her this week in Athens.
‘At Christmas, at Easter, on their birthdays, I am always so sad because I do not see them. Some people judge me over what I’ve done — even my own family and neighbours — but they do not understand the truth. I’ve done what is best for my children.
‘I cannot count the number of doorbells I have rung of government departments, asking officials to help me and my family. They make promises but do nothing. They have no money either. Our country is in crisis.’
Tough times: Maria Tsvira, pictured with her daughter Juliana, is now forced to use the charity medical centre set up in Athens
Kasiani’s children were born in a country which has been brought to its knees by crushing debt. This was built up by Greece’s huge profligacy after joining the European Union and then milking the system for everything it could get.
The public sector wage bill doubled in the past decade as perks and fiddles reminiscent of Britain in the union controlled 1970s flourished. Paying taxes became optional for the middle and upper classes and corruption was rife.
Until two years ago, the big fat Greek gravy train carried on racing towards the buffers. Even pastry chefs and hairdressers were listed among the 600 ‘professions’ allowed to retire at 50 (with a state pension of 95 per cent of their final year’s earnings) on account of the ‘arduous and perilous’ nature of their work.
Now drastic austerity measures imposed by Eurozone finance leaders mean that benefits, state pensions and pay rates have been pared to the bone as taxes are hiked heavenwards in a last ditch attempt to balance the books and stop the country going bankrupt.
For example, the threshold at which personal tax has to be paid has been reduced to £3,000 a year, while Vat has soared to 23 per cent. There is a new annual levy on private property which costs the average homeowner £1,000 a year.
Sad: Sophia, a child who is now being looked after at the SOS children's refugee in Athens after being abandoned
Even charities, including the one running the complex for 55 children where Kasiani Papadopoulou’s three now live, have been forced to hand over some of their donations to the empty Greek state coffers.
The price of such austerity, say many here in Greece, is too high to pay, because whatever tough measures are introduced, they will never cover the massive national debt of £366 billion, even with the help of the two bailout packages worth a combined £184 billion coughed up by other EU countries, including Britain.
A sign of the Greeks’ belligerent refusal to face up to reality is the rise of a grassroots movement called ‘We Won’t Pay’ that encourages the middle classes to break the law by taking public transport without validating their ticket or driving through tolls without paying. ‘We have already paid through our taxes so we should be able to travel for nothing,’ claims Konstantinos Thimianos, a 36-year-old activist protesting on the streets of Athens.
He wears a yellow vest with ‘total disobedience’ emblazoned on his back and, with other activists, chants: ‘We won’t pay for their crisis.’
Such opposition to the austerity measures is growing. In this week’s parliamentary elections, Greeks rejected the moderate parties that support the hard-line policies imposed by the EU.
Already, one in five adults is out of work, a fifth of Greek firms have closed, the standard of living has fallen by 20 per cent in two years, and the country which created the Olympic Games in 700 BC can only afford to send half of its athletic team to compete in the London Games.
In the leafy suburbs of Athens this week, I watched two smartly dressed elderly men rifling through rubbish bins at the side of a busy road.
One, who said his name was Georges, told me that their state pensions had been cut to £220 a month. He said: ‘We are looking for anything we can sell.’
He walked away sheepishly with a dented silver picture frame he had found in the bin.
Meanwhile, Government health spending has been slashed by a third. This means that medical care is no longer free for those who have not paid full national insurance contributions. Half of routine prescription drugs are in short supply.
No wonder that the queues at the Social Mission, a charity clinic set up this year by volunteer doctors and the Archbishop of Athens in the centre of the city, lengthen each day. In three months, 650 uninsured patients, many of them children, have come for treatment.
Protests: Political instability has resulted in huge social unrest and civil disturbance
One regular visitor is Maria Tsivra, 37, a divorcee and mother of a five-year-old girl called Juliana who needs routine vaccinations and fortnightly doctor’s appointments to treat a throat infection.
Maria is the daughter of an Athenian shopkeeper and used to work in a bakery. She comes from a hard-working family but lost her job more than a year ago, as the crisis started, and she took time off to care for her ill daughter.
‘The financial crisis was just an excuse to sack me. The bakery was facing more taxes and had less customers.
‘I was a victim like thousands of others in other jobs,’ she says in a solemn voice.
