Red Cross Blogs

Libya: crisis deepens and thousands continue to flee

By Sarah Oughton
March 17, 2011 at 1:36 pm

It may be slipping down the news agenda but the conflict in Libya continues to escalate and the Red Cross is deeply concerned about the deteriorating humanitarian situation. 

Thousands of people continue to flee the civil war every day with a total of 287,000 having now escaped into neighbouring countries, including 154,000 who have crossed into Tunisia. 

I’ve just been speaking to Melanie McNeil, a British Red Cross logistics delegate currently based at the Tunisia and Libya border. This is what she said: 

“It’s hard to get a concrete idea of what is happening on the Libyan side of the border because there’s very little information available. The number of people crossing the border has dropped since the first few days of the crisis, but we’re starting to see these rise again. 

The people crossing over are being sheltered in the border area in transit camps and those that are being repatriated by their home countries are being sent to the airport at Djerba as soon as possible – the idea is that they will only be on the border for a couple of days and to keep people moving through and free up space as more people arrive. 

In terms of planning the emergency response operation we’re working on different scenarios with regards to the number of people continuing to arrive – we’re definitely looking at the need to scale up quickly and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies is working with the Tunisian Red Crescent to establish a new camp as quickly as possible, which will provide shelter for up to 10,000 people. 

Setting up the camp, which is about 6km from the border on the Tunisian side is pretty challenging as it’s basically in a desert area. It’s been very windy, creating a sand storm and making it very difficult to put up these massive tents.

I arrived on 5 March and spent my first 24 hrs on the tarmac in the airport offloading planes, which contain donations from the Red Cross,  such as blankets, tents, kitchen sets, jerry cans and  latrines. Ten days ago there were few logistics workers here and over the first week we’ve had nine planes arrive and there’s been real pressure to off load the goods and store them quickly and securely before they are distributed. Djerba airport is mainly commercial and is struggling to cope with the loads of cargo arriving. 

My colleague, Mike Barcroft, is the air ops and customs clearance delegate. He spends all his days at the airport getting the goods through and dispatched to our warehouse. 

I’ve moved my ‘office’ from the airport tarmac to a hotel between the border and the airport, and I’ll be moving again soon to the camp when it’s properly set up. 

My job is to make sure we have all the right documents for clearing the goods and then to track and keep records of all the goods as they come in and are then dispatched to the people in the camps. 

I work closely with the relief teams as they’re the people out in the camps assessing what people need and then they put their requisitions through to me. So I have to make sure that we have enough stock available to meet the needs.So far we’ve distributed around 5,000 kits to a camp being run by a number of international organisations, including UNHCR  and the International Committee of the Red Cross. The kits contain toothbrush, toothpaste, razor, soap, blankets and sleeping mats.

 The temperatures here are high and the conditions are pretty harsh. A lot of people arriving have had to walk long distances. They arrive hot, hungry and exhausted – many are in quite a state and desperate for a shower and food. 

Everyone here is working together to do what we can to meet people’s needs and it’s looking more and more likely that the needs are only going to increase over the coming weeks.” 

Thanks to the generosity of donors our Libya & Region Appeal has now raised £244,000. However, more funds are needed to help thousands of people in a desperate situation.

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Tags: Libya & Region Appeal, Libya crisis, Libyan civel war

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 17th, 2011 at 1:36 pm and is filed under Emergencies, International, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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