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Tue, Nov 26, 2019

MENASourcebyEmily Burchfield

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Libyan women with taped mouths take part in a silent march in support of the women who were raped during the recent war in Libya, in Tripoli November 26, 2011. REUTERS/Mohammed Salem

At a recent United NationsSecurity Council (UNSC) meeting on November18, 2019 concerning Libya, members were privileged to hear from Rida Al-Tubuly,advocate for peace and co-founder of Together We BuildIt, a nonprofit that supportsa peaceful democratic transition in the country by empowering women to play anactive role in peace-building. Ms. Tubuly addressed the systematic exclusion ofLibyan women from the UN-led peace process and suggested a different pathforward.

Libya experts frequentlycall for greater inclusion of civil society and local governance leaders inpeace-building efforts in order for the peace process to be more representativeof ordinary Libyans. And yet, Libyan womens powerful role in civil society andthe fact that they make up half of the population of ordinary Libyans isoften overlooked. For the peace process to be truly by and for Libyans and successfullyadvance a long-term solution, a broad and diverse range of Libyan women must begiven a seat at the negotiating table.

Why have women beenexcluded from the peace process?

As Ms. Tubuly explained to UNSCmembers, [Libyan women] are often told by international decision makers thatthe reason women are excluded from formal peace and political negations isbecause the Libyan actors are against womens political participation. Thisbegs the question: if there are no means for ordinary Libyans to take part inthe political process, then how will we be able to change things on theground? It is misguided and reductive to imagine that the majority of Libyansare opposed to womens involvement in the peace process. Womens inclusion isnot just a feminist issue, it is an issue of reflecting Libyas nationalculture and traditions in the peace process.

Libyan women have longplayed a key role innegotiating or mediating conflicts within families, clans and localcommunities. This legacy is often overlooked because it lives in local culturesthrough oral history rather than written documentation, according to ZaraLanghi, scholar and head of Libyan Womens Platform for Peace. Women also play an outsize role incivil society organization and activism in Libyaindeed, nonviolent action byurban women was central to the 2011 uprising that ousted former LibyanPresident Muammar Qaddafi. Libyan womens active engagement in the revolution empowered their political and socialstatus, but the chaos and dysfunction of the post-revolution era led tobacksliding in womens empowerment.

War-related insecurity hasin many instances limited womens freedom of movement in public. Traditionaland religious injunctions against women traveling without a male guardian(mahram) have been invoked in some areas. Further, patriarchal strains ofLibyas culture have fused withthe ideas of masculinity, militarism, and fundamentalism promoted by the violentconflict, giving rise to political actors with interests and objectives thatexclude women. These factors created obstacles to womens participation inpolitical activities, but women found ways to overcome them. Women facilitatemany of theinformal peace processes throughout the country and are activeorganizers for peace. However, their formal participation in the peace process isfurther hindered by the UNs neglect in the post-revolutionary period.

How does the ongoingviolence affect Libyan women?

Libyas local and regionaldiversity means that womens experience throughout the country is highlyvariable. However, it is important to address the conflicts differentialeffect on women. The war has led to a loss of gains in womens rights andpolitical empowerment. Women who do participate in politics are increasingly atrisk: Seham Serghewa, a rights activist and member of the House ofRepresentatives, was abducted in July and her fate remains unknown toinvestigators. As UN Special Representative for Libya Ghassan Salame noted inhis briefing tothe UNSC on November 19, Ms. Serghewas fate is part of a larger pattern ofviolence against women across the country that includes several instances ofkilling and forced disappearances in recent months. Women are among thecivilians that bear the brunt of the conflict and are also increasingly at risk of sexual and gender-basedviolence, but,as Libyan womens organizations have pointed out, the absence of gender disaggregateddata on conflict casualties and sexual and gender-based violence among womenserves to further their marginalization and the erasure of the gendered impactof armed conflict.

Libyan women have ideas for a path forward in their country, and deserve to have their input amplified at an official level.