She and Juliana are staying for free in a friend’s house. She has no national insurance and no money to pay £40 for an appointment with a private doctor. ‘I cannot afford for Juliana to see the doctor or get her medicines. That’s why I’ve come to the Social Mission.’
More dramatically, she says: ‘I need help, but not as much as some who are even selling their children on the streets.’
Crisis: Greece has been brought to its knees by crushing debt which has plunged it into political and economic turmoil
She tells of a friend, a single mother who lived in a charity shelter with her baby daughter because she had no money and the State would not help.
‘She could not afford to keep her own child and gave her away to a couple who did not have a family of their own.
‘These kinds of things are happening now in Greece. There are many who are suffering and I wonder what the future holds for children of my daughter’s generation.’
The fate of once-booming Greece is changing fast. Soup kitchens are commonplace. The destitute wander the streets.
At three in the afternoon, on the sizzling Wednesday this week, I watched Father John, a 34-year-old priest from the Greek Orthodox Church, presiding over a long queue of Athenians, mixed with African and Arab migrants, in a square off Sophocles’ Street.
Women are ringing churches begging for money to help pay to have their children delivered
They were each waiting for charity workers to give them a bowl of lentils and a piece of bread. This area of Athens was, until a few years ago, a thriving financial sector. It is now home to cheap take-away food stalls and shabby shops offering to buy impoverished Athenian’s gold trinkets and jewellery.
Father John says he has never witnessed such poverty. ‘Only today I was helping a young couple, both 24, who are having their first baby. It is due any time now,’ he explains.
‘They went to the hospital this morning and the doctors said they had to pay a fee for the birth of their child. But they have no money, and can barely pay their rent at a small flat they share with friends.
‘The father used to be a professional footballer, the mother an office clerk. Now they are jobless. The mother suggested to doctors that she had a Caesarean.’
Sad: Father John, a priest from the Greek Orthodox Church, says he has never witnessed such poverty
Such operations are considered emergencies (because they are done to save a baby’s life) and are therefore carried out without charge. So their request for a Caesarean was a way of getting round the rules. However, the doctors refused.
‘They said the Caesarean was unnecessary and she should have a normal birth and pay for it herself. They also warned that she would have to leave the hospital in labour if she did not find the cash to pay.
‘She rang our church in horror and distress. We sent money to the hospital so she can have her baby.’
Church charity workers hand out 2,500 free meals a day in central Athens. Among the throng waiting for Father John’s hand-outs last week was Maria Sissmani, a beautifully dressed 82-year-old wearing designer glasses and with tinted hair.
She worked in Germany as a seamstress in the fashion industry for years and her only income is 208 euros (£172) a month, a pension paid by the Government there.
She gets nothing from her native Greece. Yet she counts her blessings. Her father, who ran a carpentry business, left her an office in a building near Sophocles’ Street where she sleeps on a mattress next to the empty desks. ‘I want to rent the office out, but because of the crisis that is difficult.
No one is doing business so no one needs an office. I have nothing, only debts, and the church told me not to be too proud to join the food queue. I do not feel so bad about it, for I am not alone,’ she says with a sad smile as she looks at the Greek men, women and children, hungrily waiting too.
Across the city, a shelter run by a charity called Klimaka provides meals and an occasional bed to the homeless. Many here are middle-aged and middle class like George Barkouris, a former radio producer and computer engineer.
A divorcee, George worked all his life until the Greek troubles began. When he lost his job because of the cutbacks, he soon ran out of money to pay his rent on a flat in Patissia, a middle-class neighbourhood of Athens. He was reluctant to ask his daughter, a doctor, for help.
‘I walked out of the flat with nothing. For the first week I slept in the park on a bench. It was a terrible shock. Like many Greeks, I felt angry, then depressed. I am 60, and need to work for another five years before I qualify for even a small State pension,’ he says.
‘When I plucked up courage and came here for help I got a big surprise. I found doctors, scientists, all the professional classes, were here, too.
‘Now this charity gives me a bed, and in return, I run their website. But there are plenty like me still sleeping in the park. They are called the ‘new homeless’ who once had money, a lifestyle, a career. Now they are ruined.’
Civil unrest: Pensioners burn emergency tax notices during an anti austerity protest
Just what will happen next is anyone’s guess. At the SOS Children’s Villages, a worldwide charity with a network of homes and social centres in Greece, which cares for Kasiani Papadopoulou’s three children, they believe things will get worse.
