- DIMITROV, Russia (CP) -- Seven-year-old Maxim claps his hands and smiles
delightedly as he rummages through a package of New Year's treats brought
by visitors from Moscow.
-
- Paralysed from the waist down by a birth
defect and abandoned by his natural mother, little Maxim looks radiant
as he chatters excitedly with Alyona, a professional woman from Moscow
who has been helping out financially with his care for the last couple
of years.
-
- Maxim is one of the lucky ones. For most
Russian orphans, and there are tens of thousands of them, life is more
like something out of a Charles Dickens novel. Even the facility where
Maxim lives, the Dimitrov Specialized Children's Home for severely disabled
orphans, about 100 kilometres north of Moscow, is badly run down and underfunded.
-
- Occupying the outbuildings of an old
hillside monastery, about 120 children at the combination school-hospital
sleep on narrow cots, four per tiny room, amid peeling paint, fraying linoleum
and rattling pipes. In a small, cold, common room, about a dozen children
crowd around a single TV set -- with no adult supervision in sight. "I
know that many of these children wouldn't be institutionalized in a western
country," says Mina Sergeyeva, the institution's head doctor. "But
here there are so few options for them."
-
- Sergeyeva is the only permanent doctor
in the entire facility, with just four nurses for help. None of the staff
has been paid in at least two months. Morale is extremely low. State funding,
never very much, has virtually dried up since financial crisis struck Russia
last August. "It's a lucky thing we have our own garden in the orphanage.
We still have some potatoes, cabbage and beets left from last summer's
crop," Sergeyeva says. "Otherwise there would be very little.
We haven't eaten meat, cheese or eggs for months now." Eyeing Max's
treats, which include chocolate, apples and bananas, she mutters: "I
hope he'll share it. None of the children here have seen fresh fruit since
last summer."
-
- Despite the grim conditions, the children
at Dimitrov appear reasonably well cared for and their relations with the
staff seem warm. That is not the case everywhere in Russia's vast network
of state orphanages, according to a report issued this month by Human Rights
Watch. The report, which followed a year-long investigation, alleges that
Russia's 200,000 institutionalized orphans are subjected to systematic
"cruelty and neglect."
-
- Russian orphans are routinely mislabelled
as "ineducable" and warehoused in closed institutions -- like
the Dimitrov facility -- where minimal resources are expended on caring
for them, it says. The report also alleges a widespread pattern of abuse
of children by staff at many orphanages, including beatings, sexual assault,
criminal neglect and punishment by public humiliation. "The abuse
in orphanages cannot simply be attributed to Russia's economic crisis,"
says Kathleen Hunt, the report's author. "The problem of scarce resources
does not justify the appalling treatment children receive at the hands
of the state."
-
- Photographs accompanying the study depict
concentration camp-like conditions in some Russian orphanages, including
starvation, filth, overcrowding and physical mistreatment. (The entire
report, with photos, is available on the internet at: http://www.hrw.org).
-
- Russian experts say the abuses cited
in the Human Rights Watch report are the exception rather than the rule,
but admit that the system is not working. "In today's harsh economic
climate many parents are simply dumping their children on the state,"
says Maria Ternovskaya, director of Children's House number 19, a clean
and apparently well-run orphanage in downtown Moscow. Ternovskaya says
it is true that the state medical commission is often too quick to diagnose
a child as "retarded" or "disabled". "Resources
are stretched to the limit, and we have no staff to bring up all these
children properly," she says. "The easy way is just to say nothing
can be done with them, and that's what happens all too frequently."
-
- About half the children from Children's
House 19 have been given to foster families over the past year, an experimental
approach for Russia that Ternovskaya believes should be widely adopted.
"We pay professional foster parents, often unemployed women, to do
what we cannot: give the children some sort of normal family life,"
she says. "It doesn't cost more, but it seems to work much better."
|
