Children's charity under fire
2007-10-26 14:29
N'Djamena - A French charity that tried to fly a hundred children from Darfur faced the threat of "severe punishment" in Chad on Friday as well as legal investigation in France, but its leaders insisted they acted out of humanitarian motives.
On Thursday, several representatives of the Arche de Zoe (Zoe's Ark) charity were among nine people arrested in east Chad on suspicion of child trafficking when they tried to put 103 children on board a flight to France.
In Chad, President Idriss Deby Itno said that those responsible for what he called an "inhumane, unacceptable" operation would be "severely punished", and sources who asked not to be named said those detained included three journalists.
France's government condemned the operation as "illegal and irresponsible", and a judicial investigation was opened in Paris to see if the charity had broken the law.
And in Geneva, the UN children's agency Unicef added its voice to the condemnation, saying the charity's mission - dubbed Children Rescue - "took place in violation of international rules".
Unicef, which has been granted access to the social centre in the eastern town of Abeche where the children are being kept, said they are mainly boys between one and eight years old, and that all bear a bracelet with an identification number.
"We do not know what that signifies ... Even if a child's mother or father is dead, it's still possible they can find other relatives who are still alive, or a household to take them in," said spokesperson Veronique Taveau.
Stephanie Lefebvre, secretary-general of l'Arche de Zoe, insisted the charity acted out of real compassion and denied any plan to keep the children for adoption.
"There has never - I repeat - never been any question of us being an adoption agency. These children were not intended for adoption. Our motives were simple: we just wanted to rescue them from death," she said.
Proper authorisations had been acquired
"These children were abandoned, enlisted by warlords. Some were drugged and armed. In addition they were malnourished and in an alarming state of health."
She said a team from the charity had been in the region for two months, and that proper authorisations had been acquired from Chad officials. Eastern Chad has regularly seen fighting between the army and rebels and Deby was speaking on his return from Libya to sign a latest peace pact.
Conflict in Chad has displaced an estimated 173 000 local people in addition to 236 000 refugees from the ethnic Darfur conflict across the Sudanese border that pits rebels against the government army and feared Arab Janjaweed militia forces.
Some 300 families in France offered to take the orphans into their homes, paying €2 400 to cover the charity's costs, Lefebvre said.
Many families turned up at an airport east of Paris for the expected arrival of the plane from Abeche in Chad, and expressed fury at the news that the charity's members had been arrested.
"In no way we were seeking to adopt a child. We just wanted to offer a temporary family to a child who at a given moment in time had great need of one," said Andre Loudieres, 47, who drove nine hours from the southern town of Rodez.
According to Christophe Letien, a volunteer for Arche de Zoe, the arrests came after Chad's authorities - who had been kept informed of the operation - changed their mind over its legality.
"We had formal statements from tribal chiefs and mayors that the children were indeed orphans, without mother or father," he said.
France's secretary of state for human rights Rama Yade, who travelled to Darfur earlier this week, said the government had been aware of the planned operation for several months and had warned l'Arche de Zoe that it could be breaking the law.
- AFP