Over the past year, 1,000 Greek families have turned to SOS for help, two-thirds with huge money problems.
The numbers are way up and the families from every walk of life. One toddler attending a nursery school where the fees had always been paid by her mother, was recently abandoned in with a note saying: ‘I will not return to get Anna. I don’t have any money. I can’t bring her up. Sorry.’
It is the sort of case where SOS picks up the pieces. The national director of SOS, George Protopapas, predicts: ‘Next year I fear that more middle class families will fall into poverty here. I think this is just the beginning and we will have many knocks on our door.’
As for widow and mother Kasiani, she prays that one day she will be able to afford to get her children back. Her decorator husband, Angelo, died at the age of 47 of pneumonia — at exactly the same time as Greece’s economic problems began.
She took two jobs to make ends meet, one in the local Town Hall and another in a shop owned by a middle-class family in the town. She was cleaning all hours God sent.
Then the work ran out. Cleaners became a luxury.
‘I had to tell my children that I could not afford to keep them. I buy them those little things that only a mother knows they want. I do my best for them when I see them, although I have next to nothing.
‘But my life has no meaning without my children. I blame the Greek government for the catastrophe that has struck our family.’
www.soschildrensvillages.org.uk/donate
Since 1949 SOS Children has been working to ensure that children who have lost their parents through conflict, famine, natural disaster, disease and poverty - can enjoy a family life. Where possible, this is done by working to prevent family break up, but in addition over 78,000 orphaned or abandoned children are cared for by SOS mothers in clusters of family homes in 518 of our unique Children's Villages, in 125 countries around the world. SOS Children's outreach support includes education, vocational training, medical care and community development programmes.
A young widow of 30, Kasiani Papadopoulou was forced to give away her three children a year ago when her money ran out and she was unable to pay for their food, her rent or send them to school with shoes or books.
www.dailymail.co.uk
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Lives for sale: Booming market for Bulgarian babies in Greece
- Dolno Ezerovo quarter, Burgas, south-east Bulgaria: Cutbacks in health and education had damaging effects in rural communities where many Roma live (Photo: Juliana Koleva)
By
Juliana Koleva and Kostas Kallergis
SOFIA, BURGAS, ATHENS, 22. Dec 2015, 09:30
"Ah, don't even ask, in our village almost everybody has left a baby in Greece. I at least managed to buy myself this little house with the bloody money, so we'd have somewhere to live with the kids. I haven't squandered a single lev. But many people here give away babies for the easy money - they drink, they eat, they party. When the money runs out, they just sell the next baby."
This is Stanka, a woman in her 30s from Bulgaria's marginalised Roma minority who admits she sold a new-born boy in Greece a few years ago for €3,500 ($3,700), a crime for which she is currently on trial.
"I regret it all the time and can't stop thinking of that boy, but I was young and stupid. I couldn't imagine any other way to earn some money to feed my other two children, I had no hope," she says, her voice trembling.
"You should have seen where we lived, with my mother and the rest of the family, more than 10 in a room with no glass in the windows, no doors, a dirt floor, no electricity or water. You wouldn't even want to house an animal there."
She starts crying as she recalls how people came to her home from the nearest big town and offered to sell her third baby, which was on the way. Everyone else was doing it. She thought it was the answer to her problems.
Now she lives with her husband and two boys, 10 and 12, in a single-storey house in the same small Roma town of Ekzarh Antimovo, about 40 km inland from the Black Sea port of Burgas. The home is run-down and basic, but for her a huge step up.
Stanka's house in Ekzarh Antimovo, south-east Bulgaria. Bought for €3,500 from sale of newborn boy. (Photo: Juliana Koleva)
Hundreds of women
Stanka is one of dozens of Bulgarian women each year who are known to have sold new babies to couples in Greece desperate for a child of their own, officials say. They suspect the real number is in the hundreds.
Mothers can earn up to €5,000, but sometimes less than €1,000, according to court documents seen by the
Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, BIRN. Middlemen take the biggest cut of what the adopters actually pay.
As Stanka points out, the practice appears to attract little social stigma among Romas, who make up the vast majority of known cases.
A distinct regional ethnic minority with their own culture and language, Romani, they are often poor, jobless and ill-educated. Many live apart in run-down "ghettoes," and face pervasive discrimination.
