French ‘charity’ workers kidnap 103 African children

Zoe’s Ark is the charity which calls itself ‘a non-profit organisation dedicated to orphaned children’ that in October came under the spotlight for its attempt to abduct 103 children aged between 18 months and 10 years from villages in Chad and take them to France. The charity claimed the children were all orphans and that they were taking them to live with adoptive families in France and Belgium who had paid between £2,000 and £4,200 for the “orphans”.

According to a spokesperson from the UN refugee agency, the children were not orphans at all and lived with their families. The French abductors, masquerading as charity workers, lured the children from their parents with promises of training and vehicles and in some instances approached children when they were alone and urged them to go with them in exchange for biscuits. 10-year-old Hamsa Brahim said: “Whites came and said they would enrol us in school. They came to talk with our father and he allowed us to go with them. They said they would train us and that when we are grown up we would get a vehicle.” The case caused international outrage with the Chadian people themselves revolting against the presence of ‘aid’ workers in their country.

Speaking from his prison cell before the hearing, Eric Bréteau, the 36-year-old founder of Zoe’s Ark, described the legal process as a “masquerade”. “We’ve already been given a detailed timetable: the trial begins on December 21, we’re found guilty on the 26th, I get ten years and we’re repatriated on the 30th,” he said.

Chad's senior protection officer for the United Nation's Children's Fund (UNICEF), Jean-Francois Basse, said the organisation did not follow legal procedures for coordinating with the government and other humanitarian organisations. He went on to state that there needs to be a compelling reason to send a child overseas: "Poverty, conflict or whatever you want, should not be a reason to remove a [child] from his natural environment and send him away and think he is better off.”

Despite the impoverishment in Africa and the history of conflicts, relatively few children have ended up in orphanages or as candidates for overseas adoption. This, says Basse, is because of Africa's strong cultural ties to the extended family. "Here it is very, very difficult to find an orphan which is completely abandoned or separated from family ties. Even if one of the parents is dead or the two parents are dead, [they] are usually taken charge of by relatives of other members of the bigger family."

On 26 December, six members of Zoe’s Ark were sentenced to eight years hard labour in Chad for attempting to kidnap 103 children and ordered to pay compensation in the amount of 40 million CFA francs (44,000 pounds) for each of the 103 children they attempted to abduct. Two days later they were sent home after an intervention from Paris where there is a strong chance the sentences will be reduced. To the disappointment of African people and commentators, Chad's Justice Minister Albert Pahimi Padacke said: "I have responded favourably to the transfer request from France this morning." The transfer is made possible by a 1976 bilateral judicial co-operation accord between France and Chad which allows criminals to serve their sentences in their country of nationality. France has also provided military support for Chad President, Idriss Deby on a number of occasions.

Coverage of the case in the western media, particularly in the UK, has attempted to downplay the incident and the BBC even sought to implicate the parents of the children by insinuating that they “gave their children away”. Little concern or interest has been shown for the children involved. When the incident first occurred, a female social worker said; “All the children who are crying want to go and see their parents. They've been having nightmares.” The bias of reporting starkly contrasts with the obsessive coverage afforded to the case of 3-year-old Madeleine McCann who along with her two younger siblings was abandoned by her parents in a hotel room in Portugal in May as they went out to socialise with friends. Madeleine was subsequently abducted.