Leigh
Ramsay
322
Wecker Road
Carindale
QLD
4152
18th
Feb 2013
Dear Leigh
This past weekend my Christian friend and I bought a house for
Chanti and her husband Chhork in the village in Srey Veng where Chhork’s family
lives. It is close to the village where the family of Chanti’s grandmother lives.
Chanti’s children, all six of them once her new baby daughter is born in a
couple of weeks, will now have the opportunity to grow up within two extended
families and attend a school that is only 100 meters from their new home.
When Rosa and Chita are returned to Chanti and Chork’s care the
family will move back to the provinces form whence Chanti and her mother came
18 years ago - driven by the death of all but one of Chanti’s mother Vanna’s nine
children, the death of Vanna’s husband and the extreme poverty that ensued as a
result of having no breadwinner in the family. Chanti’s family now has an
opportunity to start a new life in Srey Veng.
No doubt Citipointe will be sorry to lose two of its star ‘poverty
tour’ attractions from the She Rescue Home and will have to scout around afresh
to find the daughters of two other poor families that can be conned into giving
up their children with false promises. Alternatively, perhaps you will again shift
the goal posts and come up with some new reason why you will not return Rosa
and Chita to their family’s care. This is your choice, Leigh. The consequences
of this choice, the responsibility for its repercussions, will also be yours.
Last week, as reported in the media, “a Paris judge has given a two year prison
sentence to the couple…for trying to smuggle African children into France, whom
they claimed were Darfur orphans.”
You will be familiar with this story –
Christians stealing children under false pretenses. One report goes on to say:
“The couple
said they wanted to save orphans from the deteriorating situation at the time
in Darfur, but according to several humanitarian organisations, most of the
children in question were from Chad, and had at least one living parent.”
Christians ‘rescuing’ the children of poor
parents and placing them in institutions has an all too familiar ring to it.
Whilst Citipointe has not removed Rosa and Chita from Cambodia to Australia the
church might just as well have, given that you have effectively prevented
Chanti and her daughters from having any meaningful contact with each other,
contrary to all that you write on your website about reintegration and
contrary, of course, to the very basis of Christianity in action.
On top of the illegal removal of Chanti’s daughters from her
care, you have both of them available to be ‘sponsored’ by visitors to the
Citipointe website – despite the fact that Rosa and Chita have a mother, a
father, a grandmother, three (soon to be four) siblings and two extended
families that they are a part of. The only word to describe this state of
affairs, Leigh, is kidnapping. Or, to use a word that is pregnant with meaning
for all Australians, ‘stolen’. You have stolen Rosa and Chita from their
family. I find it hard to imagine a more blatant re-enactment of the very
practice that caused such emotional agony in Australia for both the ‘stolen’
children and their Aboriginal families. If Cambodia had a functioning legal
system, one that respected its own laws, both you and Rebecca Brewer would be
in jail on child trafficking charges for having held Rosa and Chita illegally
and against the wishes of their mother for the 15 months prior to the Ministry
of Social Services providing retrospective justification for Citipointe’s
illegal holding of the girls contrary to their mother’s wishes.
You have been asked many times now by myself and by Chanti to
provide evidence that the church’s holding of the girls during those 15 months had any legal
validity. You have been asked several times by both myself and Chanti to
provide Chanti with a copy of the ‘contract’ Citipointe has entered into with
the Ministry of Social Affairs that gives you the legal right to take complete
control of Rosa and Chita’s lives with no reference at all to the wishes of
their mother and father. You have refused to provide any evidence at all
relating to the legality of Citipointe’s actions or any indication at all of
what circumstances must prevail before Rosa and Chita can be returned to their
family.
Rosa and Chita should be returned to the family immediately and
Chanti has asked me, as her advocate, to put this to you as a formal request.
best wishes
James Ricketson
No comments:
Post a Comment