Two teens made the discovery of their lives, and it all started with Elene Deisadze scrolling on TikTok in 2022. At the time, she stumbled upon a photo of a girl who looked just like her, Anna Panchulidze. Elene believed that this girl was her doppelgänger, so she reached out to her and they hit it off instantly.
But to their surprise, the two girls from the country of Georgia soon found out that they're actually twin sisters. After several months, the sisters learned that they'd been adopted. "I had a happy childhood, but now my entire past felt like a deception," Anna told Agence France-Presse.
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"We became friends without suspecting we might be sisters, but both of us felt there was some special bond between us," Elene explained. But finding out that they're sisters led to an even deeper and darker discovery.
It appears that there was a country-wide kidnapping scheme that took place between 1950 and 2006. Tamuna Museridze, a journalist from the country of Georgia, has been investigating for years. She first uncovered clues in 2016, when she found two birth certificates with different dates while clearing out her mother’s house after she died.
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"We found out it was systemic, and we found out there are more than 100,000 children stolen in Georgia’s hospitals," the journalist told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. "This organized crime was all over Georgia, we can't say one maternity house was involved, all of the maternity houses were involved."
Tamuna went on to find out that people in different positions were involved along with the maternity homes, including cab drivers, nurses, gynecologists, "and of course people from the government, because no-one was arrested for this." She then set up a Facebook group to help reunite children with their families. The group, which has around 250,000 members, has helped reconnect around 700 families.
Anna's mother, Patmani Parkosadze, recalled paying $3,500 for the adoption in 2005. She had no idea that the adoption was part of organized crime. "I had no clue. At that time, you had to wait ages to adopt somebody. My husband and I were personally waiting for six years before we got Ana," she said. "We really had no idea about the corrupt system … and I wouldn't even imagine such a thing."
Lia Korkotadze, Elene’s adoptive mother, said "adopting from an orphanage seemed virtually impossible due to incredibly long waiting lists," so she was ecstatic when she heard about a baby available for adoption from a local hospital. "They brought Elene right to my house," she recalled, adding that she never suspected "anything illegal."
While the girls are thankful for their adoptive parents, they hope to be reconnected with their biological ones. "Maybe they don’t even know we exist because when children were adopted sometimes their biological parents were lied to, [told] your child is dead, maybe our parents think we are dead, we are not even alive, it would be so great to find them and tell them the truth," Elene said.
"We want to know who are we? What is our real surname? Our genetics? Who are our parents? Who we look like, our mother or our father?" Anna added. The journalist has teamed up with a human rights lawyer Lia Mukhashavria to find more information about the organized adoption scam.
