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JAKARTA – Until a few months ago, Ms. Widya Astuti Boerma knew her biological mother only from glimpses of memory.
Some were enjoyable: a moment of both at the Sultan’s palace in Yogyakarta, for example. But others were jarring, including one indelibly etched of the family’s house on fire. And then the last one: his mother’s instructions at a Jakarta train station to “be a good girl” and go with a woman he hardly knew.
Ms. Widya ended up in an orphanage. She was three years old.
Now 45, Ms Widya is one of a growing number of Dutch adoptees struggling to find their biological parents in the wake of explosive local media reports, court cases and a government investigation into illegal adoptions.
The results of a two-year investigation into the role of Dutch government officials, including some of its embassy staff, in facilitating suspected illegal adoptions are expected in February.
“It made me think I was not alone,” Ms Widya, who speaks Dutch, English, German and Spanish, told The Straits Times by phone from her home in The Hague in the Netherlands, referring to the controversy.
“It made me wonder if he had been a victim of child trafficking.”
Three weeks after being separated from her mother and enduring beatings in the Indonesian orphanage for crying, Widya was adopted by a Dutch couple who had arrived by plane.
She remembers the orphanage telling her that her mother couldn’t take care of her and that if she protested, her new parents would send her back to the orphanage.
In June, an Indonesian-speaking colleague posted details of her case on Twitter. The post received 3,500 retweets and attracted a sudden surge of attention from the Indonesian media.
And on June 17, the day after an interview with an Indonesian television station in which Ms. Widya recounted details of the house fire, her colleague received a direct message from the daughter of a woman named Suyatni.
The 58-year-old, who married a man in his 30s at age 12, was born in Yogyakarta and had worked as a housekeeper at the Sultan’s palace.
With the help of translators, Ms Widya, whose knowledge of Bahasa Indonesia is limited to some nursery rhymes that her mother sang to her, learned that the woman’s family had joined a government transmigration plan that led to them to Lampung, 900 km away in the far south. from Sumatra.
Ms. Suyatni said that her husband, who has since died, was a violent man and had problems with neighbors and the police. Later, a mob set his house on fire.
It was then that Madam Suyatni fled with her young daughter to Jakarta to look for work.
“It was kind of scary (to find) someone who can really carry on the story that has been in you for all those years,” Ms Widya said.
More than 3,000 Indonesian children were adopted by Dutch citizens during the decade until 1984, when Indonesia, which declared its independence from the Netherlands in 1945, practically banned the practice.
Ms Ana Maria van Valen, who is an adoptee from Indonesia, said that a large part of the adoptions abroad during that period were probably involuntary.
Ms. Van Valen, who remains close to her adoptive parents, speaks from experience. Her biological mother was poor and had sought help from an orphanage to temporarily care for her.
But the orphanage turned around and put her up for adoption by Dutch parents.
The couple, whose conditions couldn’t be more different from those of Ms. Van Valen’s biological parents, were eager to complete their family. They flew to Indonesia and booked excursions to tourist spots like Borobudur, waiting for the adoption process to be completed.
“My Dutch parents already had three boys and they wanted a girl but not a baby,” recalls Ms Van Valen, 44. “I was a girl and I was two and a half years old.”
Van Valen co-founded Mijn Roots, which is pronounced “my roots,” in 2015 to help reunite Dutch adoptees with their Indonesian parents. Progress has been slow.
The adoption documents here were riddled with errors and falsehoods. Of the hundreds of inquiries your organization has received, 40 have resulted in reunifications. In about half of the cases, the non-governmental organization (NGO) would learn from the biological parents that the adoptions had been involuntary.
Indonesia was certainly not the only source of overseas adoptions by Dutch couples. Local media estimate that 40,000 overseas adoptions by Dutch nationals from developing countries, including Brazil and Sri Lanka, over three decades to the late 1990s may be illegal.
At the end of a year that has brought suffering and separation, for Ms. Widya there is reunion and renewal. The results of a DNA test confirming whether she is Madame Suyatni’s daughter are expected by the end of the month. He has already booked a flight to Jakarta to meet Madame Suyatni early next month.
On a recent afternoon, Madame Suyatni, who uses a name like many Indonesians, wipes her eyes in her burgundy hijab.
He lives 90 minutes from Jakarta in a neat row of low-income housing and runs a small kiosk in the front of his house. He has remarried and has had five more children, including one from Ms. Widya’s biological father.
On this day, he is joined by his two young daughters, ages 11 and 16.
“It was only meant to be temporary,” he said, recalling his separation from Ms Widya that day on the train platform in 1979.
“I hope you can forgive me.”
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