CHAD COURT SENTENCES FRENCH AID WORKERS TO 8 YEARS FORCED LABOR

DAKAR, Senegal: Six French aid workers were sentenced to eight years of hard labor by a court in Chad on Wednesday for trying to take 103 children who they claimed were orphans of the conflict in Darfur to Europe.

The verdict came after four days of closely watched testimony in the Chadian capital, Ndjamena, in a case that enraged many Chadians and embarrassed France just as a European peacekeeping force made up largely of French troops was to begin deploying in the region.

Prosecutors portrayed the aid workers as remorseless kidnappers bent on exploiting Chad’s children. But the French workers claimed they were humanitarians acting within the confines of international law, trying to save children from imminent harm.

Diplomats and analysts widely expect that the French workers will be allowed to return to France through a bilateral arrangement. Though French officials called the verdict a sovereign decision, they said they would ask Chad to allow the aid workers to serve out their sentences in France.

The French Foreign Ministry in Paris declined to comment on a judicial verdict by another nation, but said it would ask the Chadian authorities to transfer the six convicted to France, The Associated Press reported. The countries have a bilateral judicial agreement that could allow for the six to be transferred home.

The episode brought condemnation throughout Africa. The workers claimed that they were rescuing child refugees from the parched, war-torn Sudanese region of Darfur, but it turned out that the children they tried to take were for the most part neither Sudanese nor orphans.

Earlier this year, the aid group, L’Arche de Zoé, or Zoé’s Ark posted an emotional appeal on its Web site, claiming that a child dies in Darfur every five minutes and calling upon families in Europe to help the organization take the children to Europe for temporary refuge. The group claimed that it planned to rescue 10,000 orphans. Many families donated money to help cover the costs of chartering a plane.

In October, Chadian officials stopped workers from the group as they hustled dozens of young children, some of them in bandages and attached to IV poles, onto a plane in eastern Chad. The aid workers were charged with attempted kidnapping.

The bandages and bloodstains turned out to be a ruse. The group’s supporters have argued that local helpers misled the workers about the children’s status, but video footage later made public by a journalist who had traveled with the aid workers showed them putting the fake bandages on the children.

The children were turned over to the Red Cross and found to be in relatively good health. Interviews with those old enough to speak revealed that virtually all of them were Chadian, not Sudanese, and had been living with an adult relative they considered to be a parent.

The case touched off anti-French riots in Chad, a former French colony with close ties to Paris. In street demonstrations, Chadians demanded the death penalty. French troops are stationed at two bases in Chad, and French troops are expected to make up a large portion of a European Union peacekeeping force aimed at stabilizing Chad and Central African Republic, both of which have been shaken by the conflict in Darfur and by rebellions of their own.

(By Lydia Polgreen)

Fonte: INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE