U.S. Parents Struggle to Regain Children Kidnaped by Foreign Spouses

A Virginia woman lost her son when he was whisked out of the United States by her former husband, a Turkish native, who took the child to Turkey, where the long arm of U.S. law could not reach them.

That was in 1954. Elaine Mordo has suffered 32 years without her son. Now she has a grandchild she has never seen.

“How I survived it,” Mordo sighed, “I do not know. It’s like a part of you has died.”

Mordo is not alone. There are an estimated 350 incidents each year where children are spirited from America by one of their parents--often the parent who lost custody in a divorce settlement--to foreign countries where U.S. law has no jurisdiction, according to the State Department. Few are ever solved.

The files of more than 2,300 cases involving children 18 years of age or under remain open.

A Georgia man was separated from his son seven years ago, when his former wife took the boy to Israel, her home country. He has not seen the boy since.

An Illinois woman has not laid eyes on her two daughters since last year, when they were snatched by her former husband, a native of Saudi Arabia, who took the girls to his homeland.

Another woman from Virginia was held hostage in a motel room at knifepoint by her brother-in-law last summer while her Jordanian-born former husband made off with their 8-year-old son. The brother-in-law was later arrested, convicted and jailed. The ex-husband fled to Amman, Jordan, with the boy.

Anguish, Frustration

The nations are different and the circumstances vary. But these cases are held together by the common threads of pain, anguish and utter frustration.

“It’s been a nightmare,” said Susan Mubaydin of Springfield, Va., who still carries a matchbook in her purse bearing the name of the New York motel where the abduction took place. “I need my son with me. He’s my only child, and he’s all I ever had.”

Patricia Roush-Samupam of Cicero, Ill., whose Saudi Arabian husband ran off with her two daughters, said: “I’ve been near a nervous breakdown for a year. I spend most of my time crying.”

For the parent left in the United States, the road to recovering the kidnaped child is fraught with dead ends. For some, telling their story over and over again helps. But there comes a time when the search becomes more painful than the original torture.

“Why beat a dead horse?” said the Georgia man, whose son now lives in Israel with his mother. The man said he is tired of fighting. He preferred not discussing his case and asked not to be identified.

“The horse I beat was terribly expensive in emotion and money,” he said. “I haven’t seen my boy in seven years, and I wouldn’t recognize him if I saw him. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a dead issue.”

Where can parents turn?

The obvious choice is the State Department. After all, it deals with foreign governments on a daily basis. But State Department officials say their hands are tied.

“These cases are not much different than cases involving Americans arrested overseas,” said Dona Sherman, a spokeswoman in the department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs. “Families say, ‘Well, go over there and spring them!’

“We can’t do that. The fact is we leave the Constitution behind when we go overseas. We are subject to the jurisdiction of a foreign government. The rules of behavior and law are dictated by that government. It is frustrating.”

Moreover, the State Department considers such cases domestic incidents and refuses to take sides in settling the disputes, although it will help find the child and check on the youngster monthly to make sure he or she is “treated fairly in accordance with the laws in that country,” Sherman said.

Shaky Legal Ground

When parents approach the State Department, they are provided information on the court system of the nation involved, a list of local lawyers and little more.

However, the chances of actually winning a court case in a foreign country are slim.

“We’ve had some success at getting children returned,” Sherman said. “But the numbers are not that great. I think it can be assumed the person who is there in that country . . . is going to have the advantage.”

Philip Schwartz, former chairman of the American Bar Assn.’s committee on international family law, said: “Unless the U.S. parent presented a very substantial case to counteract the likely preference for the local citizen, the chances are they would have very little hope.”

Cordial diplomatic relations between the United States and the country involved also does not count for very much. The No. 1 destination for parents fleeing America with their children is West Germany, largely because of the mixed nationality marriages resulting from many U.S. military installations there. Mexico is second.

Muslim Nations Difficult

The problem becomes more acute when dealing with unfriendly nations or those where religion or culture are vastly different from the United States.

In Muslim countries, it is nearly impossible to settle custody disputes through legal channels.

In a letter to Sen. Paul Trible (R-Va.), who is working on behalf of Mubaydin, a Jordanian court official admitted that the woman’s brother-in-law held her hostage and that her former husband, Walid Ali Mubaydin, abducted the boy back to Amman.

However, the official, Marwan S. Kasim, chief of the Royal Hasehmite Court, said there was nothing he could do.

“Legally, the child is a Jordanian citizen who lives with his father. Jordanian laws do not permit the forceful repatriation of the child to live with his mother,” Kasim wrote in the letter, which was obtained by United Press International.

Muslim society traditionally is male dominated, and the laws reflect that. Jordanian law makes a point of saying that mothers should have equal custody of children. However, the provision that dooms U.S. women seeking to regain custody of children kidnaped to Jordan is the one that says, “A mother shall lose her right to custody if she is divorced.”

Mubaydin said: “You are dealing with a culture and set of laws that are against you from the start.”

The apartment where Holly Planells lives is quiet now. Toys remain scattered in the living room, but there is no one to play with them. Her son, Yousef, nicknamed Huey, was kidnaped to Jordan last August by her ex-husband, Bassam Yousef Aqqad, during a court-ordered visit in Tennessee. Huey turned 3 in Jordan.

Planells, a UPI reporter in Atlanta, is able to talk with her son by telephone, and she traveled to Amman before Thanksgiving with the Jordanian ambassador to the United States in an attempt for an amicable solution. The ambassador, who first promised assistance, later said that nothing could be done, and Planells returned home without her son.

“My husband really believes he has done nothing wrong,” said Planells, who was granted custody of Huey when the couple divorced in April, 1985, after 2 1/2 years of marriage. “He believes he’s taken what is rightfully his. He laughs at the (U.S.) kidnaping charges against him. He knows they don’t mean anything.”

