Why did the American Missionaries kidnap the Haitian children? This is the question that is being asked by all the right thinking people from all over the world. Watch the VIDEO REPORT and read the views expressed by most people from around the world as below. Come to your own conclusions!

With more and more reports coming in after the arrest of the 10 American missionaries for the alleged kidnapping and smuggling of a busload of hapless Haitian children across Haiti’s border with Dominican Republic, the missionaries’ intensions are believed to be far from helping the children, their parents, or the quake-hit Haitians. The children are not even orphans, and most of them have living parents or relatives, and reportedly the children were being taken away without their parents’ or guardian’s permission.

The children were from Calebasse, the small town near Port-au-Prince, rather a small, poor village, where a local emissary told the people that American missionaries were offering to take the children to Dominican Republic to give them a better life and good education. After the earthquake destroyed most of the buildings including schools, the offer seemed a blessing. The flyers and printed ads brought by the missionaries from New Life Children’s Refuge promised a beautiful place for the children to live, The Washington Post reported.

In what later turned out to be a deceptive move, the 10 missionaries from Idaho and other places in USA landed in Haitian jails as they had no papers from anyone to justify why the children were being taken out of Haiti to the neighboring Dominican Republic. So, they were charged with child kidnapping and child-smuggling. The 33 hapless children are now in an orphanage run by the Austrian Charity SOS Children’s Village.

Here are reasons why the kidnapping of Haitian children was no act of charity.

While most writers and reporters felt sorry for the group leader Laura Silsby and her accomplices languishing in a dank, fetid Haitian jail, charged with kidnapping 33 children, most people agree what the do-gooders allegedly did was not only misguided, but it could be outright criminal and the Haitian authorities are right to hold them accountable for what they did. Also most people feel smuggling away a busload of kids in that manner is no act of charity. On the other hand, their actions cast doubts about the work of many charities and humanitarian organizations working in Haiti to alleviate the sufferings of the people there, one the poorest people in the whole world.

To top it all the missionaries' leader, the 40-year-old Laura Silsby, according to the Idaho Statesman, has ‘a history of failing to pay debts, failing to pay employees and failing to follow Idaho laws.’ They reported last week that Silsby has been ‘the target of eight lawsuits and 14 claims for unpaid wages’. Also that she had received ‘four traffic citations since 1997 for having failed to register or insure the vehicle she was driving.’

It is also reported that "the $358,000 house in a Boise suburb where Silsby founded her nonprofit New Life Children's Refuge in November was foreclosed on in December." She and her group planned to set up a facility to house, educate and outplace the orphans in the Dominican Republic. But after being caught with the children, the authorities say, the missionaries did not have the proper documentation needed for a surrender of parental rights. Reports from Calebasse where most of the children lived indicate that some were handed over by adults who were not their parents, not even related to them in any way.

Given the fact that thousands of Haitian children are sold into servitude each year, mostly as domestic workers, known as ‘restaveks’, the children are vulnerable to psychological, physical and sexual abuse. These children are exploited not only in Haiti, but restaveks have been rescued from the Dominican Republic as well. At the border, Haitian authorities said there was no way to be sure that these people from Idaho had the children's best interests at heart. Even if the missionaries had the best of intensions for the children, still what really happened was wrong. No one smuggles children out of a country to help them!

According to news reports, Silsby's intention was to find American families to adopt the children. Nice intention, if a child can be given a better life that way. But giving up a son or daughter is one of the most difficult decisions a parent faces even in the most trying circumstances and, definitely, the agony and suffering caused by the quake is precisely the wrong moment to expect a parent or guardian to make a permanent, life-changing decision. “True charity would have been to help those families care for their children -- not to put them in a bus and drive them away.”

According to a previously published report by the Pan American Development Foundation, poverty has forced at least 225,000 children in Haiti's cities into slavery as unpaid household servants, far more than previously thought (the number of restaveks according to a 2002 UNICEF survey were 172,000). The report said, some of those children, mostly young girls, suffer sexual, psychological and physical abuse while toiling in extreme hardship. Also the report recommended Haiti's government and international donors to focus efforts on educating the poor and expanding social services such as shelters for girls, who make up an estimated two-thirds of the child servant population in Haiti. And such backgrounds offer an easy hunting ground for people with questionable intentions to smuggle away children in the name of charity and adoption of ‘orphans’.

