By Christopher Gehrke
Impunity Watch Senior Desk Officer, South America
N’DJAMENA, Chad – One hundred and three children will be reunited with their families after six French charity workers were convicted of attempting to kidnap to kidnap them.
Chadian authorities arrested the aid workers as they tried to leave Chad on a plane bound for Paris, said the United Nations Children’s Fund.
The charity said that the children were Sudanese orphans from the Darfur region, and were being taken to foster families in France. Other charities, however, had determined that the majority of the children were Chadian, and had living parents.
The children – 21 girls and 82 boys, aged between one and 10 years – have been in an orphanage in Abeche since late October. The children indicated that they were from villages near Adre and Tine along the Chadian-Sudanese border.
Chadians expressed their outrage by staging a stone-throwing, anti-French demonstration in the capital, N’Djamena, a few months ago.
French authorities called the charity group’s actions “illegal and irresponsible.” The six aid workers were sentenced to eight years of hard labor in Chad. They were sent to France, with the permission of the Chadian government, after French President Nicolas Sarkozy intervened on their behalf. The six were sentenced to eight years in a French prison.
The children’s return home has been delayed until their guardians could be identified by Chadian officials. The French charity involved left little paperwork about their children’s identities. Despite this setback, UNICEF spokesman Jean-Francois Basse said most of the children’s guardians had been found.
“Out of the 103 children we were able to locate those who were in charge of the children for 97 of them,” he told BBC. UNICEF will travel to Chad next week to reunite the children with their families.
For more information, please see:
France24 – Children in Chad ‘kidnap’ scandal to rejoin families: UNICEF – 7 March 2008
CNN – Kidnapped kids going back to families – 7 March 2008
BBC News – Chad’s ‘orphans’ returning home – 7 March 2008
