Charles Bremner on Sarko’s humble pie

President Sarkozy took off on a day trip to Africa yesterday to extract three journalists and four flight crew from a prison in Chad – a mission that underlined French embarrassment over a failed attempt to fly 103 supposed orphans to France.

Mr Sarkozy flew home with the French journalists last night, dropping off the Spanish air stewards in Madrid on the way, after an apologetic visit to Chadian President Déby in N’djamena, the capital of Chad.

The French President’s intervention was a gesture to defuse a ten-day crisis after a disastrous operation by a small French charity to fly orphans from the Darfur region, adjacent to Chad, to foster families in France. Mr Sarkozy is assumed by diplomats to have provided undertakings on further French assistance for Mr Déby, who owes his political survival in recent years to the presence of 1,200 French troops in his country. In a similar mission in July, the French President agreed to provide weapons and nuclear technology to Libya as part of a deal for the release of Bulgarian nurses imprisoned there.

Mr Sarkozy’s Chad charm offensive also conflicts with his attempts to put a new distance between Paris and its former colonial client states.

Six members of the Zoe’s Ark charity, led by Eric Breteau, a Paris fireman, remain in custody in Chad facing kidnapping charges. They were arrested along with the crew of a Spanish charter jet ten days ago as they were escorting children on to the aircraft in eastern Chad. Three other Spanish flight crew members and a 75-year-old Belgian pilot remain in Chad accused of complicity.

If convicted they could be sentenced to between 5 and 20 years of forced labour.

Speaking in N’djamena. Mr Sarkozy called the Zoe’s Ark operation lamentable and voiced gratitude to Mr Déby, but he called for the charity workers to be returned to France to face legal action. Chad is insisting that the group stand trial there, but it is assumed in Paris that Mr Sarkozy reached some accord to resolve the matter before taking off for Chad.

Mr Sarkozy thanked Mr Déby for an assurance that the Zoe’s Ark fiasco would not jeopardise plans to deploy a 3,000-strong, French-led European peacekeeping force in Chad to help refugees from Darfur. Mr Déby agreed reluctantly to the deployment under French pressure two months ago.

As Mr Sarkozy found himself in the uncomfortable position of seeking favours from Chad, there was speculation in France that the charity operation was at the least a reckless attempt by incompetent activists to rescue children from the Darfur war zone.

Unicef and other international aid organisations have established that most of the 103 children were not orphans and came from the Chadian border region with Darfur.

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