Libya Crisis Diary

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UNHCR staff in Tunisia and Egypt will be posting regular updates on Facebook about what they are seeing on a daily basis. Andrew Purvis, from UNHCR's communications service, started off the series with a visit to the Tunisia-Libya border. UNHCR's Andrew Purvis on the Egyptian-Libyan border, March 24, 2011 It is bitterly cold at night, hot during the day. It takes two-and-a half hours to drive from the Bedouin town where we are staying to the border area where refugees and migrants from Libya's violence are now living. We start out at seven, the air dry and cold with a steady wind blowing in off the sea and arrive in the glare of mid-morning. There is no shelter for the people from Chad, Somalia and a dozen other places who are still stuck on the border four weeks after the conflict erupted next door; they are sleeping in buildings or under their own makeshift shelters, craftily rigged from blankets strung from fence posts or piles of luggage. The main border post, a sprawling complex of broken-down buildings high on a bluff overlooking a mottled patch of blue green sea, is now home to about 1,500 migrants and refugees, many fewer than even a few days ago as the last contingent of young male migrant workers are finally evacuated home. The place carries traces of a much larger population; torn plastic bags clinging to the trees, milk cartons, discarded clothing. A few days ago, as Gadaffi's troops entered Benghazi, a lot of people were expecting a major exodus here. But it never materialized. Most of the migrant workers from Chad, Bangladesh and assorted other countries have moved on, evacuated by international agencies or home governments; those left behind are refugees from Somalia, Eritrea, Sudan who have no home to go to. International aid workers are feeding them with boxed meals, providing medicine and blankets to ward off the chill. For Libyans fleeing their own country, it's another story. They are arriving at the frontier, and moving on quickly. Hundreds still cross the border each day. Unlike many migrant workers, who turn up with the accumulated fruits of their labour in Libya, from DVD players to, in one case, a fridge, many of the Libyans get here with nothing but the clothes on their back. I met a chemical engineer who had just arrived in Egypt with his young family, who had no time even to pack a change of clothes when fighting engulfed his hometown of Ajdabiya. The family hunkered down indoors for 12 hours of shelling and then fled during a lull; he is still wearing the dirt brown sweat pants and synthetic leather coat he had put on 72 hours before. He has no idea what he will do next: "We are in God's hands." The Libyans do not consider themselves refugees. They insist that they will be going home "in a week," when the situation "stabilizes," or "when God wills." A young pharmacy student I met today in the town of Marsa Matrouh, whose family fled Libya the other day, said she was happy with the UN-sanctioned airstrikes on her country but she wishes "the Arabs had done it." UNHCR's Andrew Purvis on the Tunisia-Libya border, March 15, 2011 There is a line for everything here . . . for food, for the return of your passport, for water and the latrines, for access to a power outlet to charge your phone. Most of the day is spent waiting. "There are five stages to your life," an Eritrean told me. In his case, one of the big ones, marriage and having children, was passing him by. Actually, he said with some urgency, that according to his community's beliefs, he, at age 38, was now "in decline" and really needed to find a wife. Mmm. The sense of life passing you by is a common refrain among many young refugees I have spoken to, despite the crisis of historical magnitude that they are living through. A teenage girl here observed that most kids her age were getting their education, while she was on the road with no family just trying to survive. How lucky we who are not refugees are to be able to move from place to place, even here in the camp on our own, without having to wait for someone else to decide. I am noticing how, in a few days, a vast multi-national community can organize itself. Nationalities are sticking together, though they may have not known each other before forming committees, making sure each other is informed about tents, knows meal times. I wander over to the Eritrean area, underneath the gum tree and just down for the Tunisian military hospital. The Ghanaians are now over there, beyond the UNICEF latrines. The sifting by nationality is quite natural and driven in part by interests: the Bangladeshis all want to go home now, the Somalis are desperate not to. Ghanaians want to help their brothers in Tripoli who have been stuck there for weeks. Somalis corralled a power outlet near the Tunisian military hospital and were selling it to the Bangladeshis for a fee. The camp's organization stems partly from cooperation between the international humanitarian community and Tunisians. Tunisian volunteers responded quickly to the crisis and continue to arrive to help out in many ways. I met a business school professor who had just arrived and was picking up empty milk bottles and other trash along the sandy paths in the camp. She said she travelled here from Tunis to the arid border region to help because she was so angry at what Gaddafi was doing to his own people. This is a regional revolution that Tunisia, after all, began. I am hearing a lot of stories. So many people here are living through a time of heightened drama in their lives. The discrimination against blacks in Libya that helped propel much of the current exodus is shocking. In buses, it is not uncommon for Libyans of lighter skin to roll down the windows as an African is boarding to "air" the place out ? a kind of joke. Sub-Saharan Africans and Libyans of darker complexion are overcharged at stores, I am told. In the street, they are routinely referred to by the Arabic word for slave, abid. Gangs continue to roam the streets targeting blacks, stealing what they have, beating any who resist. For proud people who came to Libya to find money to support their families back home, it is a deep humiliation. When state media announced several weeks ago that black Africans were being hired as mercenaries in Gaddafi's forces, the entire community knew that latent racism was in danger of becoming a pogrom, so most went into hiding or fled for the border. And while several hundred thousand have left, at least 800,000 foreigners are still inside the country. I had to fly out yesterday. The plane banked over the desert, pale and marked with vast geometric patterns in different shades of brown, and then up and over the white-capped Mediterranean to the Cote D'Azur in France. I could see why, even on a purely physical level, Europe is so attractive to so many from the less developed world, though its real beauty lies in the choices and freedom it allows for those lucky enough to