Alain Péligat is staring into the middle distance. His chiselled face has lost its hard edge and he suddenly looks older than his 57 years. Christine, his wife, is sitting beside him with moist eyes.
Both are recalling the morning that brought the culmination of a daring mission to save young lives from the violence in Darfur.
Péligat thought that he would be hailed as a saviour. Instead, he found himself embroiled in a fiasco that ignited fury in Africa, tarred European aid work as a whole and ultimately dragged France into a civil war. Caught in a web of lies and ambiguities, he was held up not as a humanitarian hero, but as a symbol of Western condescension towards the developing world.
He realised that the dream had gone wrong as he was driving to a provincial airport in the central African country of Chad at 6.14am on October 25 last year. His passengers were Darfuri war orphans - or so he thought - rescued by Zoé's Ark, a small French charity, and bound for foster care in France.
Then he saw three police vehicles on the road ahead: “They were armed to the teeth and ready to pounce. It wasn't an arrest; it was an ambush. I took my walkie-talkie and I said, ‘We're in the merde'.”
He was right. Local officials said that the children in his 4x4 vehicle were not the abandoned victims of Darfur at all; they were Chadian and lived with parents or close relatives.
Detained, insulted and beaten, the six Zoé's Ark workers were charged with kidnapping and sentenced to eight years' hard labour in Chad before being transferred to a jail in France. On March 31 they were released after an official pardon by Idriss Déby, the President of Chad. After a walking holiday - “He needs to clear his mind,” says his wife - Péligat agreed to meet The Times in a bistro in Paris before taking a train back to Mourmelon-le-Grand, his village in eastern France.
With his long, blond hair, grey beard, piercing blue eyes and broad shoulders, he resembles a Viking warrior. But as he fiddles with his food, leaving his steak tartare unfinished, letting his coffee go cold, he exudes a mixture of kindness and naivety. He had wanted to do good, had failed and is struggling to understand why. “On the Monday when he was freed from prison, he came home, went to bed and cried for an hour and a half,” says his wife.
A former road haulier who now teaches lorry driving at a French school, Péligat came across Zoé's Ark on the internet a year ago. The charity had been founded by Eric Breteau, a fireman, after the Asian tsunami in 2004; now it was involved in one of the most troubled parts of Africa. “A child dies every five minutes in Darfur,” Zoé's Ark claimed on its website. “Let's give them a chance to live.” The true toll is probably a little lower: UN estimates put the total number of dead, adults and children, at 300,000 since 2003.
But the message struck a chord with the Péligat household. Alain and Christine had met in 1997 and married two years later. They both had grown-up children from previous marriages, although Alain had lost a daughter, Claire, in a car crash shortly before. They wanted children together, but not another European baby who would remind them of Claire. So they adopted three Cambodian girls, all now happily installed in the six-bedroom family house in Mourmelon-le-Grand. Christine, 43, says: “Our eldest said out of the blue one day: ‘You gave me a new birth'.”
In the couple's eyes, Zoé's Ark was offering a new birth to Darfuri victims. They collected clothes for the charity, made a donation of €1,400 and put themselves forward as a foster family.
Christine says: “Our eldest daughter knows how lucky she was to be adopted, and we said to ourselves: ‘If we can save another child, let's do it, let's go for it'.”
But the project was worrying French officials. They warned Zoé's Ark against barging into a sovereign State and leaving with a planeful of children. They also said that it would be illegal to put those children up for adoption because France had no adoption agreement with Sudan. The charity insisted they would be fostered, not adopted. But the dividing line is thin. Many of the 286 couples who paid up to €2,425 to fund the operation in the hope of receiving a Darfuri orphan were childless. They thought that foster care would lead to adoption. “The intention was that the child would stay with them for good,” says Alain.
He dismisses concerns over Sudanese or Chadian sovereignty out of hand. “Can you really let people die because you refuse to interfere?” asks Péligat. “That's the question.”
For him, the answer is simple. The reality on the ground was more complicated.
The charity workers who left for Africa in September could not go into Darfur because it was too dangerous. They established two camps across the border in Chad, where Alain was responsible for logistics: water, electricity and vehicles. They operated under the name Children Rescue, which was officially headed by Émilie Lelouche, Breteau's girlfriend. They told Chadians that they planned to look after abandoned children in their camps, where there would be schooling, healthcare and food. There was no mention of Zoé's Ark or of an evacuation to France. The truth was hidden even from the charity's intermediaries - village chiefs asked to cross into Darfur and come back with orphans.
“Zoé's Ark was known to the Sudanese authorities and they knew that we envisaged taking children back to France,” says Péligat. “We were afraid that they would attack us if they found out who we were.”
In the dry scrubland across the border region, villagers were told that a humanitarian organisation had offered to take care of boys and girls “who still had their baby teeth”. A total of 350 children were brought into the camps. But who were they? Darfuri victims or Chadians sent for what their families thought would be a French-funded education near by?
“They would come in a jumble,” says Péligat. “We didn't know who was related to whom, if they had brothers or sisters or cousins with them, or if they had a father or mother alive.”
Lelouche had the near-impossible task of picking out the war orphans from the others. In the end, she kept 103 children, and the charity began attributing them to couples in France. The Péligats were to get a girl called Faiza, because she was No 51 on the list, and 51 is the registration number of the Marne, their home region. But the Red Cross, which later carried out its own investigation, says none of the 82 boys and 21 girls destined for foster care was Darfuri.
“If they are Chadian and all have parents - and as far as I'm concerned, that hasn't been proven - it's not my fault, it's not Eric Breteau's fault and it's not Émilie Lelouche's fault,” says Péligat. “It's because we were betrayed.”
But they were betrayed by intermediaries to whom they had themselves lied. The dissimulation extended as far as the children in the charity's camps, who were told that they would stay in Chad.
“We never spoke about evacuation to those kids, we never spoke about leaving for France,” says Péligat. “We didn't want the Chadians who worked with us to know what we were doing, because we didn't want word to get back to the Sudanese.”
When Chadian employees were finally told - on the evening before the charity's departure, with a chartered Boeing 757 waiting at the local airport - they rang the provincial governor, who ordered police to stop the operation. Placed under arrest amid scenes of indignation, Péligat was hit in the back, chest and head, and now has trouble with his right ear. He thought at one point that he would be shot by Déby's troops. But the Chadian ruler had other plans. He cut a deal with President Sarkozy to try the charity workers, send them to France, then pardon them. In return he demanded, and got, French help in fighting off an armed rebellion.
Péligat, who spent three months in jail in Chad and two months in France, claims to have come through unscathed. “I lost a child, and that's the worst thing that can happen to anyone, so I put everything else in perspective.”
He says his main regret is for 103 children left behind in Chad, where most are lingering in an orphanage. “They were wrecks when they came to us, undernourished and dirty. In a month and a half we saw them open up and start to smile. Now they are back where they started.”
He has no regrets about the guiding principles of Zoé's Ark's mission. “We were too trusting, that was our only mistake. But when you have a heart like mine, you trust everyone. I'd do it again - of course I would.”
Annette Rehrl, a spokeswoman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, says he is misguided. “Children are not abandoned in Africa. They may lose a father or mother or both, but they are never left on their own. They stay with the extended family. Who can say that they'd have a better life in France? That idea comes from European arrogance. We should stop thinking we can tell Africans what's best for them.”
