`Herr Tiemann wants to take his children on holiday'

Cosette Lancelin was in a cheerful mood that Saturday afternoon at the end of March 1998. It was an unusually warm day for the season, and her two children wore summer clothes as they played outside with neighbours in the small central French town of Montoire. Since the previous November, Lancelin's terrible rows with her estranged German husband, Armin Tiemann, had subsided. "We had almost friendly relations," she says now. "I had no intention of living with him again, but I believed we were going to have the best possible relations in the circumstances. I thought he had understood that it was in the interest of everyone."

Tiemann, the administrator of a small community in Lower Saxony, had even telephoned her four days earlier to wish her a happy birthday.

The couple had arranged that Lancelin take their son, Matthias, then seven, and their three-year-old daughter Caroline to her brother's home in a neighbouring village so that Tiemann could fax them cartoon drawings to colour with crayons. "We had done it before," Lancelin explains. "The children watched the drawings come out of the fax machine, and to them it was like magic."

Around 8 p.m., Lancelin put Matthias and Caroline on the back seat of her white Opel Corsa and headed through the countryside to her parents' home. She had taken Matthias and Caroline to live there, against the wishes of her husband, in July 1997. "We were on a little road in the woods, and I saw two cars blocking the way," she recalls. "There were three men, about 35 years old, wearing jeans and leather jackets standing beside the cars. I was frightened, but since their cars had Alsatian plates, I spoke to them in French. They responded in German.

"I didn't see the third car drive up and park behind my car," she continues. "There were two more men inside it. I kept asking `What do you want?' and finally one of them said: `Herr Tiemann wants to take his children on holiday. Get out of the car.' They pulled me out and Matthias started screaming, `Mama, Mama, Mama' and my daughter wailed in her little three-and-a-half-year-old's voice. I tried to grab the keys but they pushed me on the ground - I was badly bruised the next day. As the four cars drove away, I could still hear my children screaming. They left me on the roadside in the dark. I screamed like a mad woman, out in the middle of nowhere."

The brutality with which Armin Tiemann hired the head of a Munich security firm and four German thugs to kidnap his own children shocked the French public, and the case immediately became a cause celebre. The French justice minister, Elisabeth Guigou, contacted her German counterpart, Herthe DaublerGmelin, and their ministries established liaison teams to address what has become a serious issue in Franco-German relations.

The Lancelin-Tiemann case is not an isolated incident. Catherine Urban, a delegate in Germany for the Council for French Nationals Abroad, is in touch with 80 French mothers and fathers, many of whom have lost two or three children, who have been denied access to their offspring by former spouses in Germany.

Dozens of them have contacted her since hearing about Matthias and Caroline. "It's impossible to know how many there are out there," she says. "Many of those who wrote to me said they thought there was nothing they could do." The French Justice Ministry confirms it is now mediating on behalf of 60 French parents whose children are in Germany. By contrast, there are at most a half dozen cases of children kept in France against the wishes of a German parent.

Urban (whose husband is German and who has lived in Germany for the past 30 years) attributes the imbalance to what she calls the Germans' rigid and legalistic mentality. "When children end up with their German parent, they lose their French culture, language and family relations," she says. "The other parent is forgotten. It's worse than a bad adoption. When the Germans understand that children do not divorce a parent, they will have made progress."

Mary Banotti, MEP and the EU mediator for transnational custody disputes, believes the plethora of German courts - where judges are often inexperienced at dealing with such cases - is the root of the problem. Germany is considered one of the world's worst offenders in not returning abducted children and in refusing to grant divorced foreign parents access to their children.

If the Lancelin case has marked a turning point, the similar, sad story of the half-French Catherine Laylle - who is now Lady Catherine Meyer, the wife of the British ambassador to Washington, Sir Christopher Meyer - first drew public attention to the scale of the Franco-German problem. Lady Meyer has written a book, Two Children Behind a Wall, about her crusade to see her young sons Alexander and Constantin. Her former husband, a German doctor, refused to send their boys back to London at the end of a summer holiday in 1994. Over the following four years, she saw her children for a total of 11 hours, always in the tense atmosphere of a courtroom or their father's home. Her ex-husband refused to accept the guarantee of her new husband, the British ambassador to Washington, that the boys would be returned after a visit, claiming they no longer wanted to see their mother.

