Children in Chad charity case are not orphans, UN says DAKAR, Senegal: Virtually all of the children a French aid group tried to fly out of Chad had been living with family members in villages and were not orphans of the Darfur conflict, as the group claimed, the United Nations said Thursday.
That finding was based on interviews with some of the 103 children as the government and aid groups tried to figure out where they came from and how to reunite them with their families. "These were not orphans in the desert," said Annette Rehrl, a spokeswoman for the United Nations refugee agency. "They were living with their families." A French aid organization, L'Arche de Zoé, or Zoé's Ark, had claimed that the children were sick, hungry and abandoned, and had raised money from European families to rescue the children and place them temporarily in French homes. But checkups showed the children to be in good condition, Rehrl said. "In the context of Chad these are healthy, well-fed children," she said. Six French aid workers and seven Spaniards, the crew of the plane that was to take the children to France last Thursday, have been arrested and charged with attempted kidnapping and fraud. The plane was stopped moments before it was scheduled to take off from Abéché, a small, dust-choked city that is the base of operations for dozens of aid groups working in eastern Chad. Interviews were conducted with the children who are old enough to talk, and many were able to give basic information about where they had come from and who they lived with, Rehrl said. But because the children are so young - they range between 1 and 10 years old - gathering specific information has proved difficult. "When you ask a child what is his father's name he will say daddy, not Robert or Muhammad," said Inah Kaloga of the International Committee of the Red Cross, which will oversee the effort to find the children's families. Using photographs and information in interviews the organization hopes to reunite the children with their families, but that is likely to be a long and complex process, Kaloga said. The majority of the children came from Chadian villages along the border with Sudan, but aid officials were not able to say if the children were Chadians or Sudanese. The border between the two countries is long and porous, and the violence in Darfur and in eastern Chad has pushed residents of both countries into each other's territory. As they wait, the children are being kept in Abéché's orphanage, where they are attended to by health and social workers, Rehrl said. She was quick to add that the children were being kept there not because they are orphans, but because the orphanage was the only "child-friendly space available, with a courtyard and toys and places for them to sleep." The children had been asked how they came to be in the custody of Zoé's Ark, but Rehrl declined to describe their stories, citing confidentiality. The scandal has sparked outrage and condemnation across Africa, where it has a deep resonance from the colonial era, when slave traders, missionaries and colonial officials blithely separated African families with little regard to their wishes. In Congo, government officials suspended all adoptions by foreigners to examine their procedures more carefully, according to The Associated Press, and protesters angry about the attempted kidnappings took to the streets in Chad. The scandal has also raised tensions between Chad and France just as the European Union begins deploying a peacekeeping force in the region aimed at shoring up Chad, which has been increasingly drawn into the four-year-old conflict in neighboring Darfur. In the close-knit world of aid organizations operating out of Abéché the bizarre tale has brought a mix of apprehension and anger. White trucks bearing the flags of many well-known international aid groups like Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders and the International Rescue Committee ply the rutted dirt roads of Abéché, part of an army of aid workers helping hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees and Chadians displaced by the fighting in both countries. The Chadian government said this week that it planned to tighten its procedures for aid groups. The hullabaloo around the abducted children has proved a burden on already stretched aid workers, Rehrl said. Figuring out who these children are, where they are from and uniting them with relatives "will take several weeks if not months," she said.
