A group of French charity workers arrested in Chad on child kidnapping charges went to extraordinary lengths to keep their adoption operation under wraps, it emerged.
A total of 17 Europeans have been charged in connection with a bid to smuggle more than 100 children out of eastern Chad to France, where they were to have been adopted by host families.
Aid workers in the city of Abéché, where the group was arrested a week ago, say they are stunned that the charity, Zoe’s Ark managed to keep the real motive for their mission secret for so long. “Humanitarians feel cheated,” said a UN worker who met the group when they first arrived in Chad in August. “They lied to everybody.”
According to sources in Abéché, the group of six aid workers who are at the centre of the scandal referred to themselves as “Children’s Rescue” during their time in Chad, never once mentioning their links with Zoe’s Ark, a controversial charity involved in adoption, founded by Eric Breteau, the alleged ring leader of the child kidnapping plot.
Some humanitarians say Children’s Rescue claimed they had come to Chad to conduct an assessment mission, others say they talked of setting up a psycho-social treatment centre. Nobody had any idea they were planning a large-scale adoption.
Details of the group’s arrest, while they were on their way to the airport with the children in tow, have also created outrage.
According to the Chadian government, more than half the children found with the aid workers had bandages or IV drips. But when social workers examined the children, the medical paraphernalia was found to be fake.
Seven Spanish flight-crew members, who have now been charged as accomplices of the French nationals, are believed to have thought they were conducting a medical evacuation.
“It’s sick to think of dressing children up like this in fake bandages,” said an aid worker. “How did they think they could get away with it?”
That the group hid the true nature of their mission is not in doubt — the Chadian courts will now decide whether it was illegal as well.
A row is also raging about whether the children at the centre of the scandal are orphans from Darfur, as Zoe’s Ark has claimed. Initial results of investigations by UN agencies and the government also suggest a number of children may have family members still alive.
“This information needs to be verified, but from what we’ve heard so far, some of the children already asked us when they can go back to their parents,” Annette Rehrl, of the UN refugee agency in Abéché, told the Mail & Guardian. “So obviously if they ask for their mummy and their daddy they are not orphans.”
Another controversial question is how much the Chadian and French governments knew about the adoption mission. The French government says it warned Zoe’s Ark earlier this year, when told about their plans, that their mission might be illegal, and advised them not to go ahead with it.
According to UN sources, some time in the late summer a warning was sent to Chad from Paris, saying that a group called Zoe’s Ark could be planning an adoption mission. But because the aid workers operated under the name Children’s Rescue, this information was never acted upon.
It has also now emerged that both the French embassy and the French army in Chad helped the group with paperwork and logistics.
There is no suggestion that either was aware of the controversial nature of the aid workers’ real mission, but the case’s many links to France are creating a stir, especially given Chad’s colonial ties with the French.
“We don’t trust any Europeans now,” said a Chadian social worker who has been helping to care for the children since last week. “All French are responsible because they knew what was going on. An NGO based in France? A plane that left Chad to go to Paris? They are all accomplices. Even the French army is an accomplice.”
It’s also unlikely the group would have been able to pull off their audacious plan without some support from inside the Chadian government.
Zoe’s Ark planned to fly the children out of Chad on a 220-seater plane; in a small airport like Abéché this would not have been possible without prior agreement. Two Chadians — both with links to the Tine area, from which the charity is said to have taken some children — have been charged, and further arrests could follow.
Some observers had been worried that Chadian President Idriss Deby may use the child-kidnapping case as an excuse to delay plans to send European Union peacekeepers to Chad. Up to 4 000 troops will start arriving in the country in the next few weeks, but so far there are no signs that he will do a U-turn.
The president has used the scandal to his advantage, though. His PR team has been in overdrive since the arrests, and Deby has repeatedly made controversial statements — at one stage even accusing the aid workers of wanting to sell the children to paedophile rings. Deby is a shrewd political operator, and with 17 Europeans in Chadian custody and the world watching his every step, he is in a good position to negotiate behind the scenes with Paris.