Children of Chad

The Children of Chad saw the dawn of the fourth day of fighting in and around, N’Djamena, the capital city of Chad. Chad is a republic in Central Africa, liberated from French rule in 1960, now ruled by Idriss Déby, an unpopular president besieged, at this writing, in the presidential palace.

A coalition of three rebel groups is fighting with government forces in the center of the city, despite the permanent presence of 900 French soldiers in N’Djamena, 200 more at Abéché, and a recent agreement with France’s president, Nicholas Sarkozy, to send a certain number of Mirages F1 CR, aircraft, already used for reconnaissance in the region by the French military.

The French Foreign Minister, Bernard Kouchner, announced on February 3 that France wants nothing to do with this war (will he cancel the shipment of Mirages?), and yesterday started the evacuation of French and other foreign nationals. Six hundred people are already being shipped out, and television coverage shows families leaving with small children, smiling ruefully at the camera, the children dressed nicely for the trip and skipping along with the luggage carts.

We only see white faces in this orderly crowd. No black families or black children seem to be among the evacuees. This omission brings to mind the 103 children of Chad that were ready to be sent out of the country by plane last October under the auspices of a French social organization called Zoe’s Ark.

How many thousands of children in Chad, now like other African countries, are going to live through the tortures of a civil war, with its sidelines of hunger, displacement, death and disease? Why didn’t the Chad and French governments foresee this war and allow at least 103 children to be saved from it by sending them to France?

In neighboring Sudan, a war has been raging for over a year, and thousands of refugees are daily streaming over the border into southeast Chad, if they can make it. It hardly needed a soothsayer to predict that Chad itself, a country whose president is hated for his corruption, nepotism, and betrayal, backed by an equally detested colonial presence, would be destabilized like the rest of the region.

Were the French social workers and their local associates the only ones who not only thought the children would be better off elsewhere, but actually tried to do something about getting them out of the country, and hired a plane (not a Mirage F1 CR) to bring them to France? We cannot ask them because on the 28th of January they were sentenced to eight years without parole in a French prison.

A Chad government spokesman objected to the sentence as too lenient. Most European media, other relief agencies, and President Sarkozy himself, decried Zoe’s Ark as an organization run either by the mentally deficient or criminels. Its head, Eric Breteau, was accused and condemned by the French court of “helping foreign children to reside illegally in France.”

So now where are these 103 little children between the ages of two and ten, boys and girls, whose families had confided them to Zoe’s Ark to go to France where they could learn French, Arabic, and to read the Koran? 268 French families had subscribed 1400 euros for their welfare, and each child would have been taken into one of these French families where, in addition to schooling and languages, he or she would get the food and vitamins and medical care necessary.

As we know, the brains and bodies of growing children can never develop to their maximum capacity on a hunger regime, not to speak of growing up under the psychological stress of war. So, as civil war breaks out in Chad, we wonder where these children have been put as an alternative to France? Were they sorted out and sent back to their villages?

An enterprising television reporter went out and interviewed one of the village elders who had made the arrangement with Zoe’s Arc to take some of their children. He said the village had sufficient food and water, but had had no schools for a while. It was hard to get teachers, because teachers did not want to go and live in the villages. That is why he thought it would be good for the children to go to France, to be able to go to school. He pointed out one of the mothers, who, he said, already had six children to take care of.

What languages do they speak in these villages, how many people are literate, what do the children do all day besides not going to school, what is their future? After the Chad authorities had seized the children, all in tears and their best clothes to go to France, they put them in what seemed to be a large storeroom with soldiers to guard them, and took the six Zoe’s Ark people, the four Spanish crew members, and three French journalists, off to jail in handcuffs. Eventually the last seven were released. None of the nurses of Zoe’s Ark were allowed to stay and look after the children, who were still crying their hearts out in the storeroom. The soldiers eventually handed them down cups of something, but no one picked them up or reassured them until Idriss Déby, the president of Chad himself, appeared on camera with a sleeping baby in his arms and started a tirade on the nefarious kidnapping traffic that had luckily been nipped in the bud.

Well, that was October, and now Idriss Déby is himself confined, not in a storeroom but in his palace, wondering probably, if France will come and save him. And the children? By now the older ones would be starting their first term in a French school and learning to read and write. But in fact, all of them were sent to an orphanage somewhere in N’Djamena.

Hopefully they were sent back to their villages before the streets became “littered with bodies,” to quote a current report, and that the supply lines to the villages have not been cut, the water not polluted, the crops not destroyed or simply devoured by the crowds of refugees from Darfur or possibly from N’Djamena itself.

Finally, by the way, television viewers were shown some black refugees, not part of the affluent crowd of whites boarding planes to Europe, but women and little children of Chad, momentarily safe in the basement kitchen of one of the hotels, waiting for the fighting to be over.