Justifying taking 103 children from Chad

by Sarah Elzas

Article published on the 2009-03-28 Latest update 2009-03-28 16:54 TU

Emilie Lelouch
(Photo: Thomas Samson/Gamma)

Emlie Lelouch was arrested in Chad a year-and-a-half ago, as she and five other French aid workers with the Zoe’s Ark charity group were trying to take 103 children out of the country to France. They were tried and convicted of kidnapping and sentenced to eight years of hard labor. A year ago they were pardoned by Chad’s President Idris Deby. Lelouch has now written a book giving her version of what happened throughout the Zoe’s Ark saga.

“For the past year-and-a-half I’ve been stoned,” explains Emiile Lelouch, sitting in a cafe in the east of Paris, near where she lives these days. “Whether I talked or not I was wrong… so I said there was no point in talking.”

Written in controversial, often in-your-face style, her book first lays out who she is (a circus performer turned humanitarian worker) and her take on the problems in Darfur (humanitarian organizations on the ground in Sudan have their hands tied, and are tied to the corruption of the Sudanese government) before introducing Zoe’s Ark’s, the charity group founded by her boyfriend, Eric Breateau, and its project of recruiting French host families to take in Sudanese orphans.

She describes the few weeks she spent in a temporary camp in Chad near the border with Sudan. Zoe’s Ark had arranged for Sudanese people – village chiefs and others – to bring them children. And Lelouch was in charge of figuring out if they were really orphans.

“I asked myself a thousand times: ‘Am I doing this right? Am I making the right decision?’ And I had a thousand answers,” she says. She is very sure of the decisions she made.

“For the 103 kids, I never saw a single adult come to pick them up, as opposed to about 20 that did get picked up,” she explains. She describes women who came one or two days after a child was brought in by a village chief. These, she says, were children of previous marriages that the women’s second husbands had tried to send away.

“The mother was out, the father takes them to the village chief,” says Lelouch. “But the mothers took a maximum of two days to get us, never more.”

Lelouch maintains the children were Sudanese war orphans. The Chadian government says they are Chadian. It’s still not clear who they really are.

Part of the group’s sentence was to pay six million euros in compensation to the victims. But Lelouch says no one has been identified yet.

“It’s been almost a year and a half, and there’s still absolutely no concrete proof of who these kids are,” she says. None of the six aid workers has anywhere close to six million euros, but Lelouch says that even if they start paying installments, they would need to pay it to specific people.

“But no families have been identified,” she says. “And I really don’t think there will be any.”

Accusations of racism, neo-colonialism and exploitation were hurled at Lelouch and the other aid workers when they were arrested. Lelouch says she’s not surprised by the reactions, particularly in Africa.

“We embodied a lot of things: the cheating, manipulative white people,” she says. “We fit the bill for people to dump their hatred. It didn’t surprise me at all, because the anger is there.”

“I really am ready to admit that I made a mistake,” she says, adding that it would mean the kids have families and they are doing well.

“But after a year and a half, there isn’t a shadow of proof showing that these children are doing well and have families,” she says. “It’s quite the opposite.”

Lelouch is very bitter. And she faces years of more legal battles, with cases pending against her in French courts. But she’s resigned to it.

“We know that if we go to trial we’ll be convicted,” she says. “This time, when we fall, we won’t go alone. We still have plenty of things to stay-we still have some ammunition. So if they want to go to trial, let’s go!” She says this with a laugh.

“We’re already in the gallows. In terms of our image we have nothing left to lose. We’ve been called pedophiles. I really don’t know what could be worse.”

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