The attack on Tripoli inApril by Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar and the Libyan National Army (LNA) significantlyimpacted women and girls. Of the 90,500 civilians displaced by first month ofthe offensive, an estimated 51 percent were female; they face disproportionate risks in shelters and internally displacedpeoples camps that lack safe places,privacy, security and freedom from harassment. Most women and children displaced from Tripoli and its surroundingareas are traumatized by the ongoing conflict and in need of some form of psychosocialsupport, and an estimated 400 women are at risk of sexual violence in thisenvironment. And if the ongoing conflict creates security vacuums in the restof the country that Salafi jihadist militants can exploit, the impact on womens rights andsecurity in those locales could be devastating. It would also be remiss to omitthe fact that women migrants and refugees in Libya are at risk of rape and other forms of sexual andgender-based violence, sexual exploitation, and forced prostitution indetention and at large.

The increased instance ofsexual and gender-based violence during conflict is not a phenomenon unique toLibya: the UN has noted that violence against women and girls is widespread during conflict and usedas a war tactic worldwide. Wartime rape, trafficking, forced prostitution, andviolence targeting women is frequently used as a strategy of war; it not only terrorizes women but also contributes to malehumiliation when men fail to protect their women. Continued conflict in Libyaposes special threats to the security of women and girls.

Why should the UN include morewomen in the peace process?

Women must be included inpeace processes not necessarily because they are inherently peaceful, butbecause they have unique meditation and negotiation skills imbued by theirculture, are equal stakeholders in peace with men, are highly motivated toterminate conflict given the differential effect of war on women. This is truein Libya, where women have overcome great odds to play an important role inpeacebuilding. However, their absence or diminished presence at UN-led internationalconferences like Palermo and Paris meant that no space was made for arepresentative range of Libyan women to contribute their experiences,perspectives, and ideas to the formal decision-making process.

Not until 2015 did the SpecialRepresentative for Libya at the time, Bernardino Len, instruct that womenmust get involved in talks at the municipality and tribal level. While nomention was made of their inclusion in the formal process, some progress hasbeen made in terms of womens role in local dialogues since then. The Libyan National Conference Process, which was initiated at the request ofthe UN Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) under the auspices of the Centre forHumanitarian Dialogue, held more than seventy separate meetings of localleaders with a grand total of more than 7,000 Libyans participating; over aquarter of whom were women. While 25 percent is not representative or sufficient, the increase in womens involvementwas an improvement. One outcome of womens participation in the meetings wasthe inclusion of references to women in the final report of the conference,including the recommendation that women should be integrated into the militaryaccording to Libyan social needs and norms in order to improve the militaryseffectiveness. This is a great idea: womens participation in the securitysector has been shown to improve community relations, provide mission-critical intelligence and insights, and reduce sexual violence. These are the types of women-driveninitiatives the peace process is lacking in and could benefit from if womenspresence was representative. The National Conference Process meetings werewidely seen as more successful than their international counterparts, andwomens participation in themwhile still not at paritywas likely a causalfactor.

Research showsthat womens active participation in a peace process makes it 64 percent lesslikely to fail, and 35 percent more likely to last at least fifteen years. Theinclusion of women at the negotiating table can produce agreements that improvegender equality, which in turn decreases conflict between and within states,increases stability, and promotes post-conflict recovery. Despite the evidenceof womens valuable contribution to peace and security, their representationhas only marginally improved. Worldwide since 1992, women have made up only 3 percent of mediators, 4 percent of signatories,and 13 percent of negotiators.

UNSMIL and theinternational community would do well to consider the evidence of womensutility in peace processes and make a concerted effort to include them atinternational fora like the forthcoming Berlin conference, as well as increasing theirparticipation in national dialogues. Furthermore, as long as elections are notpossible, UNSMIL must be creative in facilitating and leading a politicalprocess that is gender-inclusive. To restorepower to ordinary Libyans, the peace process must be reconfigured: women musthave representation at the negotiating table as well as in dynamics on theground. Libyan women have ideas for a path forward in their country, anddeserve to have their input amplified at an official level. Not only that,Libya deserves the kinds of solutions women can drive forward.