In a Boston datelined report, Matthew Clark, Staff writer of the site The Christian Science Monitor, asked on February 1, 2010, “When does adoption become child trafficking?” He was commenting on Saturday's arrest of 10 members of the Idaho-based Central Valley Baptist Church for trying to take 33 Haitian children, whose ages ranged from 2 months to 12 years, without the right documents, across the border with the Dominican Republic.

The children were later taken to an orphanage in Port-au-Prince, where at least 10 children told aid workers that they had surviving parents and knew their contact details. Officials are now trying to reunite their families.

"Our intent was to help only those children that needed us most, that had lost either both their mother and father, or had lost one of their parents and the other had abandoned them," the leader of the arrested group, Ms Laura Silsby said. She said her group had met a Haitian pastor by chance, and that he had helped them gather the children. A woman who said she was the mother of five of the children said she had been deceived by the pastor.

“They really didn’t have any paperwork... I did not understand that that would really be required,” Silsby told CNN. She said they paid no money for the children and that the group did not seek paperwork from Haitian authorities. Back in Idaho at the Central Valley Baptist Church in Meridian, Rev. Clint Henry told CNN that the whole community is disturbed by the events, but praying for understanding… He said their intention was ‘upright and pure,’ and added, “It is certainly not our interest to traffic children ... we are simply trying to help.”

Added to the chaos in quake-ravaged Haiti is the uncertain fate of tens of thousands of newly orphaned children. As some agencies reported, the increased US demand for adopting Haitian children in the wake of the earthquake is ‘churning up the advocates of streamlined adoption procedures for Haiti against those who say too-hasty adoption can hurt the children and birthparents that in some cases still exist.’

Haitian authorities, expressing fears that child traffickers may take advantage of the chaos and loss caused by the earthquake that killed up to 200,000 people, said the Americans had no documents proving the children were orphans or giving them permission to take them out of the country. Haitian Social Affairs Minister Yves Christallin said, "This is an abduction, not an adoption,” explaining that children need authorization from the ministry to leave the country.

Haiti’s Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive has denounced the American Baptist group’s “illegal trafficking of children.” In an interview with the Associated Press, Bellerive said that if they had been acting in good faith, "perhaps the courts will try to be more lenient with them". But he noted, "It is clear now that they were trying to cross the border without papers. It is clear now that some of the children have live parents. And it is clear now that they knew what they were doing was wrong."

Bellerive, who has cited reports of child trafficking and even human organ trafficking since the quake, has called the arrested Americans “kidnappers.” But he has acknowledged the possibility they were misguided but acting in good faith to help the children. He said they had known "what they were doing was wrong". He said Haiti was open to having the Americans tried in the US since most government and court buildings had been destroyed.

Haitian Culture and Communications Minister Marie Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue said, “We have information about people trying to steal kids to take them out of the country, which is the reason why the government has decided to reinforce security”. She said the judge would decide whether the Americans would be tried in Haiti or if they should be sent home to the United States for trial because of the damage inflicted on the courts and staff of the Haitian judicial system by the quake.

A Haitian judge is expected to decide on Tuesday whether the five men and five women from Idaho have a case to answer. A hearing scheduled for Monday was postponed because of a lack of interpreters for the Americans.

The case of the American missionaries resembles that of some Europeans from a France-based group called Zoe's Ark who were detained in Chad in 2007, who were accused of trying to fly 103 children on a chartered plane out of the African country illegally. The six French members of the group claimed the children were war orphans from Sudan’s Darfur, but UN officials said many were Chadian and were not orphans. Chad initially sentenced the six members to eight years of hard labor and ordered to pay restitution amounting to about $9 million. However, they were repatriated to France after a pardon granted by Chad's President Idriss Deby.

