Chad kids not orphans
2007-11-01 21:19
Abeche - International aid agencies on Thursday rejected the war orphan label attached to 103 children at the centre of a child abduction scandal involving a French charity in Chad.
In a joint statement, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and Unicef said 91 of the children had spoken of coming from a "family environment with at least one adult in a parental role".
"Therefore they cannot be considered to be orphans," ICRC spokesperson Anna Schaaf said in Geneva. Schaaf said questioning of the children suggested that most of them were in fact Chadians.
Chad's security forces had arrested 19 people since a small French charity, Zoe's Ark, attempted to fly the children to France, believing they were orphans from the war-torn Sudanese region of Darfur across the desert border.
Belgian pilot charged
Nine French nationals - six members of the charity and three journalists - faced a forced labour sentence on charges of kidnapping and extortion, while seven Spanish flight crew were charged with complicity.
A Belgian pilot of 75 was also charged on Wednesday because he had flown the children from the border settlement of Adre to the main eastern town of Abeche, where the Zoe's Ark people were arrested on October 25.
The charity workers had rejected any suggestion of a kidnap operation, saying they had acted in good faith, believing they were saving Darfuris children from certain death.
The relief agencies' statement said most of the children appeared to have come from villages along the Chad-Sudan border, which was a porous area that had for years been wracked not only by an influx of hundreds of thousands of Darfur refugees, but Chadian rebel insurgency and ethnic strife.
Origin of kids 'moot point'
Schaaf said: "Most of the children are Chadian, but not all." The statement said relief workers had spent days talking to the 21 girls and 82 boys aged between one and about 10.
"From the information gathered, they live in villages on Chad's territory, but we don't know if they originate from these villages. We can't tell what their nationality is," said Schaaf.
For the Chad government, the origin of the children was a moot point.
"Whatever the case, whether the children are Chadian or Sudanese, the (Zoe's Ark) operation took place in Chad. That's what matters," said a senior Chadian official who asked not to be named.
The Belgian pilot had been jailed in N'Djamena, while the other arrested Europeans were still in police custody in Abeche.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy late on Wednesday again urged Chad's President Idriss Deby Itno to free the journalists, a Chadian judicial source said, but a senior official said "we're being asked to twist the arm of justice".