Emily Burchfield is an assistant director at the Atlantic Councils Middle East Programs.

Thu, Sep 19, 2019

One of the unfortunate consequences of Libyas crisis is that the main players with decision-making power in Libyas conflict are the regional and international powers involved in the crisis.

MENASourcebyKarim Mezran

Thu, Aug 22, 2019

In 2020, when Tunisia begins its two-year term as non-permanent member of the Security Council, the country will have the biggest opportunity to influence international affairs since becoming a democracy in 2011. In response to the appointment, Tunisian Foreign Minister Khemaies Jhinaoui declared Tunisia will be the voice of Africa and the Arab worldTrying to []

MENASourcebyKeith Jones

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How the exclusion of women has cost Libya - Atlantic Council

Knud Holmboe, circa early 1930s

In the summer of 1931, the security services in French-controlled Syria detained and deported a Danish journalist who had the previous year spent time in the Italian colonies of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica in North Africa, part of what would later become the modern state of Libya. The Italian fascists had reportedly contacted the French to request the expulsion of the twenty-eight-year-old traveler on the grounds that he was a dangerous subversive. French officials in Syria needed little convincing: the tall, blue-eyed Danes reputation had preceded his arrival and some of his reporting about Libya, they believed, had inspired anti-Italian riots in Syria that had left several dead. Soon after these disturbances, an article in the British press called the young man a Danish Lawrence, referring to T.E. Lawrence, the British military officer in World War I better known as Lawrence of Arabia.

On the surface, there were several similarities between the careers of the Dane, whose name was Knud Holmboe, and the now-mythic Lawrence. Both men were Arabic speakers and aficionados of Arab culture, though Holmboe had gone further and converted to Islam, reversing his earlier contempt for Muslims and Arabs. Both had traveled across and written about the Middle East, casting a cold gaze on European colonial projectsthough the Danish adventurer was far less implicated in such schemes than the British archaeologist and intelligence officer had been. Finally, both were champions of Arab anti-imperialist campaigns. By the time the French detained Holmboe, he had already been imprisoned in Egypt for conspiring with anti-Italian Libyan dissidents, members of the Sanusi Sufi order, to resupply a besieged rebel base across the border in southern Libya.

Holmboe had been spurred into action against the Italians by a road trip hed made in 1930 across Italian-ruled Libya. Aside from several brushes with death, the journey exposed him to the cruelty of Italys counter-insurgency activities, especially in eastern Libya, which included concentration camps, executions, poison gas bombs, and the forced displacement and starvation of civilians. Estimates of the resulting death toll in the eastwhat Italian and Libyan historians have labeled a genociderange from 35,000 to 70,000. Holmboe was one of the few Western witnesses to this savagery and, in the first of many attempts to silence him, the Italians deported him on a stinking prison barge at the conclusion of his 1930 trip. Refusing to be cowed, in 1931 Holmboe published a book about his odyssey in Danish (released five years later in English as Desert Encounter, a blander title than the original Danish one, which translated as Desert Ablaze). It became a bestseller in the United States and in Europethough it was immediately, and predictably, banned in Italy, and indeed appeared in an Italian translation only in 2004.

Holmboe has long weighed on my mind in my own travels across Libya over the past decade, at times even retracing his journey. It was only on a trip this summer, though, that I finally packed Desert Encounter in my bag, dipping into its pages during languid afternoons in Tripoli and at night on the front lines during lulls in the fighting between militia groups. A blend of travelogue, spiritual musing, social critique, and journalistic expos, Desert Encounter eschews the operatic prose and Homeric pretensions of Lawrences Seven Pillars of Wisdom. It is also largely devoid of the Orientalist tropes that saturated many Western travelers accounts from this era. It reads, in places, like a Tintin-esque Boys Own adventure, though it occasionally slips into a self-righteous tone. The New York Times called it thrilling, but, writing in The Observer, Graham Greene was less impressed: Holmboes story is exciting, his material of great interest, but he has few literary gifts.

