French Charity Zoe’s Ark Hits the Stumbling Block of Reality

From our special correspondent.

Eric Breteau, the head of Zoe’s Ark, repeated the admission in court that he had never been to Africa before. Although the situation in Darfur is indeed critical, Breteau has had from the start a grossly exaggerated view of the crisis. “Every five minutes a child dies there”, the charity alarmingly claimed. If valid, this figure would imply over 500,000 deaths in the five-year crisis, whereas reliable estimates guess at 200,000 to 300,000 deaths in total. According to the charity’s figures, “there wouldn’t be a single child left in Darfur, the counsel for the prosecution remarked during the trial.

Breteau allowed the charity four months to carry out the orphan identification process. He took the additional risk of looking for orphan children in an area of Chad bordering with Sudan, home to the same families and tribes on both sides of the border. This context of extended families raises the question of how one can rightly assess the nature of the relationship between guardian and child. The International Committee of the Red Cross, a veteran of orphan rescue operations in war zones, carries out long-term research missions on the ground before it proceeds to commit a child’s family links to paper.

Throughout the trial Zoe’s Ark has claimed that it had been acting in good faith, and blamed the charity’s intermediaries for deceiving them. But was it really not to be expected that some Chadian children should be presented as coming from Sudan so as to benefit from the support offered by Zoe’s Ark ?

The School and Children’s Centre in Adré were a real boon in this area deprived of infrastructure. As one father explained in the witness box, “I entrusted them with my children because I was told that they would receive clothes, food, and schooling”. So far this opportunity had been available only to the Sudanese children living in refugee camps.

It is probably in Tiné that the Ark’s workers’ assessment of the situation was the most inaccurate. On the basis of a trip lasting no longer than a few days and undertaken solely by their intermediaries, the charity’s members took nearly fifteen children of the Zaghawa tribe, whose members belong to the same ethnic group as President Idriss Déby. In Chad, planning to take Zaghawa children away is equivalent to harming the president’s own family. And this is a step too far.