GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Muammar Qadaffi is back in the headlines, with the International Criminal Court in the Hague issuing an arrest warrant for him on charges of crimes against humanity, Monday 27 June, and US Senator Mike Turner sparking debate by telling Foreign Policy magazine that Nato is trying to kill the Libyan leader. South African leader Jacob Zuma has objected strongly, reports allAfrica: “The intention of the United Nations Security Council authorizing military action against Libya was ‘to protect the Libyan people’ and ‘not to authorize a campaign for regime change or political assassination,’ President Jacob Zuma of South Africa has told fellow members of an African Union panel on Libya.”
Geneva-based IOM (International Organization for Migration) reports that while 44,000 Chadians have managed to flee Libya since the fighting began, scores are currently stranded in the desert after six weeks, with little access to food or water and an emergency effort to try to get supplies to them got underway Tuesday 28 June.
“Thousands of stranded migrants, including large numbers of women and children, are in desperate need of immediate food, water, shelter and medical assistance after having spent many weeks living in the open in the southern Libyan desert, an IOM assessment team has found as the Organization looks into ways to evacuate them to safety. So far, more than 2,000 Chadian migrants have been discovered by IOM in Gatroun and Sebha, though these figures could grow as the team continues with its assessment in the area.”
The head of the assessment team says that conditions for the group “are brutal in the desert heat with no protection from the sun, wind or sand and no access to water, food or sanitation.”
Unusually large numbers of women and children, elderly signals long-time labourers fleeing
ICRC has started clearing unexploded munitions around Libyan cities; reports of children injured
Misrata, Libya evacuations led by the IOM: six shiploads have carried out civilians, but refugees are also fleeing overland, across the desert (©2011 IOM)
Update 14:55 Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – A disturbing new picture is emerging of the desperate straits of those fleeing Libya overland to Chad, says the IOM (International Organization for Migration).
The Geneva-based organization in its latest media update, 6 May, on efforts to evacuate civilians from the strife-torn country, says that five people have died after arriving in Faya, in northern Chad and some 100 are hospitalized.
“The temperature here in the Sahara is above 50 degrees centigrade. Those who manage to arrive are extremely dehydrated and physically exhausted by such a demanding journey. They have just made a two week trip across the desert without food and water on an open and crammed vehicle in the full sun. There are no towns along the route to stop at and get supplies. There are no roads here, just desert sand,” says IOM’s chief of mission in Chad, Qasim Sufi.
The IOM reports that the journey “has been too much for some, with”more than 100 migrants including children . . . currently hospitalized in Faya with severe dehydration, respiratory, gastro-intestinal infections and injuries.”
The number of people fleeing overland, across the desert, appears to be rising dramatically, with 14 trucks, arriving in Faya this week and another 14 said to be en route. The IOM estimates, based in part on reports from those arriving, that “40,000 Chadians in the southern Libyan town of Gatroun, mostly women and children [are] reported to be in a desperate and pitiful condition. ‘People are telling us that these migrants have no food, water, shelter or sanitation. After many weeks like this, and in these temperatures, they cannot survive for much longer,” says Sufi. ‘We have to be able to access them to help them otherwise they could just die.’”
The IOM has to date taken more than 6,000 people from Faya to final destinations in Chad, but 3,700 await transport, in a transit camp designed for 900 people.
International Red Cross working closely with Libyan Red Crescent Society to find unexploded munitions
The ICRC in Geneva says it began 3 May to clear unexploded munitions in areas in Libya where the fighting has been heavy, notably around Ajdabiya, Misrata and Benghazi. Several children have reportedly been injured and the ICRC is working with the Libyan Red Crescent Society both to identify likely contaminated areas and to education the population to the danger.
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – A French agronomist working for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Chad was abducted Tuesday 10 November near village of Kawa, eastern Chad, where ICRC has a primary health care assistance programme. The ICRC says Laurent Maurice was taken by several armed men, but does not know their motives nor their identities.
Seven years after his arrest in Pakistan, where he was attending a mosque, 21-year-old Mohammed El Gharani, a citizen of Chad, has been released fro Guantanamo Bay and sent home to Chad, his lawyers say. The US government has not confirmed the information. El Gharani was 14 when he was arrested on suspicion of “of staying in an al Qaeda-affiliated guest house in Afghanistan, of fighting in the battle of Tora Bora, serving as a courier for senior al Qaeda operatives, and being a member of a London-based al Qaeda cell,” reports Reuters, and he was turned over to US officials in Afghanistan. The charges were never proven and a judge ordered in January 2009 that he should be freed.
Médecins Sans Frontières has begun a campaign to vaccinate 500,000 people in Nigeria against meningitis, part of a major campaign to fight an outbreak of the dangerous infectious disease in Nigeria, Niger and Chad that has killed hundreds of people since 2008.