Funnily, The US missionaries, who admit they had no documents, approvals or passports for the Haitian infants, insist they just wanted to help them by taking them over the border to an orphanage they were establishing in the Dominican Republic. They said they did not know they were doing anything wrong. But it is hard to believe that the missionaries were so illiterate that they believed they can transport children at their will without even the permission of the parents or anyone from Haiti, even considering that legal documentation was difficult to get.

And why did they want to transport the 33 children to Dominican Republic, and not to USA? From Dominican Republic, where did they want to take the children? And why? They owe a lot of explaining to the right thinking people!

Michelle Brané, director of the New York-based Women’s Refugee Commission's detention and asylum program says, “It’s tempting to want to airlift children out of Haiti, getting them out of harm’s way immediately… But it’s important to remember that in the current chaos, thousands of people, including parents and children, are still searching for their families. Removing children from countries too quickly after an emergency,” she adds, can “jeopardize family reunification efforts… and increase the risk that children will fall into the hands of traffickers and other ill-intentioned individuals.”

The New Life Children's Refuge's "Haitian Orphan Rescue Mission" (the detained American’s mission) has described the incident on their website as an effort to save abandoned and traumatized children. They intended to take 100 by bus to a hotel in the Dominican beach resort of Cabarete. They said they were only trying to provide a better life for the children and denied that the group had done anything wrong. But ‘it may technically be child trafficking’, especially so in a very poor country where the illicit trade has exploded in recent years.

According to the guidelines of the UN, two years should pass after a disaster before adoption can even be considered, giving time to exhaust all efforts to locate family members first. On this, Kent Page, a spokesman for UNICEF in Haiti, said, "You can't just go and take a child out of a country -- no matter what country you are in. There are processes that have to be followed. You can't just pick up a child and walk out of a country with a child, no matter what your best intentions are."

"One girl was crying, and saying, 'I am not an orphan. I still have my parents… And she thought she was going on a summer camp or a boarding school or something like that," said George Willeit, a spokesman for SOS Children's Village. He said the children had arrived "very hungry, very thirsty", including a baby who had to be hospitalized because of dehydration.

Notably, after the process for the adoption of 400 children by families in the U.S. and the Netherlands was expedited, UNICEF and SOS Children urged an immediate halt to adoptions from Haiti. Patricia Vargas, the regional director of the Austria-based orphan charity SOS Children, which is now looking after the 33 children at its orphanage on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, said, "The majority of these children have families. Some of the older ones said their parents are alive, and some gave an address and phone numbers."

Incidentally this week, US officials waived visa requirements for Haitian children already on the path to adoption. Since the United States is spearheading a huge relief effort to help the quake victims in Haiti, the case of the detained Americans could be diplomatically sensitive at a time when US charities are pouring millions of dollars of donations into Haiti.

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Learn more from what Sky's Amy Lewis reports in this video.

Video journalist Jose A. Iglesias (of El Nuevo Herald) documents life in the streets of Port-au-Prince, two days after the quake struck Haiti. There was hardly any distance between life and death in the earthquake hit Haiti, mainly in the capital Port-au-Prince, and it depended on how fast the victims were rescued from under the rubble and on how fast treatment can be rushed to the injured. Food and water supplies were running out, many thousands of Haitians spent nights and days in the open. Arson and looting were rampant with hardly any police or rescue forces in sight.

Collapsed buildings and infrastructure included schools, hospitals, residential buildings, hotels, roads, and anything that can be listed as a building or construction.

According to the Haitian president, René Préval by Thursday evening 7,000 people had already been buried in a mass grave. But many hundreds of dead bodies were piling up outside the city’s morgue. The scale of devastation was so much that any reliable estimates of the numbers of dead and injured were still impossible to make even on Friday, though unconfirmed reports estimate that the death toll could be 100,000 or more.

US President Obama has promised at least $100 million in aid, and the first installment of American troops arrived Thursday to handle security and cargo operations at Haiti’s main airport that had its main runway was intact. But flights had to circle for two to three hours before landing. On Thursday, USA reached an agreement with Cuba to allow American planes on medical-evacuation missions to pass through restricted Cuban airspace so that it will save the flight time to Miami by 90 minutes. Many more European and other countries have either promised aid or are already rushing in rescue teams, equipments, food and medicines.