Banotti never ceases to be horrified by parents' behaviour in custody battles. "I've seen parents so caught up in the drama that I genuinely feared for the life of the children," she says. "The dynamic that takes over is one of love, hate and revenge. You find a parent frightening the life out of their children - saying, `if you go back to your mother I'll be put in jail forever'. People are prepared to do terrible things to their children to get even with their partner."

Banotti is haunted by the words of another mother who lost her children to their German father. "She said: `We started out as two people who loved their children. And now we are two criminals.' "

History looms large in all Franco-German disputes. By chance, Cosette Lancelin's home town of Montoire was the place where Adolph Hitler met the ageing Marechal Philippe Petain to accept France's capitulation in the second World War. But during her secondary and university studies, Lancelin was fascinated by talk of Franco-German friendship. In 1986, through a relative who was the mayor of a French village nearby twinned with Kirchdorf, she arranged to do volunteer work in Germany. There she met Armin Tiemann, 23 years her senior. The couple married three years later, when she was 25 and he was 48. Matthias was born the following year.

In retrospect, Cosette Lancelin realises she was not mature enough. "He was a very dominating person, and that gave me an impression of stability. As I grew older, it became suffocating." She is by nature a friendly person, she says, and her Prussian-born husband "likes to feel that he is above everyone else". He discouraged her from forming friendships with the neighbours. After a disastrous session with a marriage counsellor in January 1997, he went to the local tribunal and obtained sole legal authority over the children. For the following seven months, the couple's luxurious bungalow was a tense and angry place. Tiemann repeatedly took the children on holiday without her. In July 1997, against his wishes, she took Matthias and Caroline to her parents' home in Montoire - an act which the German government has called kidnapping.

Urban is outraged that Lancelin's behaviour should be equated with that of her estranged husband. "If the mother had been German and taken her children to, for example, Munich, they would never have called it `kidnapping'," she says. "Kirchdorf is closer to Montoire than it is to Munich - but Montoire is in France. There may be a Schengen agreement (on free movement in the EU), but the borders remain in people's heads. There is a world of difference between skipping off with sand pails while singing songs, and being kidnapped by strangers at the edge of the woods at an age when you still believe in witches and the big bad wolf."

The day after he had his children kidnapped, Armin Tiemann invited German television to his home, where he was filmed gloating with his arms around them. Almost without exception, the German media have supported Tiemann. Under the 1980 Hague Convention on Civil Aspects of Child Abduction, a parent who kidnaps his or her child must return the child immediately. Germany is a party to the Hague Convention - which was approved by the highest legal body, the Constitutional Court, before it was ratified. Yet in October 1998, that same court ruled that "the constitutional right of the children to well-being" overrides Germany's adhesion to the Hague Convention.

The tug-of-war over Matthias and Caroline has been a legal epic. Cosette Lancelin four times received court orders granting her custody - twice in Germany and twice in France. Each time, her influential husband managed to have the German decisions reversed. As for the Blois High Court and the Orleans Appeals Court which sided with her, the German Sulingen Tribunal judged their decisions "fraglich and unbeachtlich" (dubious and insignificant). The result is that despite the Hague Convention, thousands of protest signatures on petitions from around the world, Mary Banotti's lobbying in the European Parliament and a campaign by three "Matthias and Caroline Support Committees" in Germany, the children remain with their father today.

What Le Monde had called "the cold anger of French authorities" boiled over at the December 1998 Potsdam Summit, when President Jacques Chirac complained to the German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and spoke of the Lancelin-Tiemann case at a press conference. "I was deeply shocked by the method used by one of the protagonists, which consisted of a real hold-up - coming to kidnap two children on French territory in inadmissible conditions," Chirac said. "We cannot remain in a situation where such things can happen, because it's the law of the jungle."

Cosette Lancelin saw Chirac's television statement. "It's a funny feeling," she says. "When you hear the President of the Republic talking about your case, you know it can't go any higher." The German Constitutional Court has now referred the dispute back to the Court of Appeals, which had earlier sided with Lancelin, and she is hopeful Matthias and Caroline may soon be returned to her. "Our problem has taken on European proportions," she says. "But it can happen to anyone. The proof is, I'm anyone - and it happened to me."