Anti-trafficking police and prosecutors say it is rare for the mothers, who usually have other children already, to regret their actions, or for them to invest the money in something lasting like a house.
Usually the women, often only 18-19 years old and rarely over 25, decide to sell during an unwanted pregnancy, but more recently police have noticed some who conceive with the sole purpose of selling.
Velichka, a mother of three from the Roma ghetto in the eastern provincial city of Sliven, is perhaps more typical than Stanka. She has no home of her own and no money left from the €1,500 she received for her child - only half what she had been promised.
She earned a two-year suspended sentence in Bulgaria in 2009 for selling her baby in Thessaloniki, Greece, after police were tipped off. She has no qualms in telling her story, though the details she relates paint her as more of a victim than did the account she admitted to in court.
Velichka, who says her only employment has been as a prostitute, now blames her father for forcing her to sell her baby and says he spent the money on gold jewellery and a television. She still lives with her parents.
In Greece she sold a kidney, and in that way, according to police, made the contacts that led her to sell her child a year later.
She reveals her deepest secrets, then asks for money to help her buy medicines for herself and daughter, but finally gives up.
Bulgarian police say they suspect the baby trade with Greece may go back as far as the 1990s, when the collapse of communism in eastern Europe suddenly opened up the borders, but has been growing steadily in recent years, especially since Bulgaria joined the European Union in 2007, making those borders all but vanish.
Roma quarter in Nikolaevo, central Bulgaria, where people live isolated from Bulgarian society: no running water; no electricity; no education; people sleep on the floor, in the mud. (Photo: Juliana Koleva)
Hundreds of women
The traffickers here are mostly Roma men and women who lived for many years among ethnic kin in Greece and have good contacts.
They focus on the Roma ghettoes around the Black Sea ports of Burgas and Varna and in the relatively poor east - the towns of Sliven, Yambol, and Stara Zagora between the coast and the more affluent capital Sofia.
A ready market awaits them across the southern border in Greece where often childless couples are willing to pay to bypass a state adoption system which can leave them waiting seven or eight years.
Greece, unlike Bulgaria, permits private adoptions and thus makes this kind of deal easier.
The Mitera Infant Centre in Athens, Greece's biggest state institution for adoptions, says only one in five of some 500 annual adoptions involve the state. Each year the centre arranges around 35 adoptions but receives 150-200 applications.
Bulgarian authorities say Greeks have been paying up to €30,000 for a girl and €40,000 for a boy. Greek police say adopters pay anywhere from €3,000 to €30,000, with prices down slightly in recent years because of the economic crisis. Four out of five babies up for sale were boys.
"It's not just that the parents want to have a boy, boys are more expensive and therefore the criminal rings prefer them too," said an officer from the Greek police anti-trafficking unit who declined to be named as he takes part in undercover operations.
The young mothers, however, get only a meagre share of this money, Bulgarian police say. The rest goes to traffickers and other intermediaries.
"It is not uncommon afterwards for the traffickers to cheat the women out of their promised money, throwing them €500 or so or even just a ticket home to Bulgaria," says one investigator.
The road routes south to Greece are easy and well-worn.
Traffickers drive the pregnant women across the inner-EU border without passport checks, and if guards do ask the purpose of their trip, they usually cite seasonal agricultural work.
The women, mostly treated as suppliers of goods, are then put up in lodgings they are not allowed to leave until it is time to give birth. After that they return to the lodgings while the deal is finalised.
Doctors, lawyers involved
Stanka relates her experience.
"I was in an apartment with two other pregnant women. I don't even know where they took me, it was a city that began with R I think. I was told not to leave the house as it would awaken suspicions.
But during my stay they didn't treat me badly, perhaps they didn't want me to give up and betray them," she says, in faltering Bulgarian - like many of her peers she attended school briefly and has contact with almost only Roma speakers in her daily life.
"When the time came they took me at the hospital, it looked as if they were familiar with the medical team. After the birth they became rougher - they made me sign some documents that were incomprehensible to me, almost threw the money at me - just half of what we had agreed - took the child and sent me back to Bulgaria."
She and other mothers told BIRN that teams in the hospitals seemed to have been specially organised by Greek members of the trafficker group, and knew what they were involved in.
Bulgarian police and prosecutors say this tallies with their findings.
"The network cannot be organised without doctors, local lawyers and prosecutors sometimes," one officer told BIRN.
