Dutch adoption scandal exposed

Until a few months ago, Widya Astuti Boerma knew her biological mother only from glimpses of memory.

The last memory was her mother’s instructions at a Jakarta train station to “be a good girl” and go with a woman she barely knew.

Widya ended up in an orphanage. She was three.

Now, 45, Widya is one of a growing number of Dutch adoptees scrambling to find their biological parents in the wake of explosive local media reports, court cases and a government inquiry into illegal adoptions.

The findings of a two-year inquiry into the role of Dutch government officials, including some of its embassy staff, in facilitating suspected illegal adoptions are expected in February.

“It made me think I wasn’t alone, ” Widya said from her home in The Hague in the Netherlands. “It made me wonder if I had been a victim of child trafficking.”

Three weeks after separating from her mother and enduring beatings at the orphanage for crying, Widya was adopted by a Dutch couple who had flown in.

In June, an Indonesian-speaking colleague posted details of her case on Twitter. The post got 3,500 retweets and attracted a sudden flurry of attention from Indonesian media.

And on June 17, the day after an interview with an Indonesian television network in which Widya recounted details of the house fire, her colleague received a direct message from the daughter of a woman named Suyatni.

The 58-year-old woman was born in Yogyakarta and had worked as a housekeeper in the sultan’s palace.

With the help of translators, Widya, whose knowledge of Bahasa Indonesia is limited to a few nursery rhymes her mother sang to her, learnt from Suyatni that her husband, who has since died, was a violent man and ran into trouble with neighbours and police. A mob later set fire to their house.

That was when Suyatni fled with her young daughter to Jakarta to find work.

“It was kind of scary (to find) someone

who can actually continue the story which you have had in you for all those years, ” said Widya.

Ana Maria van Valen, who herself is an adoptee from Indonesia, co-founded Mijn Roots – pronounced “mine roots” – in 2015 to help reunite Dutch adoptees with their Indonesian parents. Progress has been slow.

Adoption documents here were riddled with errors and falsehoods. Of the hundreds of inquiries her organisation has received, 40 have yielded reunifications.

In roughly half of the cases, the adoptions had been involuntary.

At the end of a year that has brought suffering and separation, for Widya there is reunion and renewal. Results of a DNA test confirming whether she is Suyatni’s daughter are expected by the end of the month.

She has already booked a flight to Jakarta to meet Suyatni early next month. — The Straits Times/ANN