Changes in Son

Planells, 24, said when she saw her son in November--she was not allowed to take the child outside her former husband’s house--he had regressed intellectually and had stopped speaking English.

“When he saw me, he just looked at me like he was trying to figure out who I was,” Planells said. “I don’t think he ever fully understood I was his mother.

“He’s traumatized. He used to be such a bright boy. Now he’s like an infant again.”

The cost for Planells and other parents is high in terms of money, time and emotion.

In less than six months, she has spent nearly $1,000 in long-distance phone calls and more than $3,000 for travel in trying to regain custody of her son.

Planells has stayed sane, she says, by immersing herself in work. But other parents often lose their jobs, as Mubaydin did, by spending too much time off the job chasing leads on their children.

Most believe that they are fighting the battle alone.

Little Sympathy

“The only people who really care are those who are close to you,” one father said. “Other people just say, ‘Too bad.’ ”

Even some of those close to the parents offer perfect 20-20 hindsight as opposed to constructive assistance.

“I’ve had family members tell me, ‘This is what you get for marrying an Arab. You should have known better,’ ” Planells said.

“That’s not fair. I didn’t show up in the desert looking for a tall, dark stranger,” said Planells, who met her husband at the University of Tennessee, where they were both students. “I met my ex-husband in my apartment building at school.”

These cases certainly provide food for thought for Americans married to foreigners or considering it, Schwartz said.

Mubaydin said: “We’ve been violated by these people, who have no respect for our laws. They’re parasites. They have used and abused our laws and hurt a lot of people here.”

The options available are few and costly.

After exhausting legal avenues, some parents work through their representatives in Congress, some try the diplomatic route and others hire private detectives to recapture their children and return them to the United States.

But sneaking around in foreign countries and stealing children is risky business, although there are success stories from time to time.

“It’s risky and it’s rare, but only because there are few people around who have the funds to finance something like that,” lawyer Schwartz said. “If the person could afford it and the activities of snatching the child back would not violate any country’s law . . . then I would say, ‘Go to it.’ ”

Dangerous Tactic

But the State Department officially discourages such action, and it is judged unwise by others.

“They can’t go in there like Rambo,” said Sarah Pang, executive assistant to Sen. Alan Dixon (D-Ill.), who is working with eight cases of kidnaped children. “If you tried that in some countries, first of all it wouldn’t work and secondly it would create more problems than you’d ever want to deal with. They need the government’s help to solve their problems.

“The government has lines of communications into these countries. It would be nice to use it in the right way sometime. It’s not just for some company to take advantage of their connection to some high-level government official. It should also be for Mrs. Jones down the street who has a real problem that’s going to affect her for the rest of her life.”

There is some hope with The Hague Conference on Private International Law, an agreement reached among several dozen Western nations that would force the non-custodial parent to return the child to its resident country. The United States has signed the agreement but has not yet acted under its provisions.

It remains to be seen how well the agreement will work, and it probably will never be accepted by countries outside the West, particularly nations in the Middle East where many children are held.

“The likelihood of a Middle Eastern country other than Israel agreeing to this treaty is virtually nil,” Schwartz said. “Even Israel might not be willing to do it. Then you’re left to the mercies of dealing with the foreign government either directly through their embassies or through the State Department, which are frustrating experiences.”

‘Subtle Pressure’

In some cases, more pressure is being brought upon foreign governments, Pang said.

“We really do try to think of something new every week,” she said. “We keep subtle kinds of pressure on them. Governments around the world, friends or foes, really do care about how the United States reacts to them.

“If you use that pressure correctly, you should be able to get the results you want eventually. But you have to walk a fine line. You don’t want to back any government into a corner. If you embarrass them, they won’t deal with you.”

The U.S. government is trying to get more involved in these cases.

In addition, there are other actions being considered that could help deter future kidnapings, including a requirement for dual parental consent before visas or passports are granted for international travel by children.

Weak Enforcement

Current deterrents are weakly enforced. In the case of Planells, her former husband was instructed as part of the divorce settlement to post a $10,000 bond that would be turned over to her if he ever left the country with their son. It turned out the money was never posted.

Sen. Albert Gore Jr. (D-Tenn.), who is working on the Planells case, said pressure should be exerted, but he warned the U.S. government to proceed cautiously. Selectively cutting foreign aid is not a wise move, he said.

“The presence of virtually every country in the world on the list (of nations where non-custodial parents flee with their children) complicates a strategy of threatening to terminate foreign aid,” Gore said.

Instead, Gore said U.S. officials should quietly go after nations that are “not complying with basic standards of fairness and decency.”

“When one of these countries is seeking assistance with some facet of its relationship with the United States, these cases should be brought up in a forceful way,” Gore said. “Those of us who deal with the representatives of foreign governments need to make it clear that their dealings with the United States are clouded by their failure to behave fairly.”

No ‘Magic Lever’

Gore said: “It would be far more satisfying if we had a magic lever that we could pull in each of these countries and resolve the situation in short order. But as of yet, we haven’t found that magic lever.”

Meanwhile, hundreds of U.S. parents cling to the slim hope that they will get their children back. Some parents remarry; some have more children. But for many, the hurt remains too great.

Mordo spent six years in Turkey trying to rescue her son. She learned the language and took a job, but she never regained custody.

Other parents dread the thought of experiencing Mordo’s agony.

“We’re all going through the same hell, but I have a lot of hope,” Planells said. “He’s not dead, but he is 5,000 miles away. I honestly don’t know if I’ll ever get my son again, but I’m praying that I will. He was my little buddy.”