Manila yesterday dispatched Philippine Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario to oversee the evacuation of 13,000 citizens from Libya after a Filipino construction worker was beheaded and a nurse gang-raped there.
Del Rosario said he was reprising a 2011 mission to Tunisia that also evacuated, mostly by ferry, thousands of Filipino workers during the uprising that toppled former Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi.
“Our major challenge, as in 2011, is to convince our folks that they must leave Libya at the soonest time to avoid the perils of a highly exacerbating situation there,” he told reporters.
Photo: Reuters
The Philippine government ordered a mandatory evacuation on July 20, hours after the discovery in Benghazi of the beheaded remains of a Filipino construction worker who had been abducted five days earlier. It also imposed a travel ban to the violence plagued country.
On Wednesday, a Filipina nurse was abducted by a gang of youths outside her residence in the capital, Tripoli, then taken elsewhere where she was gang-raped by up to six suspects, the department said.
She was released about two hours later and a Filipino consular team took her to hospital for treatment, a department spokesman said.
“We condemn these crimes that have been committed against our people,” Philippine President Benigno Aquino III’s spokesman Herminio Coloma told reporters in Manila.
Despite the dangers, del Rosario said many of the Filipinos, mostly employed in Libyan construction and hospitals, are refusing to leave because they would be out of a job back home.
Only just more than 700 had left Libya by Wednesday, according to a department tally, despite the rapidly deteriorating situation, with warring militias battling for control of key population centers.
Del Rosario said he is flying to Djerba island in neighboring Tunisia to “try to convince our people to leave [Libya] because the situation there is very dangerous.”
“We are in the process of engaging ships from Malta that would pick up our people from Benghazi, Misurata and hopefully Tripoli then return to Malta for air transport to Manila,” he said.
While each vessel could carry up to 1,500 people, he said the government was still negotiating the evacuees’ safe passage through these ports.
Failing that, the Filipinos would be bussed to Djerba where flight arrangements would be made, he said.
Meanwhile, Greece is sending a frigate and two other vessels to Libya to evacuate workers at its embassy in Tripoli as well as a few hundred Chinese and European nationals, government officials said.
The Greek frigate Salamis, which can carry up to 100 evacuees, is expected to arrive in Libya last night, a Greek defense ministry official said. A second naval vessel, Prometheus, and a passenger ferry are expected to help evacuate workers from countries including Britain and Cyprus, officials said.
The past two weeks of fighting between rival militias in Libya have been the worst since the civil war that ousted Qaddafi in 2011, prompting Western governments to follow the US and the UN in pulling out their diplomats.
France closed its embassy on Wednesday and evacuated 30 French nationals from Tripoli, a few days after the US embassy evacuated its staff across the Tunisian border under heavy military escort.
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