The dozen Bulgarian prosecutors and police from the organised crime division who helped with this article all declined to be named because rules forbade them to talk to the media and because exposure might harm future operations.
Once the pregnant woman is in Greece, it seems very easy for her to leave the baby behind without anyone knowing.
One method that Bulgarian investigators have encountered for legalising the adoption is for a Greek man to claim he is the father of the child. A few months later the mother relinquishes her parental rights in his favour.
But the most common path is private adoption. A lawyer or an obstetrician helps a couple find a woman who wants to give up her newborn. All they must do is sign a private agreement. That was that - although since 2013 the adoption must also be ratified by a court.
No money is supposed to change hands. But the absence of regular checks has created a fertile black market, authorities acknowledge.
Bulgarian supply, Greek demand
One Greek couple told BIRN of their daughter's experience a decade ago.
Unable to have her own child, Elena (not her real name) had tried for years to adopt through from a state-run children's home but in vain. Eventually she and her husband gave up and decided to pay.
They found out about an Athens lawyer who could find babies from Bulgarian mothers.
The couple paid €25,000 and soon the lawyer arranged a meeting outside one of Athens' main hospitals. Elena waited in the car with her father. One of the traffickers who had arranged the adoption opened the door and placed the baby in her lap. "Elena was glowing with happiness," her father remembers. She was a mother, at last.
The couple later completed all the legal paperwork for the private adoption of their daughter. Theoretically, social services should make scheduled and spot visits to check up on the child. But no one ever did.
A few years later the little girl saw a pregnant woman and asked her mother: "Were you like that too before I was born?". And Elena replied: "You are not a baby from my belly, but you are a baby from my heart," her mother recounted.
Away from the Balkans few people know of this contemporary trade in the region.
One story that did make global headlines in 2013 was when Greek authorities seized Maria, a blonde five-year old living with a Roma family near the town of Larissa, on suspicion she had been abducted. It turned out she had been unofficially "adopted" and was an albino Bulgarian Roma from Nikolaevo, near Stara Zagora. She is now in care pending an official adoption elsewhere.
Nikolaevo, central Bulgaria: Maria's family house. People shocked by Maria story two years ago. Nothing has changed, except a new family now lives in Maria's old home. (Photo: Juliana Koleva)
Bulgarian authorities and Roma leaders agree that dire poverty and lack of opportunity drive women to sell their babies, and that within their community, there seems to be little objection to the practice on moral grounds.
"For them the child is not a big value, they don't feel the sale of a baby as a problem, just a livelihood," says Michael Stefanov from A21, a foundation that fights human trafficking.
Gancho Iliev, a Roma who heads a foundation to help his community in the Stara Zagora region, says conditions in the ghettoes are dire.
"There is no 21st century, no water, no power. People sleep on the floor in the dirt with the chickens and other domestic animals. They are isolated from other Bulgarians."
"There is no proper education, medical health care, or religion," he says. "Nearly everyone is unemployed, just a few make a living in agriculture or clean the streets for petty cash. There is nothing to give them values, morality."
He says the authorities do little to help and that there is no real political will to improve their lot.
No emotion
A policeman from Sofia's anti-trafficking unit recalls his first cases.
"I met a girl - she came into this very office with her mother and they both cried so much and regretted selling the baby. They couldn't stop crying," he says.
"That is why I'll always remember the woman who was next. There was nothing, no emotion of any kind. She talked about the sale as if it was of no importance, as if she had sold a watch or a TV set."
The attitude of the second woman, he says, is the more typical.
Police from both countries said most trafficking probably goes undetected. Even when they uncover a case, making a prosecution stick can be a nightmare, particularly since cross-border coordination of investigations does not prove easy.
A Greek anti-trafficking policeman said that apart from tracking the criminal rings down, the biggest challenge was to prove a financial transaction.
"That's what makes a private adoption illegal," he said.
Months of investigation and surveillance might be inadequate unless the gang is caught red-handed. Without that, cases ran a risk of being very weak when brought to court.
One human trafficking expert from Bulgaria's General Directorate for Combating Organised Crime estimated that only about one in 10 such crimes in Bulgaria was ever solved.
The low risk of detection, difficulty of prosecution and often mild sentences in Bulgaria make it a profitable easy business for all involved.
