Zoe’s Ark French charity workers back in France from Chad to serve 8 years in French prison
January 29, 2008
After months of trials on two continents that captured the attention of France and the world, a French court sentenced six charity workers from the amateur charity organization Zoe’s Ark to eight years in prison. The workers had been convicted in Chad of trying to abduct 103 children from the border with war-torn Darfur and take them to France.
The founder and five members of French charity Zoe’s Ark were sentenced to eight years hard labor in Chad last month plus a fine of $9 million on charges of attempted kidnapping. The convicted French aid workers were later repatriated to France where no such penalty exists, under a pre-existing 1976 agreement between France and Chad. Charity founder Eric Breteau, his partner Emilie Lelouch, head of logistics Alain Peligat, volunteer firefighter Dominique Aubry and team doctor Philippe van Winkelberg were at the hearing. A sixth aid worker, nurse Nadia Merimi, was not in court. She was hospitalized with exhaustion earlier in January.
The Zoe’s Ark members were first arrested at the airport in the eastern Chad town of Abeche on October 25, 2007 as they were about to put 103 children on a flight bound for France. Three French journalists and seven Spanish and Belgian flight crew members were also arrested in the sting, on initial suspicions of “kidnapping and child trafficking”.
International aid staff later found almost all the children to be Chadian, rather than war refugees from Darfur, across the border. Furthermore, the children were not all orphans, but many apparently had at least one living parent.
In the most extreme accusation associated with the case, Chad’s President Idriss Déby went so far as to accused the group of being a ring of pedophiles exploiting the refugee crisis in a scheme to sell children to paying adults back in France.
At their four-day trial in Ndjamena, the French aid organization’s members declared their innocence. They claimed they were lied to by middlemen into believing the children were orphans from the Sudanese region of Darfur which borders eastern Chad. A violent uprising that broke out in Darfur in 2003 has led to the deaths of more than 200,000 people and forced 2.5 million to flee.
Opinion on the 8-year sentence of the French aid workers is split between people in Chad and in those in France, with natives of Chad complaining that the Europeans were getting special treatment and the workers’ lawyers in France deriding even the lighter French sentence as a farce.
But even in France, there is disagreement as to the motives and tactics of the French charity group. Were the Zoe’s Ark workers merely amateurish do-gooders who ran afoul of a corrupt Chad system? Were they pawns in a larger political struggle between the two countries? (The case has stoked tensions between France and Chad, a former French colony, as Paris prepares to lead an EU peacekeeping force of 3500 in eastern Chad to protect refugees near Darfur.)
Were the workers simply examples of what sub-Saharans view as arrogant European colonialism? Or was something more sinister afoot—such as obtaining children, orphans or not, to “sell” to desperate, childless French families for adoption? Theories abound, with conflicting evidence on all sides.
Adoption is not permitted in either Sudan or Chad. Adoption arranged by an organization without and official charter for the activity is also prohibited in France.
Zoe’s Ark maintained that it wanted to place orphaned Darfuri children under five years old in foster care with families in France. The general secretary, Stephanie Lefebvre, told the French newspapers in late December that the organization never aimed to have the children in its care adopted, but simply to save them from starvation.
But critics said many of the host families were childless couples, led to believe that they could begin adoption procedures. Most paid between €2,800 and €6,000 (up to $9,000) to the charity, which is reported to have registered donations totaling at least €1 million.
More damning still, UNICEF said that bandages put on the children by members of Zoe’s Ark were designed to portray them as war victims; however the child-protection body found that none was wounded. And some French media reports quoted residents of Chadian villages claiming they’d seen some of the 103 children lured from their homes into trucks by visiting white people promising candy. These stories were confirmed by some of the children themselves in interviews.
Mariam, 10, said, “A car came with two whites and one black man, who spoke Arabic. The driver said, ‘Come with me, I’ll give you some money and biscuits and then I’ll take you home’. “We were taken to the white people’s house and they gave us medicine – small white tablets. I was not ill. All the children were given pills. They told us that we would no longer be able to go home.” Mariam’s mother is dead but her father is still alive. She is from Chad, not Darfur.
A clumsy attempt to do good, or a nefarious child-trafficking scam? The mystery will likely rage on in France and around the world for some time. But some other aid organizations in France and elsewhere fume that the Zoe’s Ark case has made their jobs more difficult, with local populations viewing outsiders who claim to be trying to help them with even more distrust than before.
Zoe’s Ark was formed four years ago by motoring enthusiasts from the French four-wheel-drive community to aid victims of the December 2004 Asian tsunami. Its founder, Eric Breteau, is a volunteer firefighter and former president of the French 4×4 Federation. Zoe’s Ark says it is motivated by the firefighter’s spirit and sense of duty.
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