“A child dies every five minutes. We must save the children of Darfur whilst there is still time. In a few months, they’ll be dead.” These words are written in big bright letters on the website of Zoé’s Ark, the French charity that this week attempted to transport 103 children out of Chad and into France.
If you believed these words, if you had some cash in the bank and space in your heart and home for a child, what would you do? Help save lives is the answer. It’s little wonder that the charity received more than a million euros in donations from the general public. It is also not surprising that more than a hundred families were willing to pay up to 6000 euros each to take in a Darfur orphan. The families were to provide the child with a foster home opening the possibility of adoption further down the line.
The reality turned out to be quite different. In Chad, 103 children have been lured away from their families with sweets and false promises. Six charity workers, three journalists and seven aircrew have been arrested. In France, those who awaited the arrival of the children have seen their hopes dashed and increasingly feel they were duped by a charity that at best was irresponsible and reckless and at worst was criminal and duplicitous.
Who is gullible and who is guilty in this debacle?
Is it those who have overstated the plight of children in Darfur? A child does not die in Darfur every five minutes; yet many of us believe they do. The information on the Zoé’s Ark website is sensationalistic and exaggerated but it rings true. It falls into line with the celebrity appeals and campaigns that we have seen recently, all of which paints a harrowing and desperate picture of what is happening in Darfur.
No. Though it is true that some have resorted to shock tactics in order to get the attention of the general public, the reality is that the situation in Darfur is indeed harrowing and desperate. It may be true that more children die daily in Iraq than in Darfur, but that does not lessen the suffering of the children in Darfur. Why one gets more celebrity attention than the other is a valid question, but does not negate the need to highlight the crisis in Darfur.
Is it those who paint the conflict along overly racial and religious lines? Or put another way, is there a political agenda to portray an Islamist government as responsible for genocide? The argument over whether or not genocide took place may have been politically motivated. There is also no doubt that a complex political situation has been simplified in a way which more readily lends itself to dividing up the players into good and bad.
But no, because over 200,000 people have died and hundreds of thousands have been raped, beaten and displaced. Those who have died, those who have been raped, those who have lost their homes, they were overwhelmingly black Africans; and those who have killed, raped, looted and burned villages are overwhelmingly Arab, regardless of whether they did this with the support of the Sudanese government or not.
Is it those who think the ends justify the means? The Zoé’s Ark charity workers clearly believed that saving lives justified breaking laws, or at least circumventing regulations. And they are not alone to believe that humanitarian relief should be imposed when lives are in danger, it is famously an interventionist philosophy espoused by Bernard Kouchner, France’s current foreign minister. It is also in the same line of reasoning as the politics of the US and its coalition of the willing in attacking Iraq.
The ends justify the means is a reasoning of last resort. We will take the law into our own hands when our confidence in the law has utterly broken down. We will think that breaking the law is a necessary evil if the evil it replaces is sufficiently horrifying and for evil to be sufficiently horrifying it must both be life-threatening and well, evil.
In the case of the French charity workers arrested in Chad, both the belief that they were saving children from certain death and a lack of confidence in the normal legal process led them to think that they could be justified in effectively kidnapping a planeload of children.
In the bigger picture, you can see how the exaggeration of the extent of the crisis in Darfur and the demonization of the Sudanese Arab militias could lead people to believe that the ends justify the means, just as the exaggeration of Saddam Hussein’s military arsenal and his demonization played a key role in creating the right political environment for military intervention in Iraq.
Did the charity workers know the truth? Were they naïve and gullible or were they duplicitous and guilty? For now, I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and believe that they genuinely thought the children were orphans from Darfur whose lives were at risk. It is right that they be arrested and that the Chadian authorities investigate fully their role in what ultimately turned out to be the attempted abduction of children. Of the 103 children, we now know that at least 91 were not orphans at all, but children with at least one adult they considered a parent. Nor were they from Darfur, but from Chad.
The same does not hold true for the three journalists who were arrested with the charity workers. A film crew is an observer, not an agent and bears no responsibility for the events it is filming. The Spanish aircrew is also not responsible for the actions of those who chartered their services. Both the journalists and the airline crew should not be in jail and I am pleased to note that the president of Chad has indicated they are to be released.
Perhaps the saddest aspect of this story is the continued belief that black African children are better off being brought up by European families. There is a persistent subtext to international adoption which states that wealth and access to resources more than makes up for separating children from their culture and their biological relatives. Many children in African orphanages are not orphans at all but children of parents who do not have the means to feed them and keep them well. I have no doubt that white families who adopt children from Africa do so with love and with the best interests of the children at heart. I would certainly not wish to see international adoption curtailed; I just wish we could make it easier for African children to grow up safe and well in the place of their birth.