Even so, Desert Encounter remains a compelling historical document and deserves to be remembered for its harrowing account of Italian rule. Holmboe describes scenes of blood-stained landscapes with a surreal vividness that recalls, to my mind, Isaac Babels Red Cavalry or Curzio Malapartes Kaputt. He passes through ruined and abandoned villages, their wells filled with sand or cement by the Italians. He sees the wreckage of Italian airplanes brought down by Arab insurgents rifle fire and stumbles over half-clothed corpses gnawed by jackals, the animals yellow eyes shining like phosphorescence. He attends public executions of Arabs, the gallows presided over by an Italian colonial auxiliary force of Eritrean Christians with large silver crosses hanging around their necks. Scanning the crowd of onlookers, he notices that Italian settlers have brought their cameras.

Beyond his testimony about the depredations of interwar imperialism, there are other reasons to revisit Knud Holmboe. The arc of his life, with its stark conversions, straddled the schisms and categories that divide us still: he was a Christian turned Muslim, a onetime European supremacist turned defender of Arab sovereignty, and a reporter turned clandestine activist. He was also an augur of his troubled ageand perhaps of ourswarning about fascisms potential for terrible violence at a time when many in the West were either slow to appreciate its dangers or were actually complicit in its rise. Mussolinis large body of English worshippers would do well to have a look at it, George Orwell wrote, reviewing Desert Encounterin November 1936, a month before he arrived in Barcelona to fight Francos forces in the Spanish Civil War.

*

Knud Valdemar Gylding Holmboe was born in the Jutland region of Denmark in 1902, the oldest of seven children in an upper-middle-class family. The milieu of his childhood points to a stirring of the expansive humanism, literary inclinations, and spiritual hunger that would impel his future wanderings. One of his brothers, Vagn, went on to become a classical string composer famed for his metamorphosis technique, which a reviewer described as a rhythmic patternexisting in a state of constant evolution. That musical innovation might serve as a metaphor for the flux and transformation that defined Knud Holmboes identity and intellect.

At the age of nineteen, he spent time in a Benedictine abbey in Luxembourg and considered becoming a priest, but instead became a journalist writing for Danish newspapers. He reported first from Denmark and Europe, then shifted his focus to North Africa and the Middle East, traveling first to Morocco to interview a Danish prince who was serving in the French Foreign Legion. His book-length account from the frontlines of the 1920s Moroccan rebellion against Spanish and French colonial forces, the so-called Rif War, is littered with racist stereotypes: the brown men fighting the occupation, he wrote, were brigands motivated by religious fanaticism. It is almost as though it had been written by a different person from the author of Desert Encounter, published eleven years later, in which the same Moroccan fighters are described as brave mountaineers.

What wrought such a profound change in him? Attending a Muslim prayer service in Jerusalem in 1926 seemed to spark a reverent interest in Islam: [T]here was absolute quietude, he later wrote of the encounter, no priests celebrating the mass or preaching or changing bread and wine into God, no music to hypnotize and lead the heart away from clear understanding. Months later, he visited a mosque in the Moroccan mountains and heard an elderly imam expounding on the virtues of Islam. In 1929, during a visit to England, he formally converted.

It was against this backdrop that Holmboe began his journey across North Africa in 1930. Hed originally planned to travel by boat from Spain to Egypt and then on to Mecca and Medina, but a chance conversation in a hotel lobby in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, in northern Morocco, persuaded him to make, instead, an overland trek across the Maghreb. Write us a book on North Africa seen through Arab eyes, the stranger proposed, Holmboe narrates in Desert Encounter. Accepting the challenge, he found himself crossing a threshold that was as much psychological and metaphysical as it was geographical. This was going to be my last day as a European, he declared. Donning a Moroccan burnous that made him unrecognizable, he secured his transportation: a four-cylindered 1928 Chevrolet with an enlarged fuel tank.

