Family Forum / Parenting / Adoption / December 2007

http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,22887154-5001026,00.html

Angelina Jolie adoption torture threats
By Stephen Bevan
December 10, 2007 12:00am

HER credentials as a caring superstar could hardly be bettered.
Angelina Jolie, mother of four, is as famous for her well-publicised
adoptions of children from Third World countries as she is for her
Oscar-winning movies and relationship with Brad Pitt.

As a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations Commissioner for
Refugees for the past six years, the beautiful 32-year-old actress has
travelled frequently to impoverished African states, often to the
heart of a conflict, to highlight the plight of the world's most
desperate people.

In October, she visited Western Sudan to bring to the world's
attention the appalling conditions endured by an estimated 2.5 million
people who have fled brutal ethnic fighting in the war-torn province
of West Darfur.

The visit took the film star within an hour's flight of neighbouring
Ethiopia, the birthplace of her daughter Zahara, whom she adopted amid
much publicity in July 2005 in what seemed to be a flamboyant act of
charity.

Indeed, even the most cynical Hollywood-watcher couldn't fail to be
moved by Jolie's description of the hell from which her new daughter
had been removed.

The little girl's natural mother had, according to Jolie, died of
AIDS. Malnourished and suffering from rickets, six-month-old Zahara
was, it was claimed, just days away from death when Jolie found her at
an orphanage in Addis Ababa, nursed her back to health and adopted
her.

Although they knew Zahara had family back in Ethiopia, Jolie and Pitt
have chosen not to visit Awassa, the lakeside town where the little
girl was born. Had they done so, they may well have been shocked by
what they found.

It has now been revealed that not only is Zahara's mother, Mentewab
Dawit Lebiso, alive and well, but the man who arranged Zahara's
adoption has been waging a campaign of threats and intimidation
against her family.

When rumours surfaced last month in America that all was not as it
appeared with the paperwork, the American headquarters of the
international adoption agency Wide Horizons For Children initially
insisted Zahara's mother was dead.

But in Ethiopia, the man who brought Zahara to the agency knows
Mentewab is alive and has been attempting to shut her up. Traced to
Zahara's home town, Mentewab and her extended family, speaking through
interpreters, have now told their side of the story.

Although aged 24, she is struggling, between selling onions in a
market, to finish high school. It is a measure of the desperate lack
of opportunity afforded to young Ethiopians: in this part of the
world, many people don't start any formal learning until they are in
their mid-teens.

In taped interviews, Mentewab, her mother Almaz Elfneh, 45, and
sisters Frehiwot, 18, and Zinash, 20, tell a disturbing story of rape,
grinding poverty, lies and dubious official paperwork.

It was this, rather than AIDS, that took Zahara on the extraordinary
journey from her starving family to an orphanage in Addis Ababa and on
to the Hollywood mansion owned by two of the world's most famous film
stars.

And while the American headquarters of Wide Horizons For Children and
Jolie may well be oblivious to the harsh realities of what goes on in
adoptions such as these, the revelations have come as no surprise to
the man who arranged the adoption for the agency, 'Mr Fix-It' Girma
Degu. Indeed, rather than try to deny it when confronted with the
family's account of what happened, he went straight to the house where
Mentewab was staying with her sisters in Awassa.

There, he threatened to have one of her sisters jailed for talking to
journalists.

Mentewab was interviewed in the dirt yard outside her uncle's home.
Her story starts in 2004, many miles from Awassa in the town of Shone,
where she was staying with her grandmother while she attended school.
One night, when her grandmother was away on business, a stranger broke
in and subjected her to a brutal rape. When, a few months later, it
became impossible to hide the fact Mentewab was pregnant, her
relatives disowned her.

"I felt so lonely," Mentewab says in her native Amharic language. "I
thought about having an abortion but I didn't have the money. There
was nothing I could do."

In the absence of other options, Mentewab, who was determined to
finish her education, went to stay with a cousin in nearby Hosanna.

Her baby girl was born at Hosanna hospital on January 7, 2005 -
Christmas Day in Ethiopia. Mentewab called her Yemasrech, which means
good news, although she was later renamed Tena Adam, the name of a
local herb.

Impoverished Mentewab struggled to look after her daughter. When her
mother Almaz learned of her plight, she came to Hosanna.

"She told me, 'It's all right, we can raise this baby together.' I
think she thought I might kill myself if she didn't help me," Mentewab
says.

All three returned to Awassa, where they stayed with Mentewab's uncle
in a gloomy, cramped, three-room hut with a mud floor and tin roof on
the outskirts of town. Almaz looked after the baby while Mentewab
worked as a labourer on a building site.

Her meagre wages paid barely enough to feed them.

"Sometimes all I had was a piece of bread all day," she says.

Finally, when her uncle asked them to leave his house and find their
own place, their family life went into a free fall.