Bulgaria tightened up its trafficking laws a decade ago and has some of the toughest penalties in Europe. Anyone who convinces a woman to sell her baby or transports or houses her during the process can face up to 15 years in jail, and the mother can also be prosecuted.
However, evidence is hard to collect, since all involved have an interest in remaining silent.
The biggest success in cross-border efforts to combat the trade, the so called Lamia case, came after one mother changed her mind and sought police help to recover the child she had just parted with. But such cases are few.
More usually traffickers, aware of dangers as in that case, just let the women go, as one mother, Fana, told BIRN.
Suspended sentences
As a result prosecutors often cut deals with traffickers who agree to plead guilty and in return often receive suspended sentences of less than three years.
This is why only three people are serving sentences in Bulgarian prisons for the baby trade, according to justice ministry figures.
Although there have been cases involving mothers from nearby Albania and Romania, it seems Bulgaria is the centre of the trade.
A tally of Greek police statements show that from 2010 to 2015, more than half of the people, mainly traffickers, arrested for illegal adoptions were Bulgarian citizens. Greek police sources told BIRN most were Romas.
"We think Bulgaria is leading this type of traffic. It is much closer to Greece and transporting a pregnant woman there is quite easy. Albanian women face tighter border controls," says the NGO worker Stefanov.
"Another reason could be religion … especially among the Albanians, who are highly religious."
Prosecutors and police say widescale impunity is simply persuading more women to follow suit.
One young Roma girl from Kameno, a poor village near Burgas with a big Roma quarter, tells how her friend and other close relatives were tempted into a sale.
"When you are on the brink of survival and can't provide for your children, and you see more and more families travel to Greece with a pregnant woman and return without the baby … After which they start celebrating and partying the same night because they have come by some money … That is when you begin to consider it," she says.
She once asked an acquaintance if she missed the twins she had sold.
The young woman just shrugged her shoulders, motioned to her other children, and said: "It was their turn, how otherwise would I be able to feed these here."
In her village the traffickers live well, she says.
"I'll tell you where to go and look for them, but I won't come with you, I am afraid even to be seen speaking with you," she says.
Village of Kameno, southeast Bulgaria: Locals and police believe up to 10 well-to-do homes in Roma quarter built with baby trafficking money. (Photo: Juliana Koleva)
We visit the street she indicated. On one side are run-down shacks, where the locals and police say the pregnant women are recruited from. On the other are a dozen or so flashy new multi-storey houses, freshly painted, surrounded by high walls with wrought-iron grilles, and smart cars in the yards where men with gold chains, rings and chunky bracelets hang out.
Locals and police say about half of these houses were built from the proceeds of baby trafficking. Many residents of Kameno, Roma and Bulgarian, say they are surprised the authorities seem to turn a blind eye to it.
Burgas police told BIRN they were very aware of the source of this wealth but had little hope of compiling evidence that would stick in court.
In May this year, for example, members of two of the families owning lavish houses in Kameno appeared before the district court in Burgas.
The three traffickers - Stanka Raycheva and spouses Racho and Silvia Dinkovi - confessed to taking a pregnant woman to Lamia in Greece in 2010 and getting her to sell her baby. The mother, who faces a separate trial, testified against them.
Despite this, and comprehensive evidence from Bulgarian and Greek police, two of them got a suspended sentence of just under three years, and the other a fine.
A police officer from Burgas who worked on the case told BIRN such light sentences would never serve as a deterrent.
"The traffickers lack any respect for the system and it becomes virtually impossible to prevent the spread of this crime," he said, banging a fist on the table in frustration.
He said the investigation took over 18 months and he and his colleagues had become demotivated by such an outcome of all their hard work.
Bulgarian officials say they can find out nothing from Greece about what happens to the babies after they are born.
Experts from Bulgaria's Commission for Combating Human Trafficking say Greece's National Adoption Registry is even more secret than the records of the Bulgarian anti-terrorist services. Every time they try to locate a baby, they get the same response: We have no Bulgarian babies here, and we do not give information on Greek citizens.
Burgas district court: Silvia Dinkova (middle), her husband Racho Dinkov and their neighbour Stanka Raycheva (her parents in the picture) were charged with baby trafficking. (Photo: Juliana Koleva)
What should be done?
Ersi Fotopoulou, a lawyer from the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki who has dealt with numerous adoptions, said Greece should reconsider the ban on money changing hands - a rule that ensures that when money is involved, the lion's share goes to the traffickers.
