Sick Swedish asylum children baffle experts

By Stephen Brown

STOCKHOLM, April 27 (Reuters) – Swedish investigators are baffled by a
mysterious illness affecting over 400 children of asylum-seekers,
mostly from former Soviet and Yugoslav states, who fall into a deep
depression and lose the will to live.

The government presented its first study of the so-called “apathetic
children” on Wednesday, after King Carl XVI Gustav added his voice to
a chorus of concern from charities, church groups and politicians who
want them protected from deportation.

“It is dreadful what is happening to these poor children,” the Swedish
king told reporters.

The condition is known as Pervasive Refusal Syndrome and can be
life-threatening. It affects boys and girls of all ages, but mostly
aged 8-15, who refuse to speak, move, eat or drink for days or many
months, and must be drip-fed to keep them alive.

Virtually unknown before 2000, the condition has been seen on a large
scale only in Sweden. But the researchers ruled out that the children
were faking their condition.

“I have never believed that,” said researcher Nader Ahmadi. He has
documented 409 cases in the last two years — many more than the 150
cases originally reported. But the data raised more questions than it
answered, as he acknowledged.

“Why have these cases apparently only happened in Sweden? Why do they
mostly come from such specific places in the world?” asked Ahmadi.

More than 61 percent of the children come from the former Soviet
Union, mostly Central Asia and the Caucasus, and 26 percent from the
former Yugoslavia, especially Kosovo.

Neither does approval of their families’ asylum petition necessarily
cure the children, he said — some get well right away but others have
remained seriously ill for up to a year.

Charities like the Red Cross and Save the Children have criticised the
Social Democrat government for refusing to give the children an
amnesty or legal protection from deportation.

Immigration Minister Barbro Holmberg has argued that all asylum
petitions must be dealt with individually. Authorities continue to
deport such children, when it deems their lives are not at grave risk
and they will receive good care in their homelands.

But the father of two girls from Azerbaijan suffering from the
syndrome who now face deportation said it was “not true at all” that
they would receive good care back home. The family suffered violent
persecution there for being half Armenian.

Elvira, aged 13, has been in a coma-like state for months and now her
sister Eleonora, aged 7, is slipping into the same state. “Last week
Eleonora refused to eat, drink or go to the toilet,” their father,
Abulfat, told Reuters.

04/27/05 13:06 ET