Charity workers held as French minister attacks NGO over Darfur 'adoptions'
Nine French nationals were still behind bars in Chad on Saturday after a French minister condemned as "illegal and irresponsible" an attempt by a charity to fly more than 100 children from Chad to France in an apparent mercy mission.
With the nine under arrest -- including members of the charity concerned Arche de Zoe (Zoe's Ark) and three journalists -- in connection with the aborted mission to "rescue" the children, Rama Yada, the minister for human rights and foreign affairs, said France had attempted to stop the airlift.
Chadian television late Friday showed the French nationals, handcuffed and seated on the floor in the eastern town of Abeche, as well as the 103 boys and girls aged between one and eight years. Some of the children were weeping.
A crowd of around 100 disappointed would-be carers of the children protested outside the Chadian embassy in Paris Friday saying it was a "total mystery" why the flight had been stopped.
Arche de Zoe claimed it was flying out the children to "save them from death" in the nearby Darfur civil war.
However according to a representative of Unicef in N'Djamena, the Chad capital, the "massive majority" of the children were from Chad and there was "nothing to say" that they were orphans.
Chad's president Idriss Deby Itno demanded "severe punishment" for the charity workers and called it a case of "kidnap, pure and simple."
Deby claimed the charity had "tricked the vigilance of Chad's authorities", claimed they were "acting against the will of parents" and rhetorically asked journalists if the aim was to "sell them or kill them and remove their organs?"
Speaking on French TV Yada said: "We did everything we could to ban and prevent this operation. After that they carried it out in a clandestine fashion, without telling anyone, with the backing of the authorities."
"They mounted an illegal and irresponsible operation" she said.
The children were reportedly to be adopted or fostered by families in France who had paid 2,800-6,000 euros (4,000-8,600 dollars) to the organisation.
The charity says it moved the children from the border region between Darfur, in western Sudan, and Chad and was going to take them to France to "save them from death."
French nationals originally waiting to meet the plane at an airport outside Paris travelled Friday to protest outside the Chad embassy in Paris.
Maryse Cales, vice president of the Collective of Families for the Orphans of Darfur, said outside the embassy: "We demand the freeing of the charity workers and demand to know what will become of the children. They had all permission, it is the change of heart of the Chad authorities that we don't understand. It is a total mystery."
Stephanie Lefebvre, secretary-general of Arche de Zoe, insisted that the charity acted out of 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.
Earlier Friday the French military confirmed reports that it had ferried members of the non-governmental organisation around Chad, "the same as we do for many other organisations," according to spokesman naval Commander Christophe Prazuck.
The operation had approval from Chadian authorities and the UN refugee agency, he added, saying that "children on the other hand have never been transported by French military means."
Some 300 families had offered to take in the children, according to L'Arche de Zoe.
Fighting in eastern Chad between the army and rebels has displaced an estimated 173,000 locals, in addition to some 236,000 refugees from the Darfur conflict across the Sudanese border that has left at least 200,000 dead.
AFP
