Many Set to Fly Out of Chad Had Parents

This handout picture taken Friday Oct. 26, 2007, in the eastern city of Abec...
By TOM MALITI, AP
Thu Nov 1, 8:11 AM EDT
N'DJAMENA, Chad —
Most of the 103 African children a French charity attempted to fly from Chad to Europe appear to have at least one living parent, U.N. agencies said Thursday.

A French group calling itself Zoe's Ark was stopped last week from flying the children it described as orphans from Sudan's Darfur region to Europe, where the group said it intended to place them with host families.

Seventeen Europeans have been detained by Chadian authorities, including six French citizens who were charged with kidnapping. The group says its intentions were purely humanitarian.

Aid workers who interviewed the children at an orphanage in eastern Chad where they are being cared for said most of them come from villages on the Chadian-Sudanese border region.

"Ninety-one of the children referred to a family environment made up of at least one adult person whom they consider as a parent," the U.N.'s Children Fund, the U.N. refugee agency and the Red Cross said in a joint statement.

The French Foreign Ministry and others have cast doubt on the claims by the little-known group that the children were orphans from Darfur, where more than 200,000 people have been killed since early 2003.

The International Committee of the Red Cross and the two U.N. aid agencies said several days of talks with 21 girls and 81 boys aged between 1 and 10 "suggest that 85 of them come from villages in the border region between Chad and Sudan, in the area of Adre and Tine." Adre and Tine are both in Chad.

Interviews continue, the agencies said, to track their families or close relatives.

In Central Africa, meanwhile, Republic of Congo's justice minister said late Wednesday that the country was suspending all international adoptions following the events in Chad.

"The government is taking this as a preventive measure," Justice Minister Emmanuel Aime Yoka said.

Yoka said the Chad incident occurred only a few days after 17 children from the Republic of Congo were adopted by Spanish families. He said the two events were not connected, but said the coincidence of timing led the government to re-examine its policies.

Republic of Congo is taking measures to verify the situation of those children currently in Spain, he said.

Also Thursday, a delegation of senior Sudanese officials led by the Minister of Social Affairs Samia Ahmed Mohammed was to travel to Chad to monitor the interrogations there and steps that will be taken protect children from future abductions.

According to its Web site, Zoe's Ark, founded in 2005 by volunteer firefighter Eric Breteau, announced in April it planned on "evacuating orphans from Darfur." The group launched an appeal for host families and funding.

Established French aid and adoption agencies had raised questions about Zoe's Ark could legally organize adoption of children from Darfur, and alerted French judicial authorities, according to French newspaper reports.

The French Foreign Ministry in August warned families to be careful. Still, some 300 families reportedly signed up to adopt or foster children, and many were waiting at a French airport last week for the children when they heard members of the group had been arrested.

Of the 17 people detained in Abeche since last week, six were French citizens charged with kidnapping. If convicted, they face up to 20 years in Chadian prison with hard labor.

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Associated Press Writer Louis Okamba in Brazzaville, Republic of Congo contributed to this report.

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