Latest news with #TruthandReconciliationCommittee
IOL News
27-05-2025
- Sport
- IOL News
The year of Braveheart, OJ Simpson, Gangsta's Paradise and the mighty Springboks
Pete Sampras of the US won Wimbledon in 1995. Photo: AFP Image: AFP When the world's rugby powers gathered in South Arica 30 years ago for the Rugby World Cup, the soundtrack was Coolie's Gangsta's Paradise while OJ Simpson's flee from justice was one of the first 'crimes' captured on television. The American football star would be found not guilty by a court of murdering his girlfriend Nicole Brown, with 150 million people watching on live television, but many apartheid villains would not be as Nelson Mandela established the Truth and Reconciliation Committee in South Africa. 1995 Rugby World Cup logo 1995 Rugby World Cup logo Image: Independent Media Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Advertisement Next Stay Close ✕ It was a cleansing experience for a Rainbow Nation that continued its welcome into the wider world after democratic elections in 1994. This was the year when Microsoft's Windows '95 swept the across the world and altered how we operated computers. This was the first year that the internet was entirely privatised, with the United States government no longer providing public funding, marking the beginning of the 'Information Age.' In January of 1995, an earthquake in Japan killed 5 000 people, while — and here is an unfortunate surprise — Israel and Palestine bombed each other. In cheerier news on the sporting front, spinner Anil Kumble took 19 wickets in a first-class match while in Zimbabwe, Andy (156) and Grant Flower (201) set a brotherly world record stand of 269 to propel Zimbabwe to a first-ever victory in Test cricket against Pakistan. This was the golden era of cricket for South Africa's neighbours and they won that first Test by an innings in Harare. In more austere matters in February, the financial world was rocked by one of the first big banking collapses in the modern western world — rogue trader Nick Leeson sank London finance house Barings Bank after his investments in Singapore went horribly south. Like any year, there were tragedies, including a sarin gas attack on a Tokyo subway that killed numerous commuters, and there was the awful Oklahoma bomb blast in the USA. In the arts, the memorable movies of 1995 were Babe, Braveheart, Leaving Las Vegas, The Usual Suspects, and Dead Man Walking. While Coolio's song was No 1 in South Africa and could have been the theme tune for Joburg 30 years later, the most popular song in the world was Mariah Carey's One Sweet Day. It was the No 1 song on the Billboard charts for a record-breaking 16 weeks.
Time Magazine
15-05-2025
- Politics
- Time Magazine
New Report Exposes the Painful History of International Adoption
In March, South Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC) released its report on the country's international adoption system. After a three-year investigation, the committee found evidence that, among other widespread abuses, adoption agencies fabricated documents, misrepresented children as orphans available to be adopted, and sent children overseas without the consent of their biological families. Concluding that the human rights of adoptees and birth parents were violated, the TRC has recommended that the Korean government issue an official apology. For many, these findings are shocking but not surprising. Adoptees who have searched for information about their birth families and academics who have studied international adoption have long known of cases in which one child was substituted at the last minute for another—or of birth mothers who were coerced or tricked into relinquishing their children. Adoptees have located birth parents they were told were dead. The agencies that arranged their adoptions have lied to adoptees and withheld information. Activists in Korea, many of whom are international adoptees who have returned as adults, have been fighting to draw attention to these cases for years. South Korea has been winding down the practice of international adoption, but the practice continues there and around the world, even if at a much slower pace than in previous decades. But even if it stopped tomorrow, the system that has moved hundreds of thousands of children around the world was built on the foundations of Korean adoption, which have been revealed as deeply problematic. International adoption is not as old as some might think. Americans had adopted internationally on an ad hoc basis and in small numbers in the years before and after World War II, but systematic international adoption is rooted in the aftermath of the Korean War (1950-1953) when Americans began adopting children from South Korea. Originally, these adoptions were used as a temporary effort to remove mixed-race 'GI babies' born to Korean women and fathered by foreign men, presumed to be American military personnel. Observers quickly concluded that these children had no future in Korea for three reasons: they were racially mixed in a society that thought of itself as racially pure; they were the children of women who were assumed to be sex workers; and they were fatherless in a highly patriarchal society, and in which citizenship flowed through fathers, not mothers. In the United States, which had historically excluded Asian immigrants, Korean-white children's racial mixture made them imaginable as family members for the white parents who adopted most of them. So did Americans' understanding of these children as coming from a Christian, democratic South Korea. In the context of the Cold War, these transracial, international adoptions were powerful symbols of Americans' new commitment to antiracism, despite the persistence of racist policies in immigration, housing, and employment. Korean children first came to the United States under a series of temporary refugee laws, but Americans' demand for foreign