live here. UNHCR's Andrew Purvis on the Tunisia-Libya border, March 13, 2011 The wind was blowing so hard today it was hard to find a quiet place to talk. The sky turned a metallic gray as dust blocked the sun. I was talking with some Eritreans who had just arrived here from Libya. "This is paradise," one of them suddenly told me as we rounded a row of tents and were greeted by a new blast of sand. "Air, space, no roof . . . This is good." The young man had spent most of the past four years in a Libyan prison, some of that time in solitary confinement, suffering torture, he said, and electric shocks.. Along with 700 other Eritreans, Somalis and other immigrants rounded up by the Gaddafi regime, he was released three weeks ago and is savoring his freedom in Tunisia. The lines are shortening in the camp as more and more Bangladeshis are flown out and the feeding operations are organized, but hundreds of people continue to arrive from the Libyan border, many now from South Sudan. The camp itself continues to expand as new land is cleared. Two weeks ago there was nothing here, just a scrubby plain with a few gum trees. Today it is a sprawling, somehow orderly expanse of multinational communities. Bangladeshi refugees have hoisted colourful sarongs, scraps of cloth, even a pair of pants, high on poles in front of their UNHCR tents to mark the spot where they live. They stream in the wind, like prayer flags in Tibet. Somalis have marked their tent with their flag. On the way to the camp today we could not stop in town because of some problems yesterday. So I bought something to eat at the stalls sprouting along the pavement, which are selling mobile phone cards, boiled eggs, fresh carrots, baguette sandwiches made out of a reddish meat stew. The camp offers a pretty good picture of what is happening inside Libya. It's hard now to travel around inside government-held territory. But people arriving daily not only bring reports of where they were. They are constantly on the phone with their friends and relatives who are still there. Several Ghanaians pulled me aside today to ask for help for what was happening at the airport in Tripoli, where thousands of migrant workers converged early in the uprising to find a flight home. It's been 20 days. Food is scarce, drinking water is going for nearly US${esc.dollar}2, triple the old price, and fights are breaking out between Ghanaians and Nigerians over food, he told me. At least two people have reportedly been killed. "The conditions that side are too bad," he said, shaking his head. Another story I heard today: One night early in the uprising, a rumour spread through the Eritrean, Nigerian and entire sub-Saharan African community that a ship was coming to the port near Tripoli to take them to safety in Europe. After state TV announced that black Africans were killing Libyans, they all feared a pogrom, so they fled for the port. But the hoped-for rescue ship never arrived and instead, around midnight, Gaddafi's police swarmed in and arrested several hundred men, women and children, herded them into a nearby prison and left them there for over a week. Thousand of Eritreans and Somalis are still stuck in the country. UNHCR's Andrew Purvis on the Tunisia-Libya border, March 12, 2011 The wind blew most of the day, sand everywhere, in your eyes, in your food. I've discovered local almonds, very fresh. The humanitarian workers here are running on fumes, building camps, latrines, water, recording personal histories, counselling, trying to get things done. The camp population is still growing? topping 17,000, a small city. Day starts early, with a long trip along the brackish marshland, through whitewashed villages, to the border, and then all day in the sun and wind, thousands of anxious, tired, hungry people, desperate to go home or, in some cases, anywhere else. Hearing the stories of those coming out of Libya, the depth and sheer brutality of the racial discrimination there, even more than the violence, makes you angry at the regime. One Eritrean could not even bring himself to speak of the humiliation he had experienced. I've been noticing the stamina of people here, both the refugees and migrants, who have been through so much, and the humanitarians who are working so single-mindedly to help them. I met a girl from Eritrea this morning who had arrived in Libya after travelling alogn smuggling routes across Sudan and the Sahara to Tripoli. She arrived here a few days ago. She is alone and wants to find her mother. As she was escaping Tripoli through checkpoints in Libya, Gaddafi's soldiers kept demanding her mobile phone. They tried three times to take it from her and each time she refused, knowing the phone was the only thing to link her with her family. Slight, she won out in the end. She is helping take care of a four-year-old Somali boy whose own mother was killed in Mogadishu. Most of the people to have fled here to Tunisia are young men, but lately more families are coming, especially from Somalia, Eritrea and other places that keep swelling the world's population of refugees . . . a 15-day-old boy, round face swaddled in thick blankets, whose Eritrean father is in prison in Libya . . . a young woman who is more than eight months pregnant. She says the wind blows too much at night, and the sand sifts inside her tent. These babies will grow up in a better place than this. On our way home not far from the border, our car was surrounded by a group of angry youths upset at something, not yet clear, rocking our ca., I reached to lock the doors but opened the window instead, bad moment, but our Tunisian driver talked them down, edged forward, and drove on. The camp on the Tunisia-Libya border is filled with people from all over the world, Ghana, Eritrea, Vietnam. The Bangladeshis really stand out and not just because there are more of them. They are by far the most orderly and patient. Just the other day we were talking about the exemplary tone they set. But yesterday, their patience ran out. They did not complain when the companies that had brought them to Libya did nothing to help them when the violence erupted nearly three weeks ago (even as they evacuated their well-paid executives from the Libyan border). The Bangladeshi workers waited nearly two weeks for their government to send enough planes to ferry them home. They stood in hours-long queues for food, showered in the open, waited days for their passports to be returned - then something snapped. Protestors barrelled through the camp, hoisting signs with little child-like drawings of planes scrawled on them: "We Need Air!" At the end of the day, in a south Asian touch, they threw one of their own half naked into the air, on his back, and marched him up the main road through the camp, as if he were a corpse in a funeral procession, symbolizing their own plight. Today, many got what they wanted, a bus ride to the airport for the flight home. The lines in the camp have also been sorted out. But now the Somalis are demonstrating.