THERE must be better ways of spending your fifth wedding anniversary than jumping through the bureaucratic hoops involved in a twelve-hour journey by air, but Marie and Rene Chesnel would not have it any other way.
Almost a full year since they last saw their daughters Alexandra (“Babette”),17, and Murielle, 16, and four months since they found out that the girls had been brought illegally to Cyprus instead of being accompanied to France as arranged, the family was reunited – for three days, at least – in a quiet Nicosia suburb yesterday morning.
After their arrival at Larnaca airport just before 8.00am, the Sunday Mail drove Marie and Rene to the home of the family that is temporarily hosting the girls by arrangement with the Welfare Service.
Marie was barely out of the car when Babette ran out of the house and gripped her mother in a tight hug. Murielle was close behind, and the next few minutes were a blur of tears, hugs, wide grins and then more tears.
“I cannot begin to describe the ordeal we’ve been living through all these years – what it means to think you may never see your children again. Even when I was sitting on the plane coming here from Athens, I still could not quite believe that I was going to see them soon,” said Marie.
In a way, the Chesnels’ journey to Cyprus began a long time ago.
Marie, who has a Cameroonian passport, moved permanently to France in 2003, and married Frenchman Rene in 2005. She immediately made an application for her daughters to join her in Angers (SW France), but this was eventually turned down on the grounds of doubts about the authenticity of the girls’ birth certificates.
The couple battled for a further three years to be reunited with the girls, but were unsuccessful. In late 2008, Marie’s brother – who was then caring for the girls – died, and they had to move into a guest house. Babette’s health suffered, affecting her attendance at school, and by April 2009 she had contracted typhoid.
During her visit to Cameroon that month, Marie contacted Monsignor Côme, a man who presented himself as an Eastern Orthodox bishop and who assured her that he could arrange for the girls to go to France on two-year student visas. He told her that the total cost of tickets, paperwork and his services for sending the two girls to France with an accompanying adult would come to roughly €9,150.
The Chesnels agreed to pay and in mid-November 2009 Babette and Murielle went to Douala airport to fly to France.
The next day, Marie and Rene learned that the “Bishop” had instead put her daughters on a flight to Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), and they had arrived unaccompanied at Ercan airport in the north of Cyprus, having flown via Beirut and Istanbul.
They were then brought across to the government-controlled area by Nzounda Urbain, a suspected member of a smuggling ring, who is currently out on bail, pending his appearance in court to face six charges under investigation, including trafficking of migrants and aiding third country nationals for a profit.
For the next three months, Marie and Rene received phone demands for money and threats to the lives of their daughters from Urbain. The girls say that despite his threats, Urbain did not physically mistreat them in any way.
Babette and Murielle were freed four weeks ago, and while the Cypriot and French authorities consider what to do next, the two girls – who are victims of smuggling – have the status of illegal immigrants.
Knowing that their daughters were finally safe, Marie and Rene started to plan for Marie to travel to Cyprus to see them. After she was told in France that it would take up to four weeks to get a visa for Cyprus, the Sunday Mail and non-governmental organisation KISA (Action for Equality, Support and Anti-Racism) approached the Interior Ministry on her behalf some ten days ago, asking Minister Neoclis Sylikiotis to use his discretionary power on humanitarian grounds to have a visa issued upon her arrival.
The Minister promptly agreed, and gave instructions for the visa process to be completed. Last week, the Sunday Mail was able to take up the generous offer by a reader – who prefers to remain anonymous – to pay for Marie’s air ticket, which allowed Rene to come too.
The journey itself was not straightforward. The Chesnels said that at the check-in at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport, the airline staff queried the reliability of their copy of the Interior Ministry’s official letter confirming the visa upon arrival, citing the commercial liability of carriers in cases of illegal movement. After a nerve-wracking wait of twenty minutes, they were allowed to check in.
The transit flight in Athens after an uncomfortable six-hour wait also presented a challenge. Marie said: “The Aegean Airlines guy conducting the boarding-pass check at the gate took one look at my face – mine was the only African face there – and promptly started to examine every page of my passport. Eventually, he let us board the plane. Then, literally two minutes before we were scheduled to take off, he came onto the plane, pointed at us across a number of seats, and in front of everyone called out: ‘You have to get off the plane with your luggage’. To the credit of one of the cabin crew, she immediately objected, asking the man why on earth he was now telling us to get off, after he had allowed us to board. She went with us as we got off the plane and walked back up the air-bridge to the gate barrier. The man tapped away at his computer for a minute or two, then brusquely told us we could get back on the plane. I still have absolutely no idea why he told us we had to get off the plane.”
Yesterday, the Mail rang Aegean’s head office, customer service line and its desk at Gate 4, Eleftherios Venizelos airport to ask for a possible reason, but there was no answer.
Rene said yesterday: “At times it seemed like touch-and-go whether we would even make it here, but now we can think about what comes next.”
Babette and Murielle have been lucky, because as victims of trafficking they are now being safely sheltered in Cyprus. But they need to be reunited with their parents in France.
Since Marie and Rene had their fifth wedding anniversary on Friday, Marie can now apply for automatic citizenship in the country she has called home since 2003.
The Chesnels hope to have DNA tests carried out tomorrow, which will remove any doubt as to Babette and Murielle’s parentage, and so rule out the concerns expressed by the French authorities about the reliability of the girls’ birth certificates.
If the Interior Ministry here sees fit to legalise Babette and Murielle’s status by granting them temporary visas on humanitarian grounds, the question would then be whether the French authorities would have any reasonable grounds for refusing to allow them to be permanently reunited with their parents in France.
