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No "good" deed shall go unpunished
Six French charity workers are expected soon to be flown home after they were sentenced in Chad today to eight years hard labour for trying to kidnap 103 children in order to take them to France for adoption.The guilty verdicts are likely to conclude the African episode of the so-called Zoes Ark affair, in which French activists gathered children in eastern Chad whom they believed to be orphans from the Darfur conflict and arranged for them to fly to an airport in the Champagne region. Foster families were waiting for them when they were arrested in October. It turned out that the children were from Chadian families and most were not orphans. Their families entrusted them to the French charity in the belief that they were to be educated locally. The activities of Eric Breteau, a volunteer fireman, and his five colleagues from Zoes Ark sparked an outcry in Chad and embarrassed President Sarkozy, who nevertheless intervened in October with Idress Deby, President of the former French colony, to ensure that they would be returned to France. The group are expected to be sent to Paris in order, at least in theory, to serve their sentences in France under a 1976 judicial accord between Chad and France. They face a separate criminal investigation in France but it is unclear whether they would be dispensed from prison time. At the end of a three-day trial, Beassoum Ben Ngassorom, the state prosecutor, called on the Ndjamena criminal court to sentence all six of the French defendants to seven to 11 years for attempted kidnapping, fraud and for not paying their bills. They came with apparently humanitarian intentions, but rapidly switched to the non-humanitarian, the prosecutor told the court. A Chad national and a Sudanese man were sentenced to lighter terms of four years because they were victims of deceit by the French, as the prosecutor put it. Two Chadian officials were acquitted. Mr Breteau, the founder of Zoes Ark, insisted throughout the trial that his groups intentions had been honourable and his French lawyers said they had merely been applying the concept of humanitarian interference, the doctrine that was devised in the 1980s by Bernard Kouchner, the humanitarian crusader who is now French Foreign Minister. Mr Breteau offered an apology for the first time as the trial ended today, saying that he not intended to separate any Chadian parents from their children. He insisted that he and his colleagues had acted in good faith when they tried to fly the children from eastern Chad, near the border with Sudans conflict-ridden Darfur region, to France. If they are Sudanese ... we have deprived them of a better future; if they are Chadians and we were lied to, if we separated them from their families, we are really terribly sorry, for we never wanted to separate families, he said. Mr Sarkozy flew to Chad a month ago to bring home French journalists and Spanish airline crew who had been detained with the charity workers in October. He promised that he would bring home the charity workers, whom he depicted as a band of misguided clowns rather than criminals. The timing of the groups return remains uncertain, especially since Mr Breteau angered the Chadian government by announcing at the start of the trial that he expected to found guilty and then be home by the New Year. Posted by: tipper 2007-12-26 |
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