Entering Libya, he drove along an Italian-built road (the best I have ever seen, even in Europe) and arrived in the capital, Tripoli, where Mussolinis fascist regime had erected a vulgar spectacle of power. The buildings flash with marble and brass, he writes, as black-shirted youths marched on streets adorned with posters of Il Duces visage emblazoned with the inscription: Those Who Are Not for Us Are Against Us. The Italians seemed confident of imminent success in defeating the remaining Arab rebels. Sono liquidati, (They are liquidated), the Italian governor, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, purred to visiting diplomats. But Holmboe was hearing enthralling reports from eastern Libya of the exploits of an elusive guerrilla leader named Omar al-Mukhtar, a former Sufi teacher who was directing hit-and-run raids on Italian soldiers from hideouts in the mountains. When we think hes in one place and that weve got himpoof! Hes gone, a soldier from the Italian Tyrol told Holmboe.

Determined to meet these rebels, Holmboe continued his eastward journey. Somewhere in the desert outside Sirte, a windswept plain of thorn scrub and spear grass, his car broke down and he spent days wandering lost without water. Rescued by some Italian soldiers, he was taken to the city of Benghazi, the seat of the eastern colony of Cyrenaica, under the de facto rule of an iron-fisted general named Rodolfo Graziani. Clean-shaven, rosy-faced, his eyes nearly black, Graziani was supervising the depopulation then taking place of the countryside around Benghazi in order to break the will of the resistance. The grim result was a series of barbed-wire-bound concentration camps, into which over one hundred thousand Bedouin had been herded.

Holmboe visited one of these camps and his description reads as a brutal indictment. He found some 1,500 tents housing 6,0008,000 people, many of them ill and wretched, limping along with crooked backs, or with arms and legs that were terribly deformed. When his account finally appeared in English, six years later, it was explosive for the stark contrast it provided with the propaganda that the Italian fascists had long fed the world about their civilizing project, both in Libya and elsewhere in Africa. It is a pity that we have had to wait five years for a translation, noted a British reviewer of Desert Encounter in 1937. We should have been spared any illusions that we might have cherished as to Italys aims and policy in Abyssinia. For Holmboe, the camp visit was perhaps the catalyst for his radicalization: [A]ny European who obtains a glimpse of [Italian rule], he wrote, must feel ashamed to belong to the white race.

The rest of his voyage completed his evolution from chronicler to partisan. Separated from an Italian convoy in the eastern Green Mountains, he was captured by al-Mukhtars fighters, only escaping execution because he could recite the Quran. Around a campfire, his hosts told him about a litany of Italian abuses, including a wrenching story of a young Arab girl who had been kidnapped by the Italians and sold into a brothel. Released but afflicted with an unspecified illness, she begged her father to kill her. The old sheikh kissed her on the forehead and complied. And I tell you, the man narrating this to Holmboe said, every Italian I meet shall die. At the end of his sojourn with these men, Holmboe had promised to meet with their exiled leader in Egypt, Idris al-Sanusi, the man who would later become the king of independent Libya in 1951.

Finding himself once more in the custody of the Italians, Holmboe was soon expelled from Cyrenaica. From there, he made his way to Alexandria, in Egypt, and sought out the Sanusi chief, as he had sworn to. For his part, Idris al-Sanusi gave Holmboe a letter of introduction to the rebels at the Libyan oasis of Kufra, near the Egyptian border, providing more evidence that Holmboe was by then no mere observer. Returning to his hotel after the meeting, he offers a haunting vignette of Western moral decay that evokes the later writings of Paul Bowles. He passes through the prostitutes quarter, teeming with powdered women, drunken sailors, and the odor of whiskey, incense and sweating bodies. Above the din, he hears the melody of Beethovens Moonlight Sonata wailing from an electric pianoexcept that half the notes are missing. At that moment, the tune has become for Holmboe a thing of staccato, halting horror.

