Chad case part of vast child abduction plot- Sudan
November 15, 2007 (GENEVA) — Sudan added to the international row over Zoe’s Ark Friday, accusing Paris of having furnished visas to the French charity to fly 103 children out of Chad, before the Chadian authorities intervened.
Sudan’s humanitarian aid commissioner Mohamed Abdel Rahman Hassabo also accused pointed the finger at UN agencies working in the region.
“In March, April, May, the authorities of France gave advance visas and gave permission for the plane to take these children to France,” said Hassabo.
The children were merely the front-lines of a vast operation to send 10,000 African children to Europe, he told reporters in Geneva.
“This is a very serious crime, against any principle of humanity,” he added.
Hassabo suggested that United Nations agencies and other humanitarian groups had supported the Zoe’s Ark operation — a claim firmly rejected by the UN’s deputy High Commissioner for Refugees, Craig Johnston.
“We have a number of totally unsubstantiated and unsubstantiatable allegations that are being made concerning UNHCR and UNICEF,” Johnston told reporters in Geneva when asked to comment on the allegations.
“I will leave it to your judgment why these accusations are being made and what are the motivations behind them,” he added.
Johnston, just back from a tour of Sudan and Chad, where he met some of the children at the centre of the Zoe’s Ark row, nevertheless described the operation by the French charity as “shameful and disgusting.”
Six French members of Zoe’s Ark and four Sudanese officials remain imprisoned in Chad’s capital N’Djamena, as an investigation into alleged child abduction unfolds.
Zoe’s Ark says the children were orphans from neighbouring Sudan’s war-torn Darfur region who it planned to place in foster care with families in Europe.
But Chad says the group did not have permission to take the children out of the country.
While Hassabo claims 17 of the children were Sudanese, aid agencies who have since cared for them said most of the youngsters are Chadian and have at least one living parent.