Rescuers, search teams, doctors and others already in Haiti could do precious little as there was an acute shortage of equipments, medicines and other rescue material, and heavy equipments were needed to lift the concrete bocks and rubble to save people trapped under them. Time was running out for those trapped under rubble, though nothing could be said about the dead.

Haitians are victims of centuries of poverty, exploitation by colonial powers, internal violence and natural disaster. Most of the people were living in less than US$2 a day.

About 40 to 50 percent of the population of Port-au-Prince is kids and they are more fragile and likely to be killed than adults, due to dehydration, loss of blood, and of shock. One of the most impoverished countries in the world, Haiti already had a very bad history as regards the safety of children.

In a December 2009 report, 225,000 children, mostly young girls, in Haiti's cities were into slavery as unpaid household servants, the Pan American Development Foundation's report said; some even suffer sexual, psychological and physical abuse while toiling in extreme hardship. Most are sent by parents who cannot afford to care for them to families just slightly better off. Researchers found 11% of families that have a child laborer have sent their own children into domestic servitude elsewhere.

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After having hit a deadlock on coming to any kind of consensus, the Copenhagen Summit is inching along with fresh, renewed hopes that there would be some kind of an agreement on cutting carbon emissions. As the mood at talks shows, the developed and industrialized countries seem to tell the developing countries, the Least Developed Countries, the underdeveloped island nations and the African countries that they should not expect anything from the rich and developed countries to mitigate the problems caused by climate change, but they have to adapt clean technologies and reduce emissions. The rich do not want to commit to anything at all, it seems.

In the renewed talks, the leaders and delegates are trying to find time for the lost time in meaningless discussions by continuing long overnight sessions. There are also indications that the talks are back on track again, presumably, after the developing countries won certain concessions. There is considerable pressure on at least maintaining what the Kyoto Protocol made some countries agree to, instead of leaving everything a free-for-all, and continuing meaningless lip service on the ill-effects of global warming. Unless the organizers and the world leaders want to reduce COP15 a mere comedy show, they have to come to some sort of meaningful consensus before the final high-level session starts that will start on Tuesday evening.

After suspension of discussions on points raised by the African group, supported by G77 group of countries and the bloc lead by China on behalf of developing countries, the informal talks were split in to two groups; one group chaired by Germany and Indonesia is exploring possibilities of further emission cuts by developed nations under the Kyoto Protocol while the second group chaired by the UK and Ghana, is examining the long-term financing to help poorer countries develop along green technologies to protect themselves against perils of climate change.

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There were accusations against the Danish conference hosts who were charged with ‘trying to sideline negotiations on the Kyoto Protocol by packaging discussion of outstanding difficult issues from across the various strands into a single informal session’. Also the developing countries have been on a tough stand that developed nations still inside the protocol must commit to further emission cuts. The world's two largest emitters, China and the US, are at odds with China rejecting US demands that its carbon emission cuts must be subject to international verification.

The non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are highly critical of the organizers including the UN and the Denmark authorities for sidelining them and mistreating them. It is reported that there will be tighter restrictions to NGOs for the rest of the week. More than 50 organizations, including Friends of the Earth, ActionAid, and CAFOD, have written to the Danish hosts and the UN climate convention secretariat accusing them of ‘undemocratic’ behaviour. Their letter says, "The presence of the public ensures that the substance of the matters being discussed at the negotiations is subject to public scrutiny… The process of arriving at these outcomes must be fair, open and transparent. The legitimacy of this process is at stake." About 45,000 people have registered to take part in the conference, about half of them from NGOs, against the capacity of Copenhagen's Bella Center of only 15,000.

The final high level part of the summit is expected to be attended by about 120 heads of states and governments on Tuesday evening, including UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen and others. Let us hope that something meaningful comes out finally, before the delegates and leaders return home, spending millions of dollars and adding to the atmosphere several thousand tons of greenhouse gases by their flights.

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