Sudan puts heat on France
2007-11-20 13:26
Khartoum - Aid agencies and French interests in Sudan are coming under intense pressure over a plot to abduct 103 Darfur children from neighbouring Chad and transfer them to France.
Three weeks after the aborted attempt by the French charity Zoe's Ark to fly the children out of Africa, Sudanese President Omar al-Beshir had added his voice to a chorus of anger, branding the action as modern-day slavery.
"This we can call a slave market," said Beshir on Saturday. He said: "The operation took place under the eyes and noses of Western charitable organisations and the French government."
Beshir said: "America, Britain and Europe are liars and hypocrites who want our resources and that's why they stole our children to sell in a slave market in Europe."
Aid workers summoned
Aid agencies operating in violence-wracked Darfur were being harassed, and the authorities were using the scandal to tighten the noose around some 12 500 aid workers deployed in the western Sudanese region.
Orla Clinton of the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)said: "It would have been a good opportunity for Sudan to underscore that what happened in Chad would have never happened here."
Members of French NGOs, and other foreign aid workers, had been summoned by Sudan's humanitarian aid commissioner Mohamed Abdel Rahman Hassabo and warned their actions would be held to account, one of them said.
Hassabo had accused Paris of having furnished visas to the French charity to get the children out of Chad, before the Chadian authorities intervened.
"In March, April, May, the authorities of France gave advance visas and gave permission for the plane to take these children to France," he said earlier this month in Geneva.
17 kids 'Sudanese'
The children were merely the advance guard of a vast operation to send 10 000 African children to Europe, Hassabo said. Zoe's Ark said the children were orphans from Darfur who were to be placed in foster care with families in Europe.
But Chad argued the group did not have permission to take the children out of the country.
While Hassabo claimed 17 of the children were Sudanese, aid agencies who had since cared for them said most of the youngsters were Chadian and had at least one living parent.
Nevertheless protests were organised in front of the French embassy in Khartoum.
Ruling National Congress Party officials had also upped the ante, and some of its MPS had even demanded the expulsion of French Ambassador Christine Robichon as well as French charities.
Nafie Ali Nafie, number two of the NCP, said: "The question is why these children were being taken to the West? Perhaps to provide organs such as hearts and kidneys to elderly patients."
Party member Qotbi al-Mahdi branded the action by Zoe's Ark as "proof of the Western plot against Arabs and Muslims".