IN south eastern Chad, squarely at the Sudanese border along the Darfur region, sits in the hot desert a small town called Adré. Not far from it is another dustbowl of a place named Abéché.

The Darfur conflict that broke out four years ago drove some 250, 000 displaced persons into refugee camps around these two towns. By end 2005 Adré itself was attacked by Janjaweed militias who were at the root of the conflict in the first place. This created another spate of displaced persons (DPs), this time local.

From then on Abéché abruptly was a blinking hotspot in the desert, especially since the UNHCR decided to camp its regional headquarters there. With that started rolling in charity groups in Toyota Landcruisers. As opposed to the European imperialists of yore who had favoured white suits and solar hats, the humanitarians of our times are attired in jeans, sandals and baseball caps. They can also be distinguished by their frequent whipping out of cell-phones and their chatter of a million dollars here and a million there.

While their predecessors often died under the blazing African sun doing challenging jobs like building railroads and digging canals, victims of malaria, sleeping sickness and machete wounds, the humanitarians dash to a Paris or London hospital at the slightest suspicion of infection. More importantly, their heroics are covered by round-the-clock TV networks!

An excited exchange of phone conversations in Abéché on the morning of Oct 25 between members of a French charity group named Zoé’s Ark (curiously registered in Chad as Children’s Rescue) had to do with bundling a group of 103 Darfur orphans in a chartered Boeing 757 and flying them off to Reims in France. Overheard by the locals, the news spread like wildfire all over the town and resulted in a raid by the police who recovered the children, most of them heavily bandaged around heads, necks, arms and legs. Any doubts that still lingered were quickly dispelled by a succession of amazing discoveries. The bandages were fake and none of the children was injured. Most were Chadian and not Sudanese as claimed, and practically nobody was an orphan. All, 80 boys and 23 girls, were in perfect health!

The 10 members of the charity (six French and four locals), plus the Spanish crew of the chartered flight and three French journalists who had accompanied them were handcuffed, charged with child abduction and placed behind bars. The revelations shook up France.

More came cascading down, avalanche fashion. Eric Breteau, the spearhead of the Ark, had revealed his quixotic plan of airlifting as many as 300 children from the region in July this year to Rama Yade, the Senegalese-born French Junior Minister for Foreign Affairs whom President Nicolas Sarkozy had proudly presented recently to President George Bush as “my Condoleezza Rice”. The madcap project didn’t impress Quai d’Orsay and Breteau was advised to forget about it, the sooner the better. This probably was the reason the charity changed its name when it finally decided to go ahead with its idea despite official French disapproval. Things took a turn for the worse when the next day President Idriss Déby of Chad visited the centre where the children were housed in Abéché and openly spoke of a paedophile, human organs racket. Chad media harked back to the good old colonial days when young African boys were picked up, brought to orphanages to undergo military training and used as cannon fodder during conflicts when they grew up.

The French are still debating whether the Zoe’s Ark-Children’s Rescue operation was a sinister, cynical adventure for the sake of profit or just a show of neo-colonial bravado impervious to local values. More facts came to light as the charity’s activities were investigated in France. Playing on the sensitivities of mostly retired people who have all the time in the world to watch the incessantly repeated images of misery in Africa on 24-hour television channels and to constantly feel guilty about it, the NGO had approached hundreds of them.

“Initially,” one of the victims of the swindle told Le Figaro magazine, “we were asked to pay 90 euros per head to become members of the charity; they were back pretty soon asking us to pay another 1,400 euros that they had figured out would cost for the “evacuation” of each child. Smelling a rat I refused and told them I was quitting the Ark. From then on I am still getting insulting email qualifying me as a criminal.”

As far as the French Left is concerned this is all the fault of President Nicolas Sarkozy and his government. Hints were also dropped that it was time to send French army helicopters in a lightening commando strike and have the Ark people freed and brought home as soon as possible. Sarkozy had his own ideas.

True to his reputation of the fastest moving object in Europe, he flew personally on the morning of Oct 4 into Ndjamena, had a quick discussion with President Déby evoking a long-forgotten 1976 legal cooperation accord between France and Chad, addressed a news conference on the spot, had four Spanish air hostesses and three French journalists released, had everybody embarked on the presidential flight, dropped the hostesses at Madrid airport while sharing a hasty cup of coffee with Prime Minister José-Luis Zapatero, and was home with the three French journalists by midnight. Whew! The militant Trotskyite daily Libération paid a grudging tribute by headlining the story: “Hop onto Sarko Airlines flight…”

Though everyone agrees not all the NGOs are scams, many working in African countries either do not know or don’t care about local customs or sensibilities. The Zoe’s Ark crowd in its self-righteous arrogance obviously forgot that there is no concept of an orphan in Africa and that children who have lost one or both parents automatically become part of the extended family. It was probably haughtiness also that led the group into the impossible imbroglio it finds itself in today.

Three more Spaniards belonging to the crew of the chartered flight and the Belgian pilot were later released but the Ndjamena government is determined to keep the six French charity workers and four Chadian nationals in jail and try them according to the local law. That means, theoretically at least, up to 20 years in prison on the charge of trying to abduct children.

As Rama Yade curtly told a particularly quarrelsome Socialist parliamentarian during a National Assembly session: “Africa of daddy’s days, Monsieur le député, is over!”

The writer is a journalist based in Paris.