THE suspected attempted abduction of 103 Chadian children by a French charity raises two issues, one of which has been widely noted while the other, oddly, has not attracted any attention. The overlooked factor is the website of Zoe’s Ark, posted in French with an English version that no longer works. It is a very strange production for a charity since much of its content is highly political, including a denunciation of the “Islamic dictatorship” of Sudan. Stranger still is the fact that the donations page offers only a postal address for supporters to send their money.
Leaving aside what the nine French charity workers and seven crewmembers of the Spanish plane that would have carried children to France really intended, it should never be the business of a humanitarian charity to embark on such overt political criticism. All aid charities, regardless of the personal feelings of their field workers, should be focused on the aid functions for which they were established. The behavior of Zoe’s Ark has very unfortunately cast a pall of suspicion over all the other charities that are working in Chad and Darfur. Those suspicions must be deepened by those who read its deplorably political website. It seems that the French government was already investigating this charity’s activities and there is some indication that Paris may actually have tipped off the Chadian authorities about the flight.
What has attracted most comment is the idea that international charities should have any sort of policy to collect genuine orphans and re-home them with families in the wealthy First World. Anyone seeing the heart-rending TV footage of starving, abandoned African children will want to do something to help. But offering a new start to these kids in a far-away land is a highly controversial way to assist. What it ignores is that unlike in the West these days, Africans still enjoy large extended families. The only reason why such units may be chary of taking on orphaned relatives is that they are already struggling to look after those who are closest to them.
Yet the effect a campaign to remove these children for adoption in the West — Zoe’s Ark boasted in April that it intended to gather up 1,000 Darfur orphans — is to suggest that Africans are somehow less caring and responsible than Westerners. The notion seems to be that these unfortunate juveniles are not only being rescued from conflict and starvation but also from Africa itself. That is a racist notion, which is reprehensible.
The truth is that if outsiders want to aid the young orphan victims of tragedy, whether in Darfur or the Congo or anywhere else, they should bring out their checkbooks and given generously to charities that are helping sustain the communities to which these kids belong. Giving families the means to survive, with dignity, until the political circumstances finally change for the better, is far preferable to transporting thousands of children to an alien culture.
Zoe’s Ark’s activities deserve to be condemned absolutely on these grounds alone.