*

Nearly a century after Holmboes odyssey, Libyas landscape has irrevocably altered, bearing now the scars of the oil boom, decades of misrule by the dictator Muammar Qadhafi, the 2011 uprising, and the travails that followed. The Italian-built capital Holmboe visited, with its arcaded plazas and neo-Moorish facades, is today enveloped by poured-concrete housing and half-finished high-rises. The once-vaunted Italian-made roads Holmboe motored along are rutted by neglect and dotted with militia checkpoints. The stately Albergo Italia hotel where he stayed in Benghazi is gone, partly destroyed by Allied bombers in World War II, while more recent fighting between Libyans has blighted a porticoed palace where Holmboe once watched Graziani address Italian troops from a balcony.

It cannot be denied that civilization has been created in Benghazi, the Dane wrote, upon entering eastern Libya. But what civilization? The travesty of the Italians rule in Libya was that their much-trumpeted architectural achievementsthe theaters, palm-lined waterfronts, and orchestra pavilionswere accompanied by a ruination of Libyan society. Lacking the paternalism of the French colonizers, the Italians quashed the nascent intellectual class they initially encountered and, over the next decades, reinforced tribal affinities while denying Libyans access to education (by the time of Libyas independence, illiteracy was almost universal). What is especially sinister is that the Italians seem to take no interest in their subject peoples, Orwell noted in his review of Desert Encounter.

Today, generations of Libyan scholars and writers have lent their own voices and perspectives to describing the period Holmboe chronicled, through archival research and in rich fictional accounts, memoirs, poetry, and art. Yet Holmboe remains a part of this remembering. His portrait hangs in the national museum in Tripoli and his daughter and grandchildren have been feted during visits to Libya under the previous regime. Some years ago, a group of Libyan youths held a book club discussion on Holmboe in the Green Mountain town of al-Bayda, not far from where he was detained by Omar al-Mukhtars fighters.

The legacy of the Italian epoch is still felt in Libya in other ways: in the absence of inclusive governing institutions; in the atomization of Libyan society into groupings of kin, town, and region; in the reliance of local elites on external patronage; and in the widespread violence that has become a kind of political currency. Holmboe would find much that is familiar in this state of affairs. The major cities in the west and east, Tripoli and Benghazi respectively, are once again militarizednot by the blackshirts and carabinieri, but by Libyan militias sparring for power and wealth. Those in the east are led by an autocratic, khaki-clad field marshal named Khalifa Hifter, who, since April of this year, has been waging a war to topple the internationally recognized government in Tripoli and who favors the sort of lavish military parades that would have met with approval from Graziani and Badoglio.

Nor has the unquiet ghost of Italian colonialism been laid to rest. Even today, successive Italian governments have inflicted new horrors on Tripolitania, again in the form of camps: to block the influx of African migrants making the Mediterranean crossing, Rome has backed their internment in squalid detention centers run by Libyan militias. On top of all of this, there is renewed international meddling. Foreign-piloted aircraftremotely-controlled drones in place of the monoplanes whose wreckage Holboe saware again bombing Libyans with impunity. African mercenariesno longer Eritrean ascaris but Chadian and Sudanese gunmenare again fighting on Libyan soil, in the ranks of the countrys warring factions.

As I read Holmboe, I found myself reflecting that he would also likely be chilledbut not surprisedby the nativist, authoritarian turn that politics has taken in present-day Europe. He sensed in his own time such an illiberal swing; indeed, he was not completely immune to its appeal, conceding that it had put many things in order in Italy. By the end of Desert Encounter, though, he was warning that Fascism stretches its tentacles far into the distance. The antidote, he believed, was Islam. Islam, he wrote, in spite of Bolshevism, Socialism, and all other modern ideas for the happiness of mankind, is able to make every individual completely happy. That is a view shared today by countless European Muslim converts, some of whom, like the Dane, have traveled abroad on behalf of Islamic causes. Were he alive today, Holmboe might very well find himself hounded by intelligence services as a suspected foreign fighter or victimized by Europes rising Islamophobia.