"My baby was crying all the time because she was hungry. I thought she
was going to die, so I ran away," Mentewab says.

It was the act of a frightened and ill-educated girl but her decision
to flee was to have far-reaching consequences.

"After Mentewab left I didn't have money to buy her food so the baby
lost a lot of weight," Almaz says. "She was really skinny. I was even
thinking she could die. I went to the Kebele (the local council) and
told them my daughter ran away and had left the baby with me.

"I said to them, 'Please take the baby before she dies.' They asked me
to bring three people to witness that the mother had run away and that
I could not afford to keep the baby."

Almaz had already been introduced to Girma, a local man, by her sister-
in-law and he agreed to take the baby after the Kebele gave consent.

Girma took the baby to Addis Ababa, Almaz says.

"He promised he would keep in touch. He said he would bring back the
baby to visit after five months and he would send me a picture.

"He also promised to introduce me to the family that would adopt her."

Almaz says she never told Girma or the authorities that her daughter
had died.

"But then Girma came to me and told me that the baby had been adopted
and taken abroad," she says. "He said there will be journalists coming
to you and you must deny the whole story and say it is not your
granddaughter."

After stories first began to circulate two years ago that Zahara's
birth mother was still alive, Almaz says Girma dragged her to the
local council offices and accused her of lying. He also tried to force
her to say that Zahara was not her granddaughter.

"He brought this woman who claimed Tena Adam was her daughter," she
says. "He tried everything to get me to say it's not my granddaughter.
He even threatened he'd put me in jail and have me tortured."

But Almaz refused to budge.

The revelation that Zahara's mother is alive and living on a few
dollars a week while she struggles to complete her education will come
as a huge embarrassment to Wide Horizons For Children, which claims to
have placed more than 10,000 children from all over the world with
Western families since 1974.

Dr Tsegaye Berhe, head of the agency in Ethiopia, says he was told
Zahara's mother was dead at the time of the adoption and has the
official papers to prove it.

"We have to trust the documents we received," he says. "She (Almaz)
has signed, three witnesses have signed, but the document is saying
something different to what she is saying now. She said her daughter
had died."

And in a move some might regard as intimidation, Berhe says he has
asked the government to instruct Ethiopian police to investigate
whether the grandmother lied to the Kebele. "We have already talked to
the government," he says.

"The grandmother has given two statements. One that the mother is
dead, another that she is alive. We have told the government what she
is doing and that it has to take action because it is the government
she's made to look foolish.

"It's a big scandal to say something then another thing the next day.
That will make a big problem for her."

Berhe produced the paperwork he says was signed by Almaz and three
other witnesses testifying that Zahara's mother had died, but refused
to allow it to be copied or photographed. One of the three witnesses
named in the document, Asegadech Asefaw, backs up Almaz's account that
she told officials her daughter had run away.

Another of Almaz's former neighbours, Bekelech Haile, says she also
confirmed Almaz's version of events but, strangely, her name does not
appear on the document.

Witnesses say they've never heard of the name that does.

"I cannot read or write," Almaz now says. "I don't know what they
wrote but what I said was that my daughter ran away, not that she was
dead."

The adoption agency says it makes efforts to establish links between
adoptive parents and a child's family. Berhe says he always arranges
for adoptive parents to go to the village to meet surviving family,
take pictures and videos, and even have some correspondence.

"It's very important because when the child grows, we don't want him
or her to lose their identity," he says. "(The child) is going to ask
a lot of questions . . . Why did you adopt me? Who are my parents?
Where do I come from? Questions the child is going to ask."

Yet, according to Zahara's birth family, Jolie has never visited their
home in Awassa, where donkeys, cows and goats vie with cars and trucks
for space on the road. Indeed, she has never contacted them or even
sent a picture of Zahara.

Berhe does not dispute Jolie never met the family but blames media
interest.

"There were a lot of journalists following her," he says. "She was not
able to travel as she would have liked."

As for Jolie's failure to make any contact, he says the agency gets
regular reports on how Zahara is doing from social workers in the US
"but with the connection between the blood family and the adoptive
parents, it is up to them."

Meanwhile, Wide Horizons For Children moved rapidly to distance itself
from Girma, the man who supplied Zahara and the paperwork.

Although Girma says that he worked for the adoption agency and has
distributed business cards claiming he represents it, Wide Horizons
For Children says he is not an employee but is employed by an
orphanage in Awassa.

It does not deny, however, that it was he who brought Zahara to its
officials.

"What he has done is tanta- mount to kidnap," Mentewab says. "He took
my daughter and just disappeared with her, saying I was dead."

She does recognise that Zahara has far better prospects with Jolie and
Pitt.

"She will have a better life with Angelina," she says. "The thing that
makes me upset is saying I'm dead - I'm alive and have never had
AIDS."

She would like Jolie to bring her daughter to visit her birthplace, a
gesture that would mean everything.