[Angus]

What are your thoughts on the story of the US Church Group trying to take 33 children out of Haiti with no documentation or any checks made by them that the kids were actually orphans? Taking kids over the border to sell on to god knows who or just extremely naive do gooders? Can't decide

[InOne]

Haitian police have charged 10 members of a US Christian group with child trafficking after they allegedly tried to leave the country with more than 30 survivors of the country's devastating quake.

News of the charges came as the UN's food agency prepared to launch a massive food effort targeted at vulnerable women in a bid to ease some of the chaos surrounding the relief effort.

Haitian authorities said police had arrested five men and five women with US passports, as well as two Haitians, as they tried to cross into neighbouring Dominican Republic with 33 children late on Friday.

Border police "saw a bus with a lot of children. Thirty-three children. When asked about the children's documents, they had no documents," Haitian Culture and Communications Minister Marie Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue said.

Social Affairs Minister Yves Christallin identified the Americans as members of an Idaho-based charity called New Life Children's Refuge.

"This is an abduction, not an adoption," he said.

Some of the older children had spoken to aid workers and "say their parents are alive, and some of them gave us an address and phone numbers," said Patricia Vargas, head of an international centre caring for the youngsters.

Vargas said officials at the Haitian Institute of Social Welfare, which deals with adoptions, told her "most of the kids have family".

The leader of the group, identified as Laura Silsby, said that the group's aims were entirely altruistic and that they were only trying to seek help for the children in the Dominican Republic, CNN reported.

The US embassy confirmed that ten US citizens were being held for "alleged violations of Haitian laws related to immigration".

Workers from aid groups and other non-governmental and religious organisations have poured into Haiti in the aftermath of the January 12 quake which is believed to have killed some 170,000 people.

Amid fears that food is not reaching enough people, the World Food Program said it would open 16 fixed collection sites in Port-au-Prince on Sunday, aiming to feed two million people in two weeks.

Only female quake survivors will be allowed at the sites to avoid scenes at chaotic mobile handouts that have sometimes seen children and women muscled aside in the scramble for bags of rice, beans and cooking oil.

The aid effort suffered a further setback over the weekend, after the US military stopped flying injured Haitians to the United States for treatment because of a dispute over costs.

The governor of Florida has asked the US government to share the financial burden on his state's hospitals, putting a block on flights that have so far carried more than 500 people with spinal injuries, burns and other wounds.

The US State and Defence Departments were working with Florida Governor Charlie Crist and state authorities to try to fix the problem, said US Ambassador to Haiti Kenneth Merten.

The United States has spearheaded relief efforts since the 7.0-magnitude quake, which also injured around 200,000 and left more than one million homeless.

The aid effort has, however, drawn criticism for a lack of coordination. Some leftist Latin American nations have also accused US forces of occupying Haiti militarily instead of focusing on aid needs.

Haitians, many of whom are living in squalid makeshift tent camps, have complained that relief has been slow to reach them on the ground.

Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive made a fresh appeal for 200,000 tents to house homeless earthquake victims before the country's rainy season starts, most likely in May.

"We are very aware of the consequences to all of the people on the streets if it's starting to rain," Bellerive told CNN, adding that the government only had 3,500 tents so far.

Diseases such as diarrhoea, measles, and tetanus are rising in tent camps, prompting UN agencies and the government to prepare a mass vaccination drive, while survivors also face rising insecurity with reports of rape and violence.

Aid officials have warned meanwhile that the reconstruction process in Haiti, already the poorest country in the Americas before the quake, will take decades.


http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news...0201-n6ub.html

[arista]

Yes those Yanks
claim the paperwork was not needed.

Bible Freaks they are.

[GypsyGoth]

They sound like creeps.

[Angus]

I guess that even if the motivation was genuine, ie done in the belief that they were helping these children, the church should not have acted arbitrarily by trying to remove the children over the border without any documentation, or formal permission from the government. It's quite distressing to think that some of the children were not orphans at all.

It also begs the question, "has this church group done this elsewhere before"?