ROMANIAN ORPHANS FINALLY ARRIVE HOME NEW LEADERSHIP LETS ADOPTIONS GO THROUGH

ROMANIAN ORPHANS FINALLY ARRIVE HOME NEW LEADERSHIP LETS ADOPTIONS GO THROUGH

The Wichita Eagle

PARIS A plane carrying 61 Romanian children whose adoptions by French parents had been blocked by Nicolae Ceausescu's government landed Saturday to a joyful welcome from their new families.

''We are in debt to the Romanian people for winning freedom for these children," said Jacques Lellioz of St. Nazaire in western France, who had waited more than three years for his adopted daughter, Maeva.

"I would have liked a little more intimacy, with everything more discreet," Lellioz said amid the tumult of reporters and television cameras covering the arrival of the government-chartered plane at Orly airport.

Also Saturday, an Italian air force plane flew from Bucharest, the Romanian capital, to Italy with more orphans for long-waiting parents.

Philippe Chabin's daughter, Roxanna, opened presents from her new French cousins after rushing into the arms of her adopted father, who had staged two hunger strikes to try to pressure the Romanian government into letting her go. ''We will adopt other children," Chabin said. "But not in Romania."

In the early 1980s, hundreds of French parents sought and found children in Romania when they could not in France.

Ceausescu's policies encouraging large families, combined with widespread shortages of food and other necessities, produced large numbers of children available for adoption.

Many of the children were simply abandoned by their biological parents. Ceausescu's government had forbidden the use of contraception. The former dictator had wanted to increase Romania's population of 23 million by 7 million by the year 2000.

The prospective parents had to pay thousands of dollars in official fees and often thousands more to corrupt officials to get a child.

But in July 1988, Ceausescu's government halted any new adoption cases for foreign parents, and in January 1989 it refused to allow the departure of 89 children whose adoption procedures were complete or nearly complete.

After Ceausescu was overthrown and executed last month following a popular revolution, the French Foreign Ministry said that his authoritarian government had engaged in "blackmail to obtain, in exchange for the children, the resumption of political and economic relations, which France had broken off because of human rights violations in Romania."

The new authorities in Romania abolished the ban on foreign adoptions, and the French Foreign Ministry chartered a plane to fly the many of the adoptive parents to Bucharest to pick up the children and return home.