ROMANIAN ORPHANS UNITED WITH NEW PARENTS

WITH BAN ON ADOPTIONS LIFTED, 61 CHILDREN ARE FLOWN TO PARIS

NATHALIE SAPENA

Daily News of Los Angeles

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 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 parents who had waited a long time.

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 demand for adoptive children in France was greater than the supply.

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

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 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 some of the adoptive parents to Bucharest to pick up the children and return to Paris, where the remaining parents greeted their adoptive children.

"We are happy for the happy futures of these children," Dumitru Mazilu, deputy chairman of Romania's ruling Council of National Salvation, said at a short ceremony organized at the Bucharest airport.

"Those who died in the revolution also died for these children," he said.

Some children awaited by adoptive parents were not on the plane. French officials said that authorities had not had time to check back with all the Romanian families to be sure they still wanted to give their children up for adoption, a decision made, in many cases, between two and four years ago.

Some of the children simply had not yet been brought to Bucharest from provincial orphanages in time to catch Saturday's flight, and would be brought to their French adoptive parents within days, officials said.

Many of the children were simply abandoned by their biological parents, who were forbidden to use birth control because of Ceausescu's plans to increase Romania's population of 23 million by 7 million by the year 2000.