Chad: Zoe’s Ark children return home
March 15, 2008 (ADRE, Chad) — After months in an orphanage, the first wave of children caught up in a French charity adoption scandal in the central African nation of Chad returned home on Friday to their tearful parents.
“I thank you God, I haven’t seen my little ones for over four months,” mother-of-two Zenaba told AFP as her pair completed a 150-kilometer (95-mile) bus ride across the sands of Chad.
Chadian and United Nations officials accompanied 83 children from Abeche, where they were housed as international court cases and wrangling over compensation ensued, to Adre, a village near Sudan’s border.
“The whites asked (us) to entrust our children to them for their schooling in Adre,” said Yaya Adam, a father.
“I’ve suffered for almost five months (and) spent money traveling to see them in Abeche. Now I expect them (Zoe’s Ark) to pay up,” he said.
“Everyone in the village accused me of having sold my children, my honor has been soiled,” Adam said.
French charity Zoe’s Ark had sought to fly 103 children — almost all of whom are from Chad — to France in October for adoption after claiming they were orphans or refugees from Sudan’s war-wracked Darfur region.
International aid staff later found almost all the children to have at least one living parent.
The charity’s head Eric Breteau and five colleagues were sentenced in December to eight years hard labor by a Chad court for the attempted airlift last year, before being sent to France to serve their sentence in jail.
The children left the Abeche orphanage in two buses in the morning, each carrying bags containing clothes, anti-mosquito nets and mattresses.
They also carried presents from Chadian President Idriss Deby Itno, local officials said.
“UNICEF has committed itself to monitor these children in their respective families,” Mariam Ndiaye, UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) representative for Chad, said as the youngsters began their journey home.
“After more than four months in an orphanage, I fear that once the children are back with their families, they will find life rather disagreeable,” one aid worker told AFP.
Fourteen more will set off for Tine-Chad and Biltine, again eastern Chadian settlements, over the coming days.
Five Sudanese children and one child authorities are still attempting to identify will be temporarily placed in the care of the Red Cross.
“The parents were duped and false promises were made,” Chad’s Social Action Minister Ngarmbatina Carmel Sou IV said as the 81 boys and 22 girls aged one to 11 years prepared to go home.
“For the Chadian government, it’s been an opportunity to find out how many children are abandoned with no schooling,” she added. The villages around Adre are isolated and very poor.
The Chadian minister insisted that the damages and interest of 6.3 million euros (9.8 million dollars) the court ordered the charity to pay on December 26 mattered as a “judicial decision that must be respected”.
Last Friday, Paris welcomed the Chadian president’s plans to pardon the six charity workers convicted of “attempted kidnapping”, but refused to pay the money owed the families.
“It is not for the government to pay, but at the same time, a solution must be found,” said Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner.
Chadian President Idriss Deby Itno, who has previously said he would grant a pardon to the aid workers, last Thursday told France 24 news channel that this would come in “less than a month.”
But the president, who was supported by France when rebels attacked the Chadian capital last month, said “a solution” still had to be found regarding compensation.
The case raised tensions between France and Chad, a former French colony, as Paris prepared to spearhead a 3,700-strong EU peacekeeping force in eastern Chad to protect refugee camps in the region bordering Darfur.
(AFP)