He would no doubt be mortified but, again, not surprised, that anti-Muslim attitudes in his home country would be circuitously linked to the 2011 Libyan uprising against Muammar Qadhafi. In late 2005, a newspaper in Denmark published satirical cartoons that mocked the Prophet Muhammad, sparking Muslim protests across the world, including in Benghazi, where at least ten demonstrators were killed by Libya security forces in 2006. In early 2011, when Libyan activists in Benghazi and abroad organized protests, as part of the unfolding Arab Spring, they chose the anniversary of these deaths, February 17. It is a date now enshrined as the start of the revolution and the beginning of the end for the Libyan dictator.

*

Knud Holmboe never realized his goal of aiding the anti-Italian Libyan insurgents: in February 1931, Italian forces overran the last Sanusi stronghold in the Kufra oasis, and in September of that year, al-Mukhtar, their iconic leader, was finally captured and publicly hanged in the eastern town of Suluq. With the resistance crushed, Italian rule would continue in Libya for another twelve years. Desert Encounter closes with Holmboe standing on the deck of a cargo ship in 1930, gazing across the Mediterranean and contemplating Mussolinis dream of making the sea an Italian lake, a revival of the old Roman claim to mare nostrum (our sea). The absurdity of such notions is clear from the Danes intimation that the body of water is ultimately a connector, not a divider between Africa and Europe, and East and West.

Holmboes own effort to bridge these worlds probably cost him his life. In October 1931, en route to the Hajj pilgrimage, he was ambushed and murdered by tribesmen on a desert road near the Saudi-Jordanian border. He was twenty-nine years old. It has been rumored that his killers were acting on behalf of the Italian secret service, but this has not been proven. His remains were never recovered.

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What the 'Danish Lawrence' Learned in Libya | by Frederic Wehrey | NYR Daily - The New York Review of Books

A group of refugees arrive at Kigali International Airport after a life-saving evacuation flight to Rwanda from Libya. UNHCR/Eugene Sibomana

More than 100 vulnerable refugees, including several babies born in detention centres in Libya, have arrived in Rwanda on a humanitarian evacuation flight organized by UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency.

The group of 117landed at Kigali International Airport at 22:45 last night (Sunday 24 November). They have been taken to a transit facility in Gashora, where UNHCR is providing them with life-saving assistance, including food, water, medical care, psycho-social support, and accommodation.

As violence in Tripoli intensifies, these evacuations have never been more urgent, said Vincent Cochetel, UNHCR Special Envoy for the Central Mediterranean. But with thousands of refugees still at risk in detention centres and urban areas in Libya, we need States to help us get more refugees out of the country much more quickly.

The group are mostly from Eritrea, with smaller numbers from Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan and South Sudan.

Around two-thirds of the group are under 18 years old, the vast majority of whom have been separated from their parents and wider family. Among the group are two one month-old babies.

The individuals have been given asylum-seeker status while their cases are assessed and further solutions are pursued, including resettlement, voluntary return to countries of previous asylum, voluntary return to countries of origin where safe to do so and local integration in Rwanda.

Around a quarter of the group were evacuated via the Gathering and Departure Facility in Tripoli. Others were evacuated directly from detention centres and urban areas.

Individuals were identified based on assessments of vulnerability. Due to the limited number of available evacuation and resettlement places, efforts are made to prioritise those most in need, often including unaccompanied children, survivors of torture and other abuses, and people in need of medical treatment, amongst others.

A number of additional humanitarian flights out of Libya are planned during the next few weeks.

UNHCR is grateful for support of Libyan, Rwandan and Nigerien authorities, and from the African Union, through the Emergency Transit Mechanism (ETM). UNHCR also welcomes the recent donation of US$10 million from the European Union towards the Rwanda ETM, helping us move more vulnerable refugees out of Libya and to safety.

Following this evacuation, UNHCR has assisted 2,142refugees and asylum seekers with solutions out of Libya in 2019 including the resettlement of 723 individuals. We continue to call for the end of detention of refugees and migrants in Libya as well as more places and faster, more flexible processes to move more refugees away from danger.

