Georgians Amy Khvitia and Ano Sartania recently found that they are twin sisters who were taken away from their mother at birth and sold off to separate families weeks apart. Their discovery also revealed that up to 100,000 babies in eastern Europe’s Georgia were stolen and sold off to parents who could not have children, broadcaster BBC revealed in a report. Some of these children were sold as recently as 2005.
Amy and Ano, according to the BBC report discovered each other by chance thanks to a TV talent show and a TikTok video. They finally met each other in Germany. “I always felt like there was something or someone missing in my life. I used to dream about a little girl in black who would follow me around and ask me about my day,” Ano was quoted as saying by the broadcaster.
Their reunion was part of a BBC documentary titled Geogia’s Lost Children. During the course of filming, the broadcaster along with Georgian journalist Tamuna Museridze found out that there were countless parents who were told that their children died at birth but later turned out that their children were sold to couples as far as the US, Canada, Cyprus, Russia and Ukraine.
There have been official attempts to probe the case of the ‘lost children’ but no one has been held accountable. The Georgian government launched a probe into the trafficking of children and spoke to over 40 people but told the broadcaster that the cases were “very old and historic data has been lost”.
Journalist Tamuna Museridze, who herself does not know who her biological parents are, also set up a Facebook group named Vedzeb – a Facebook page dedicated to help Georgians reunite with their lost parents and children.
It was Vedzeb that helped Amy and Ano reunite with their mother with their birth mother, Aza, in Germany.
The journalist also discovered a black market in adoption that stretched across Georgia and went on from the early 1950s to 2005, the broadcaster said.
The government made over four attempts to find out what led to the separations and launched a probe in 2003 into international child trafficking which led to a number of arrests but information available to the public is less. In 2015, after another probe, the general director of the Rustavi maternity hospital, Aleksandre Baravkovi, was arrested but charges brought against him were cleared and he was allowed to return to work.
It was also through the Facebook group that Amy and Ano found out they had the same genetic disease, a bone disorder called dysplasia. They also found out that they liked the same music and even had the same hairstyle.
“It was like looking in a mirror, the exact same face, exact same voice. I am her and she is me,” Amy Khvitia was quoted as saying by the BBC.
Comments
0 comment