children was strong enough that Congress made international adoption a permanent part of immigration law in 1961. South Korea, which had facilitated international adoption since the 1950s then enacted a law to make it easier for foreigners to adopt. With these legal mechanisms in place, the Korean adoption system grew. Beginning in the 1960s, it encompassed a wider range of children: the children of the poor, children with disabilities, and then, by the 1980s, the children of single mothers. South Korea also began sending children to a widening array of receiving countries in Europe, as well as Canada and Australia. Its adoption agencies' streamlined policies and processes made the country the so-called"Cadillac of international adoption,"offering speed, professionalism, and healthy babies. South Korea remained the number one source of children for adoption until the 1990s, long after the Korean War had ended. The international adoption system that began in Korea served as a template as the practice spread to countries around the world, including Vietnam, Colombia, and Guatemala in the 1970s and 1980s, and Russia and China in the 1990s. In the early 2000s, Christian evangelicals in the U.S. embraced the cause of rescuing orphans, and adopted children from Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Haiti. Although parents in the West adopted for a range of humanitarian and religious reasons, they also looked abroad because they faced a shortage of adoptable babies at home. This complex combination of altruism and consumerism accompanied international adoption as it spread and developed into what one consultant to UNICEF called 'a demand-driven business.' Beyond these market dynamics, governments and child welfare agencies took up the logic behind international adoption that had been established in Korea: that it was better for a child to grow up in a wealthy western country than to live in a poor home in the culture and country of their birth, and that governments should focus on facilitating international adoption rather than on keeping families together. As adoption agencies entered countries struggling with poverty, instability, or natural disaster, they brought with them the system created in Korea. Orphanages supported by western sponsorship money were disproportionately wealthier than the communities around them. It also made them more attractive to poor parents who wanted their children to have access to those resources or perhaps just needed some childcare while they worked. Once children were in an orphanage, parents could be convinced – or coerced – into relinquishing them for adoption. And once westerners began to demand 'orphans' from a country, the incentives for adoption agencies to provide them only increased, leading to more coercion and fraud. Over the past several decades, international adoption has served the best interest of the Korean government. Rather than investing in social welfare programs or supporting poor families and single mothers, the Korean government sent its children overseas. Its orphanages, hospitals, maternity homes, adoption agencies, and police received donations and gratitude payments from foreign adopters. International adoption also allowed Koreans to maintain carefully enforced ideas of bloodline purity, which hindered domestic adoption, and Confucian patriarchy, which made single motherhood an impossibility and which produced more children for international adoption. Americans have adopted internationally for decades without having to truly confront the global inequalities that made such a system possible, and which continue to sustain it. They have been able to choose from a variety of countries, comparing factors like cost, ease, type of child available, and processing time. Although they may have adopted with the best of intentions, they benefited from a system that exploited the weak and vulnerable in other countries. As the problems of international adoption have become more widely known, more adoptive parents have grappled with the realization that some of the children they adopted were never orphans at all, or never properly relinquished. The corruption that comes from the unavoidable market dynamics of international adoption have followed it wherever it has gone. Recognizing this, countries from Guatemala to China have stopped sending children abroad, and Denmark has stopped receiving them. Sweden ended international adoption from South Korea in 2023 in response to the kinds of allegations the TRC confirmed. The United States should investigate its role in the global international adoption system it pioneered in South Korea and has supported ever since. At a minimum, the U.S. should give citizenship to the thousands of adoptees who were never naturalized by their parents, and who are now at risk for deportation. Congress enacted the Child Citizenship Act of 2000 to ensure that international adoptees acquired U.S, citizenship more or less automatically, but the law fails to cover an unknown number of adoptees (somewhere between 18,000 to 75,000) who were already adults when the law passed. The Adoptee Citizenship Act, which is intended to fix this oversight, has been introduced twice in Congress to no effect. As for South Korea, the TRC's report addresses just 56 of the 367 cases that international adoptees have brought to its attention. The TRC has now been suspended and it is unclear whether the investigation will continue. But anywhere from 150,000 to 200,000 Korean children have been sent overseas for adoption since the 1950s, and they deserve answers about their origins. Meaningful redress demands continued efforts to uncover the truths beneath the international adoption industry—no matter how painful they may be. Arissa H. Oh is Associate Professor in the History Department at Boston College and the author of To Save the Children of Korea: The Cold War Origins of International Adoption.
