Stolen twins are found on Tiktok
Two young Georgian women discover each other on TikTok in 2022 because they look remarkably alike. Elene Deisadze came across a clip of a girl who looked strikingly like her. The then 17-year-old Deisadze reached out to Anna Panchulidze to point out the resemblance. The two began talking and eventually became friends. Over months, the teenagers chatted and grew close. They shared that they had both been adopted.
At some point, they came up with the idea to take a DNA test to find out if they might be related. The result: a huge surprise. The genetic testing not only revealed that the two young women were related, but it also showed that they were siblings and identical twins. "We became friends without knowing that we were sisters, but we both felt that something special bound us," said Elene to AFP.
"I had a happy childhood, but now my entire past feels like a deception," said Anna, who now studies English at the university. The girls were not accidentally separated from each other and their parents at birth, but were apparently victims of baby trafficking.
Criminal Network
Georgian journalists discovered that illegal adoptions had been taking place for over 50 years. According to the investigation, a network of maternity clinics, daycares, and adoption agencies worked together to steal children, forge birth certificates, and sell them for money to new families. The parents were told that the children had died. The infants were then sold to adoptive parents in Georgia or abroad.
Deisadze and Pachulidze were supported by journalist Tamuna Museridze. Museridze leads a Facebook group with over 200,000 members, which advocates for the reunification of stolen children with their parents. She founded the group in 2021 to find her own family after learning she had been adopted.
The new parents were often unaware that the adoptions were illegal. Some had deliberately "decided to bypass the law and buy a baby," to bypass the lengthy adoption waiting lists, said Museridze to AFP. She has evidence that between 1950 and 2006, at least 120,000 babies were "stolen from their parents and sold." In Georgia, parents paid several months' salaries for adoptions. Babies were sold abroad for up to $30,000, according to Museridze.
Adoption for a "Fee"
The adoptive mother of Elene, Lia Korkotadze, decided to adopt with her husband after learning they couldn't have children. "But adopting from an orphanage seemed practically impossible due to the incredibly long waiting lists," said the 61-year-old economics professor.
In the year 2005, a friend of yours told you about a six-month-old baby that was offered for adoption in a local hospital - for a fee. Korkotadze saw this as an opportunity to have a child and agreed. "They brought Elene directly to my house right away," said Korkotadze, unaware of the illegal nature of the situation. "It took months with unbearable bureaucratic delays until the adoption was confirmed by the court."
"I had trouble processing the information and accepting the new reality that the people who had raised me for 18 years were not my parents," said Anna Panchulidze. "But I feel no anger, only great gratitude towards the people who raised me, and joy in finding my flesh and blood again," she added.
In light of the investigation into illegal adoptions in Georgia, it was revealed that the Missing Persons unit of the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) had been looking into similar cases of children who went missing and were potentially adopted internationally.
Shortly after discovering their connection as sisters, Elene and Anna began advocating for the rights of children who were victims of this criminal network, hoping that their story could lead to the reunification of other missing siblings with their biological families.
