Lost in Libya's Turmoil: Workers from the Third World
Aziz has no passport, no money and a lot of anxiety. He spent months making his way illegally northeast from West Africa, bypassing other conflicts, to get away from his own war-torn nation of Liberia and find something better in oil-rich Libya. "I was looking for survival," he says of the long desert journey from Sudan. For a year, he found it, earning a meager wage as a car washer in the town of Kish. Now, waiting in line at Shehada Jazeera School in the Libyan port city of Benghazi, he's running for his life all over again.
The Libyan revolution has just entered only its second week of turmoil. But tens of thousands of expatriates have already fled the country — spilling over the Egyptian and Tunisian borders, out of Tripoli on chartered evacuation flights and into the port at Benghazi, Libya's second largest city, which is now under rebel control.
In late February, foreign embassies scrambled to evacuate their nationals as fighting rocked the capital and other cities along the country's coast. On Feb. 25, a U.S.-chartered ferry evacuated more than 300 people, including 167 Americans, from Tripoli to Malta. British military aircraft evacuated 150 oil workers from the Libyan desert on Feb. 26, and the embassy chartered other aircraft from the capital. China says it has so far evacuated 12,000 Chinese workers out of some 33,000 believed to be working in the country.
On Saturday, Feb. 26, in Benghazi, a lone British diplomat scanned the lines of Chinese and Bangladeshi workers who were queuing in a cold Mediterranean drizzle, amid the overpowering stench of raw sewage, to board two Greek cruise ships that had docked overnight to evacuate more people. Sent by the British embassy in Tripoli, the diplomat said he was scouring the city for British citizens who still needed help. Finding none at the port, he got back into his car and drove off. Later, the ships departed, carrying only the Chinese workers; the hundreds of Bangladeshis who had waited for hours were left behind, many of them in tears.
Indeed, for those holding passports from the developing world, the situation is increasingly grim. Thousands of workers from South Asia and West Africa are stranded here, many without passports or any cash and with nowhere else to go. Crowding the floors of buildings inside the port are Indians, Pakistanis, Vietnamese, Thais and Filipinos. Most, like the Bangladeshis, have been abandoned by their construction companies. Their Turkish and Chinese managers have escaped without them, and their home countries are too poor, unorganized or anarchic to lend a hand. "We spoke to the Turkish consulate, and they said they would only take the Turkish people," says Idris Shebany, 42, a Libyan businessman turned volunteer who has set up camp at the port to help the foreign refugees, with a sigh. "The others have no ambassadors, no consuls," says another volunteer, Hayan Salaama, as he shakes his head.
In the absence of a functioning government or international aid organizations, it is Libyan volunteers like Shebany and Salaama — many of them businessmen and doctors in the opposition-held port city — who have taken on the difficult task of helping the foreign workers who have been left behind make their escape from chaos. They have set up a makeshift clinic and gathered blankets and mattresses, and they are churning out three meals a day for the foreign workers crowding abandoned offices and storage rooms. One man who normally sells women's clothes has picked up an AK-47 to guard the camp.
Shebany says that roughly 5,000 to 6,000 new foreigners have been arriving every day, many of them packed into buses or trucks. Most so far — Chinese, Turks, Americans and Europeans — have gotten out, the Chinese abandoning an entire battery of cars and trucks in their wake. A muddy field at one end of the port, where people making a quick exit had recently been camped, is scattered with shoes and discarded clothing.
On Saturday morning, 800 Filipinos and 400 Indians arrived from the desert towns of Jalu and al-Kufrah, Shebany says. But it's impossible to get an exact head count. "After an hour, it could be 2,000 to 3,000. We don't have a list, and at any minute, more buses could arrive." He tried asking the Egyptians if they could take any of the foreign nationals over the border. Their response was no.
The day's latest arrivals stand in queues beneath a blustery sky as volunteers take their names and assign them to rooms. A group of Thais working for the South Korean company Unicon are hopeful that they'll make it out on the next set of Turkish evacuation boats. "The Thai and Turkish embassies are talking," says Pranomtjan Phiuluang, one of the Thai workers. Carrying a list he compiled of all his fellow citizens at the port, he hoped they'd be leaving the same day.
Shebany is most concerned about the workers who don't have an exit strategy: men like Aziz from Liberia, whose governments don't seem to have any game plan at all. In a stuffy row of offices by the water, Vietnamese workers from the Turkish construction company Tekfen have been waiting anxiously for four days. After traveling north from al-Kufrah, their Turkish managers abandoned them here. "There is not enough food. I am very hungry right now," says Nguyen Van Thuong, 22, a laborer.
Out in the rain, by the Anek Lines cruise ships, many of the Bangladeshis say their situation is far worse: most have only copies of their passports, because their Chinese managers confiscated the real ones when they arrived months ago to work on a housing project. "We want to go back to Bangladesh," says Amir Hussein, as rain begins to soak his clothes. "But we don't know where our passports are."
"Our company — Chinese and Bangladeshi workers — came together to the port yesterday," he adds. "Then the Chinese went back to China and left us here. My wife and sons [back home] are all worried."
In particular, the volunteers say they're worried about the African laborers, who have been scapegoated by both the Gaddafi regime and the antigovernment protesters. "We are afraid people will attack the Africans," says Shebany. He blames Gaddafi, who, like his ousted Egyptian counterpart Hosni Mubarak, has cast much of blame for his country's turmoil on foreign influences. "Today I spoke to the Ghanaian ambassador and asked them what they're going to do. He said, 'I don't know.' "
Shebany says about 250 Africans arrived at the Shehada Jazeera School this morning. But in the lobby, where a Libyan volunteer is taking names on a piece of paper, others put the total seeking refuge here at around a thousand. Many of the West African workers got caught in the cross fire; some were mugged or attacked while making their escape from nearby towns, as opposition protesters accused them of working for the regime. Rashid Mohamed and about 40 Ghanaian colleagues hid in a building at their Turkish construction company's project site for eight days, rationing bread as fighting raged around them, with their sleeping quarters — along with their passports and belongings — burned. "They said that Gaddafi brought the black people to fight," he says. "So the Libyans, when they see the blacks, they will kill them."
Even in the relative safety of the school hallways Mohamed and the others, clad in thin jackets and clutching small suitcases, are anxious. "We need help from our President in Ghana. We need serious help," says Kuko Oppong, a Ghanaian worker, who adds that he would welcome the United Nations too. "If they don't help us, some people might die. It's a bad situation. They're shooting guns."
Indeed, even as more Ghanaian and Nigerian arrivals wait in the school's muddy courtyard, the Libyan volunteers taking care of them fret that they may have to relocate the group soon. Wadir Jadir says they have gotten messages from people in the neighborhood and may move the workers to a nearby stadium. "People in the neighborhood don't want them here," he says. Residents accuse them of being mercenaries for Gaddafi. "And if they go out, some people might kill them."