Zoe's arc, “your love is choking me!”

Le blog du Prési!, written by a French-Cameroonian blogger, comments on a recent scandal involving a French NGO that tried to rescue 103 children from the Chadian-Sudanese border from “certain death” by adopting them to France.

Six members of the charity L’Arche de Zoé (Zoe's Arc) were arrested in Chad and charged with “abducting minors for the purpose of changing their civil status,” i.e. giving them new parents. The punishment is five to 20 years of forced labor.

Zoe's Arc has denied wrongdoing, saying that the children were orphans from Sudan. But according to reports, UN officials and French diplomats said that many of the children had parents and were Chadian, not Sudanese. Neither country allows international adoption.

To make matters worse, Chad's president Idriss Déby has been speculating that the charity, which was charging a 2,400 euro adoption fee, planned to sell these children to pedophiles or harvest their organs.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy is not pleased. This incident has raised tensions in the two country's relations just before the planned deployment of a French-led EU peacekeeping force in eastern Chad and northeastern Central African Republic.

Le blog du Prési! comments: on the Zoe affair, celebrity adoption, and a love that chokes, despite its good intentions: (more…)

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