The legacy of one mad dictator has made victims of the country's children

NICOLAE CEAUSESCU preferred to have orphans in his secret service. It is impossible to follow the workings of the mind of a mad dictator, but perhaps this was behind his edicts that women should aim to have at least five children and his ban on contraception. At least it ensured that he had a ready supply of recruits for the Stasi, but, almost a decade after his downfall, the mentality which he created still fills the orphanages with children whose parents cannot afford to keep them within the family.

Family planning clinics were being set up immediately after the revolution: today, women are still reluctant to attend them. Instead, they hand their babies over to the local ''lagan'', sometimes keeping in close touch in the hope of improved circumstances allowing them to take the child home. Irimia Rodica, director of child protection in the County of Bacau, admits: ''When we speak about family planning, we must speak about education for the people and for everyone who works in child protection.''

A psychiatrist working in one of the Bacau orphanages says that emotional problems are rife in these institutions. The child living with another 150 children does not learn to socialise normally and does not reach his full language potential. Mrs Rodica, who is a psychiatrist, says that children often have a development age many months, even years, behind their true age. She says: ''It is very difficult because we have a lot of children and the number of staff is very small. One nurse has about 12 children in her care, and it is very difficult to socialise and stimulate each child.''

Transition is slow from simple nursing care to the kind of system which will help children develop fully. A Swiss psychiatric project underway in one Bacau orphanage is helping staff learn new techniques of stimulation, socialisation, and education, but this is a drop in the ocean of 9500 children in care. ''It is very important to change the mentality of staff,'' says Mrs Rodica. Priorities are to transform from institutions and institutional attitudes to family units and a family ethos.

Projects to encourage fostering and adoption are also underway, and Mrs Rodica says that she is now encouraging international adoption if it is not possible to find suitable local families. The controversy over international adoption seems to have been largely resolved by the introduction of strict codes of adoption practice, and the development of a social work system means that there is now limited support for families who are in the situation of putting children into care. Limited because there is a minimal budget to help these families financially, and it is mainly finance which leads to this sad handing over of a child to the state.

It is not only finance, however. There is still a stigma attached to being a lone parent in Romania. Counselling may be in its infancy in Romania, but sensible talking from social workers can often persuade families to accept an ''erring'' daughter and her baby, and simply giving support to a mother in the maternity unit until she has had time to bond with the baby can change a mind set on giving up a child. There is, the social workers stress, no compulsion, however, to keep children.

Sadly, those who remain in institutions until they are 16, which is still the norm, are often the youngsters who become what the Romanians call street children. They are not children but young adults, rootless and ill equipped through their up-bringing to care for themselves, often lacking the basic education and skills to get a job. The youngsters receive no state support, and turn to begging, crime, and prostitution. The fact that the ''escort'' industry is openly advertised in Bucharest hotel magazines means that there is likely to be a more covert industry in child prostitution, rent boys, and the abuse of young girls.

In Ceausescu's day, young people leaving institutions who were capable of working would be given a job. That was in the days of two men to a shovel. Now there is a need to rationalise industry, and jobs are much harder to come by. The youngsters are despised by the very society which created them, and social workers know there is a need for a programme to educate the public as well as one to integrate these young people back into society from the railway platforms and town pavements where they beg and sleep. Lack of funding is again the problem, and it is a problem which will continue to grow as long as institutions exist to churn out these social rejects.

Marius Predescu, who heads the Petru Copiii Nostri organisation which liaises with the Romanian Orphanage Trust, says one of the tragedies which continues in the big institutions is that children become brain damaged because they are given out-dated anti-biotics and immunisations. There are also children labelled irrecoverable mentally or physically who, after being transferred from big institutions to family-style homes, begin to develop normally. Mr Predescu says: ''You need another kind of approach

in institutions for the handicapped,

and you cannot manage when you have one social assistant in an institution for 200 children, and one educator for 25 children.''

Perhaps the biggest tragedy is that Aids continues to be transmitted to children through blood transfusions and other injected medical treatments. ''It is intolerable to have so many children after 1990,'' says Mr Predescu. ''We had excuses before 1990 that we did not know, but we do not have excuses now.'' The figures have increased, and Mr Predescu says the single solution is to legislate to make the doctor in charge of a hospital responsible. There are around 4000 declared adult cases of Aids in Romania, and they are not the parents of the 5000 children who have the disease, a figure which is greater than all the children in the rest of Europe with Aids, according to Mr Predescu.

There is still a lack of accountability in the country, which is an obvious legacy of dictatorship. There has been a fear of NGOs sharing responsibilities in Romania, which from one point of view may be understandable. The country became ''an Eldorado'' for NGOs, Mr Predescu says, with 9000 of them working with children two years ago, ''with not too many results''.

There was also an attitudinal problem on the part of some NGOs which came into the country with a history of working in Third World countries where they came in contact with the uneducated, the colonialised. Their patronising attitude when they moved into Romania, ignoring the wishes of the Romanians, was hard to take. Others, like the Romanian Orphanage Trust which incorporates the former Strathclyde Romanian Appeal, worked alongside Romanian organisations, backing Romanian solutions for Romanian problems. ''They have understood and there have been a lot of achievements,'' says Mr Predescu.

He adds that tens of millions of pounds have been wasted, and too many wires have been crossed. Foreign NGOs, for instance, poured money into renovating institutions which were already ear-marked for immediate closure. ''Thousands of dollars were being spent every day for contradictory objectives,'' he says. Now NGOs demand financial audits which are costly and must be paid for out of money which could be better used directly for the children for whom it was intended. Communication and co-ordination are vital.

Things are moving slowly ahead, but there are still only 20 people in the Department of Child Protection. Predescu dreams of donors who concentrate on structural development not emergency intervention, and of a Romanian budget commitment to child care. He says: ''It may have been enough in 1990 to have a big heart. Now it is not. There is a long way to go, but I think we are on the right way.''