McClatchy blog: Somewhere in Africa

I've stopped in Paris on my way back to Nairobi, but Darfur is big news here as well. The story of the French quasi-charity that allegedly attempted to kidnap 103 children from Chad -- claiming they were orphans from Darfur -- is all over the papers. Yesterday, French president Nicolas Sarkozy made an emergency visit to Chad, where he secured the release of seven of 17 Europeans who've been arrested in connection with the scheme, which apparently intended to place the "orphans" -- nearly all of whom were living with their families on the Chad-Sudan border -- with host families in France. Among those still being held by Chadian authorities are six charity workers with a little-known group called L'arche de Zoé, or Zoe's Ark, who've been charged with kidnapping.

We could file this story under the category of good intentions gone awry, but that file is getting pretty thick when it comes to Africa and the West. From what's emerged so far about Zoe's Ark, this was sort of a fly-by-night charity operation that wasn't registered with the French foreign ministry and whose aims went far beyond the accepted bounds of humanitarian work in a war zone. The group's French website (the English version is down) proclaims: "We must save the children of Darfur while there is still time. In a few months, they will be dead!"

Despite having almost no visible experience working in the region, the group's website features an impressive array of maps and statistics about the Darfur conflict. Its emotional appeal clearly registered with some well-intentioned but naive French families, who were led to believe that a group of "doctors, nurses, firemen and other specialists" -- as the group describes its members -- could swoop into a faraway country and bring back several dozen of its children.

This is patently patronizing, at best, but at the heart of this story are some families that really thought they were doing a great deed. Today's Le Monde newspaper carries an interview with one such family from a well-off Parisian suburb that was preparing to welcome a 6-year-old Darfur boy named Abdel into their home.

According to the story, "Adoptive families in disarray" (Le désarroi des famillies d'accueil), Jean and Claire Rieutord learned of Zoe's Ark from a radio advertisement in May, and contacted the head of the group, Eric Breteau. The family acknowledges being "seduced" by Breteau and his girlfriend, Emilie Lelouch: "Side by side, he so strong and she so pretty, and both of them so brave -- it all had such a romantic feeling. It was very exciting," Jean recalled.

In September, Breteau arranged a meeting for adoptive families where he described his plan to bring children from Darfur as being "atypical," and that it required the families to keep quiet about it. Breteau reportedly made ambiguous statements that allowed the families to believe he had the behind-the-scenes support of French officials, who couldn't publicly back the operation because it was diplomatically sensitive. Within weeks, the Rieutord family paid 2,200 euros (about $3,100) to Zoe's Ark to ensure safe passage of the child they'd been assigned.

Jean began to have doubts. One day, he says he asked Breteau how it was possible to load an airplane full of children and take off from Africa without proper authorization. "He replied that if this had never been done before, it was because no one had dared to do it," Jean recalled.

The revelations of the past few days have shocked the Breteaus, but not enough for Jean to realize his own mistake. "We were fooled," he told Le Monde, until his wife corrected him: "No, we fooled ourselves."