Around 4,500 refugees and asylum seekers continue to be held in detention centres in Libya, including people newly detained after being rescued or intercepted at sea by the Libyan Coast Guard. Together with other vulnerable refugees living in urban areas, they remain at risk of being caught up in the continued clashes or being subjected to horrific forms of harm in the hands of smugglers and traffickers in Libya.

For more information on this topic, please contact:

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Third group of refugees evacuated to Rwanda from Libya with UNHCR support - UNHCR

"We are happy to leave the Libyan hell behind," migrants told Euronews as their rescue ship, Aita Mari. arrived into southern Sicily.

They were among 79 people rescued in the Mediterranean last week.

"In my country, the only life is that of being a soldier," said Abdul. "There is no education and no freedom."

He left Eritrea at the age of 15 to avoid military service and war.

He fled to Ethiopia, then to Sudan, and finally to Libya, where he was captured by one of the militias fighting to control the country.

"Libya is not a good place," Abdul said while showing the scars on his arms.

"We had to eat toothpaste [to survive]," Ismail, a young man from Somalia, told Euronews. He has tried to cross the Mediterranean three times, but he was repeatedly intercepted by the Libyan Coast Guard and taken into detention centres.

"Prisons are controlled by militias," he said. "They are made up of brothers, cousins... and they ask for ransom."

The testimony of the 79 people rescued by the Aita Mari match with those of human rights organisations working in Libya: detention centres are places for torture and extortion.

"You get arrested just because you are black," Ismail explained.

Hamir will never forget the journey through the desert on a van: dozens of bodies fell during the drive.

"At sea, at least you can swim. If you fall during this trip, you're dead. You couldn't see anything but the desert", he said.

When they arrived in Tripoli, Hamir and his brother were arrested and imprisoned.

"One day, I managed to escape during a football match, but I left my brother inside," he said.

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Migrants tell of their 'Libyan hell' as they arrive in Europe - Euronews

ON BOARD THE OPEN ARMS (Reuters) - An African migrant recently rescued from a crowded dinghy drifting in the Mediterranean said he would have rather died at sea than return to Libya, highlighting the desperation driving the current wave of immigration to Europe.

A migrant looks at waves on board of NGO Proactiva Open Arms rescue boat in central Mediterranean Sea, November 23, 2019. REUTERS/Juan Medina

Ibrahim Assoumanou Abdel Azize, originally from Togo, his Nigerian partner Fethia Owolabi and their five-year old son Ibrahim were among 73 migrants plucked out of a rubber dinghy on Wednesday night by the crew of Spain-based rescue ship, Open Arms.

The migrants, mostly from Central and West Africa, had been drifting around 50 miles off the Libyan coast for nearly 24 hours when they were picked up.

Cradling his young son in his arms, Azize smiled with relief on the ships deck, Reuters TV footage showed.

After leaving their home in Nigeria the family arrived in Libya where they worked odd jobs for two years to try and save the $1,300 needed to pay for the crossing.

You work for them, they dont pay the money, thats why we decided to leave Libya, we cant live our life like that with my son, I just want to keep my kid safe, thats why I left, said Owolabi.

UN figures show more than 1,000 migrants are believed to have drowned or gone missing while attempting to reach Europe from North Africa this year.

Azize said the crossing was worth the risk to escape Libya.

I wanted to come to Europe, it wasnt easy while I was on the water... if I must die on the water, it is better than returning to Libya, he said.

Owolabi said she had been terrified and wished she had stayed in Nigeria.

I didnt know the big sea... I was crying, I told the people lets go back because I was scared.

I didnt know it would be like this, if I had known this I wouldnt have come, I would have gone back to my country.

Open Arms is seeking to dock at a European port, likely in Italy or Malta, mission chief Ricardo Gati said on Thursday.

Both countries have previously refused to let the vessel land rescued migrants at its ports. A weeks-long dispute with the Italian government this summer was only resolved after a court ordered authorities to open the port, allowing 100 migrants to disembark.

Reporting by Juan Medina,; Writing by Nathan Allen, Elena Rodriguez; Editing by Alexandra Hudson

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I'd have rather died at sea than return to Libya, says rescued migrant - Reuters