"In the United States, the law is more honest and allows for a financial transaction as long as it's visible," she says. "In Greece, we cover up the issue. There will always be money involved."
Many Bulgarians, among them the families involved, argue that adoption in Greece will give the children a much better life than their siblings have amid the dust and poverty of the ghettoes. But aid workers say with no follow-up controls, no one really knows what kind of lives these children live.
A senior anti-trafficking aid worker in Sliven, who declined to be named, said Bulgaria and Greece could not stop the trade.
"If the rewards remain as high and the risks as low as they are now, it's just too tempting and it's likely to carry on and maybe grow," she said.
She suggested a partial solution that seems likely to fall on deaf ears.
"Perhaps both countries should consider some kind of legalisation - to impose clear rules for payment to the mother, for her support during pregnancy, for payment of medical examinations, accommodation. At least this would stop the black market, which mainly benefits traffickers and middlemen."
Juliana Koleva in Sofia, Burgas, and in Bulgaria's Roma communities, with Kostas Kallergis in Athens. This article was produced as part of the Alumni Initiative of the Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence, supported by the ERSTE Foundation and Open Society Foundations, in cooperation with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, or, BIRN.
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In Greece, babies are for sale on the black market
In Greece, the trade in eggs and babies is flourishing, as poor young women from Bulgaria and Romania are blackmailed into handing over infants. Perpetrators can often rely on accomplices within the local government.
In Greece, babys are available for 15,000 euros
Elektra Koutra is fighting to help foreign women get their children back. The young lawyer is convinced that criminal networks in Greece are blackmailing poor women from Bulgaria and Romania into selling their babies to childless couples. Koutra, who is representing a Romanian mother in court, says the Greek authorities have been slow to respond to the fight against the baby trade.
In January, Bulgarian and Greek police arrested 14 people over allegations that they trafficked newborn babies to Greece. According to Bulgarian Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov, most of the babies were of Roma origin.
Baby trafficking is a thriving black market industry in Greece, which does not regulate private adoptions. Pregnant women from Bulgaria or Romania are brought across the border to give birth. According to Greek media reports, the price for a baby from Bulgaria or Romania ranges from 15,000 to 25,000 euros ($20,000-$34,000). The mother won't get more than 3,000 euros, and is threatened with violence should she change her mind.
Indifferent officals
Hormone shots ensure more eggs will be ready
Alexandros Zavos, director of the Institute for Migration Policy in Athens, suspects many human traffickers have accomplices among the state officials.
On the islands, says Zavos, it is believed that citizens act as helpers to the smugglers by informing them of upcoming police checks, he added. In some cases, police even take advantage of victms.
"In the city of Patras, two port police officers were accused of having robbed refugees," he adds.
In another case cited in a 2009 UN Trafficking in Persons Report, a trafficking victim was allegedly raped while in police custody, and the three police officers suspected of the crime remained free on bail as their court case continued.
Egg donations
Traffickers aren't just limited to selling babies. On the northern border of Greece, there is now a flourishing illegal trade in donor eggs, according to Athens lawyer Elektra Kourta. Poor women from Bulgaria, Romania and Latvia come to Greece for a few weeks and are treated with hormone injections to produce as many eggs as possible, says Kourta.
"Many of these women are victims of human trafficking and forced prostitution, but they are not subject to health controls. And they are hardly aware of possible complications."
Offering help
Many women who sell their eggs are victims of forced prostitution
The best way to help the victims is in their home country, says migration researcher Alexandros Zavos. In 2008, Zavos led a reintegration program for female victims of human trafficking and forced prostitution in Moldova.
"In the beginning they need a lot of psychological support, because many suffer from severe disturbances and suicidal thoughts," Zavos said.
Another important component of the program is the training. Zavos's program didn't give the women cash, but offered to finance job training and to help with career placement.
Reintegration programs are important, he says, because human trafficking isn't going anywhere. The trade in human beings will be a part of everyday life, says Zavos, as long as criminal gangs can make a lot of money off it.
Author: Jannis Papadimitriou / sh
Editor: Andreas Illmer
In Greece, the trade in eggs and babies is flourishing, as poor young women from Bulgaria and Romania are blackmailed into handing over infants. Perpetrators can often rely on accomplices within the local government.
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