Harvest of misery as 130 villagers sell their kidneys
The Times, October 25, 2003
In Moldova the sale of an organ can raise false hopes of a better life
THE scars slashed across the abdomens of villagers from Mingir testify to the extraordinary racket in bartered kidneys that is stretching across Europe. A cluster of the poorest villages in Moldova, itself the poorest country in Europe, have become a hunting-ground for organ traders.
“He looked like you; blond, in his forties,” says Nicolae Bardan, recalling a brief meeting with the recipient of his kidney. “I heard he was from Britain or Scandinavia.”
Mr Bardan’s scar has healed cleanly but he and his neighbours feel they have been cheated out of their health and their future by profiteering middlemen. The money has long since gone: Mr Bardan was paid $3,000 from a total cost for the operation of several times that figure.
This week Members of the European Parliament endorsed a campaign to stop organ trafficking, demanding that Europeans who travel beyond the EU for kidney transplants face criminal charges on their return. They also called for tough sentences for traffickers. Under European Union law, trading in human beings for sexual purposes or labour is illegal but trading in donated organs is not. All EU countries, apart from Austria, outlaw payment for organs, but national legislation varies widely.
Mr Bardan, a slight 28-year-old farmer, stands in the bedroom of his small cottage, giving a precise account of the cash-for-kidney deal: $100 had gone to an organ scout in the village and $200 to the chief recruiter in the neighbouring community of Negrea; $120 was the cost of the bus ticket home from the Turkish clinic; and $1,000 went on building his home, some more on medical debts and a few hundred on buying coal and food for the winter as well as a bicycle for his son and himself.
Four years later, the food has been eaten, the coal burnt and one of the bicycles no longer works. Mr Bardan’s health is broken. “I am not the same man,” he stutters. “I get dizzy and when I lift anything heavy I feel that a knife has been stuck in my remaining kidney.”
The key to the organ business is in the abject poverty of this part of southeastern Europe; a no man’s land where people have to sell themselves to survive. A collective farmer such as 31-year-old Andrei Chitanu is lucky to earn €30 a month from the sale of produce. Moldavia, the fruit and vegetable orchard of the Soviet Union, is now called Moldova, a sovereign country, but barely able to feed itself.
Of 1.8 million Moldovans capable of work, 400,000 work abroad — most of them illegally. Andrei saw no choice but to sell part of his body. “We didn’t think it would be so bad, that we would never be able to work properly again.”
With his $3,000 he put a roof on his house, bought a cow, a washing machine, clothes for his family. There are more than 30 donors in Mingir and in the nearby villages perhaps another 100 have recently bartered their kidneys. At first, Turkish doctors with interpreters came on reconnaissance missions. Now the hunters are local and operate from eastern Romania to Moldova into southern Ukraine.
Anyone who drives through the countryside in the early evening understands why the organ hunters are having so much success: by 5pm the villages are blanketed in darkness, and the young people mill around in the gloom, swigging powerful home-made red wine. By 8pm many are drunk, swaying across the roads in erratically driven horse carts.
Many a local boy sees selling his kidney as the route to his dreams. Moldovan teenage couples often strike a deal: the girl works as a bar girl in the West, the boy sells his kidney, and together they dream about a better life.
“Every month someone walks into my office begging to sell an organ,” says Dr Adrian Tanase, of the Renal Transplant Section in the City Hospital of Chisinau. “This has not been done for a long time in developed countries — but here you buy or sell anything.”
The market for the body parts of these forgotten people is in the West. A local doctor who wished to remain nameless said: “Anyone — and I mean anyone — who wants a kidney quickly has to go to Turkey.” There is an edge of fear to the organ business: big money is at stake. Questions are unwelcome. The main patients are from Western Europe, including Britain and France, and from Israel.
Some of the Moldovan donors claim that they were hoodwinked. But Georghe Ungureanu, 49, must have known that he was not simply being recruited for factory work. “We were driven to a town in Ukraine but the woman who recruited us was wanted by Interpol so we switched to a second Ukrainian town and from there flew to Istanbul.”
The farmer, who paid for his daughter’s dowry with his kidney, recalls: “The woman was held by the Turkish police when we arrived and so she scribbled the address of an apartment on my arm.” He adds: “Because I had a rare blood group I had to wait two months for a recipient.”
Some of the Turkish middlemen have been closed down. Nina, the village recruiter in Mingir, has fled to Italy. Some networks are plainly being closed down, but new networks are being opened up.
The demand for kidneys is as strong as ever and the poverty in this virtually lawless main donor country is deepening.
