CHAD/GHANA: Anger in Chad over illegal child flight attempt

Hundreds of Chadians protest against the attempt by a French charity to fly more than a hundred children out of the country. Chadians chanting "no to the slave trade, no to child trafficking" protested on Wednesday (October 31) against a French group accused of trying to illegally fly children from the central African country to Europe. Several hundred angry locals gathered outside the governor's office in the eastern town of Abeche, where nine French nationals and seven Spaniards were arrested last week as they tried to fly 103 children out of the impoverished state. The French are members of a group called Zoe's Ark which said it wanted to place orphans from neighbouring Sudan's war-torn Darfur region with European families. The scandal has triggered outrage among Chadians, with many living on the barren border with Sudan questioning the motives of scores of foreign humanitarian groups that work with refugees who have fled years of conflict in Darfur. Families of children missing in eastern Chad, itself riven by conflict and home to some 400,000 Sudanese refugees and displaced Chadians, arrived at the orphanage where the 103 children are being held in the hope of finding lost relatives. Abeche governor Tourka Ramadan Karo promised the crowd a full investigation. In a bid to calm anger against former colonial power France, he emphasised the group responsible was acting independently. "The French government is in solidarity with the Chadian government on this issue. It's only the NGO Children Rescue who is responsible for these acts along with its accomplices, separate from the French government," he said. The scandal is an embarrassment for France which is a longstanding ally of Chadian President Idriss Deby. France has troops stationed in Chad and will provide roughly half of a European Union peacekeeping force of up to 3,000 soldiers to be deployed in the east in the coming weeks to protect Sudanese and Chadian refugees there. Chadian authorities have charged the French nationals, who include two journalists, with abduction and fraud, meaning they could face five to 20 years hard labour if convicted in Chad. Seven Spanish crew members of the plane chartered for the operation were charged as accessories, along with two Chadians, local officials from the border town of Tine, north of Abeche. However, Portugal's foreign minister, Luis Amado, played down the prospect of any diplomatic damage to European-African relations. He addressed the issue while visiting Ghana for talks on the agenda of the European Union-Africa summit scheduled to take place in Lisbon later this year. "As you know it was a decision of one NGO (non-governmental organisation), a complicated process, it will not travel in my view, we have a very important strategic agenda for the future and we could not disrupt what we have in mind in the medium and long term relation between Africa and European by a small and minor problem," Amado said. The Red Cross, U.N. children's agency UNICEF and refugee agency UNCHR have been interviewing the children to try to ascertain their identities. Officials have said it appears many of them, aged 3-10 years, were from Chad and were not orphans. "Once we have the information for the children it will have to be verified," said Serge Male, the head of UNHCR in Chad. "We will have to go to the villages where they claim they are coming from, see their parents, or who they claim are their parents, and do this work. It will take time," he told Reuters. Many of the infants, aged three to eight, were bewildered by the sudden rush of attention when journalists were taken to the dusty courtyard of an orphanage in Abeche on Saturday (October 27). Some began crying, others lay sleeping in the arms of those caring for them since police arrested those accused of trying to take the children out of the country.

ITN Source | November 1, 2007

Tags:. .spanish. .scandal. .bid. .motives. .minor