On Ship of Evacuees From Libya, Harrowing Tales
Bryan Denton for The New York Times
Exhausted migrant workers aboard the Ionian Spirit passenger ferry slept during their evacuation from the besieged city of Misurata, Libya, to the rebel capital of Benghazi, on Monday.
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By C. J. CHIVERS
Published: April 18, 2011
Multimedia
The conditions they left behind were dire. Misurata, Libya’s third largest city, continued to be the scene of intensive, close-quarters fighting between forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and the city’s anti-Qaddafi rebels. It also faced barrages of mortar and rocket fire from Colonel Qaddafi’s troops.
As the fighting raged, as many as 5,000 migrant workers remained trapped within the city, according to Jeremy R. A. Haslam, the team leader for the International Organization for Migration, which chartered the vessel that entered the port for a second time to collect foreigners trying to flee.
The city also was at risk of losing more of its already limited medical support. Misurata, like much of Libya, has relied for years on foreign medical workers to help staff its hospitals. Much of that staff has already left. And foreign nurses aboard the vessel said that many more planned to go soon.
Prospects for further evacuations were unclear. Mr. Haslam said the crew of the Ionian Spirit, worried that Misurata was too dangerous, was threatening not to return for another evacuation. “They think they are pushing their luck with a third trip,” he said.
Compounding the unease was an evident sense of distrust between crew members and the cruise line operating the ship. “I am sure I do not want to go back,” said a crew member on the vessel. The crew member, who asked not to be identified because he feared retaliation, said that the crew had not been told they would travel to a war zone, and that many of the ship’s company remained on the vessel only because they were owed back pay.
“They told us we were going to Greece,” the crew member said. “Not here. They lied to us.”
All around the Ionian Spirit, the scenes of the evacuation were evident, as more than 650 young Ghanaian men slept on the decks of the vessels or slumped over the tables where tourists would ordinarily be enjoying their meals. Also on board were more than 100 Nigerians, 72 Libyans and smaller numbers of other nationalities.
They were an exhausted lot. Many had been sleeping in the open for weeks, and had waited, anxiety rising, for a berth on any of the few relief ships that have risked docking in Misurata.
Isaac Owuso, 33, a construction laborer, offered a mixture of gratitude that he had at last left the city with his deep disappointment at his recent fate. He had traveled from Ghana to Libya, he said, to work on the Qaddafi government’s construction projects and earn money for his wife and child.
When the war erupted, he had managed to save $2,000 euros and 100 Libyan dinars, which he kept hidden in his clothes. He tried to flee Misurata overland, he said, but robbed at a checkpoint. He said he did not know whether rebels or pro-Qaddafi gunmen manned the checkpoint. But he knew the result.
“Look at me,” he said, pulling a lone dinar note from his pocket. “This is my life. See me? I have only this money and nothing more. How will I take care of my family?”
The ship’s cabins, meanwhile, held many wounded Libyans evacuated from the siege, including four recent amputees. Some were anti-Qaddafi fighters suffering grievous wounds.
“Thank God for this ship,” said Mustafa Youssif, whose leg was amputated on Sunday after he was hit by shrapnel while riding in a pickup truck near Tripoli Street, one of Misurata’s fronts.
In other cabins were more victims: a 9-year-old boy struck in the teeth by shrapnel, and an anti-Qaddafi sniper shot through his mouth, a man peppered with shrapnel holes.
One deck also held several Filipino evacuees, including a group of teachers from Misurata University.
The teachers said they had come from the Philippines in December, and had not yet been paid their salary by the government when the war started. The university had closed, and since the bombardments of the city by the pro-Qaddafi forces, they had been surviving with help from Libyan neighbors.
“They gave us food,” said Zoe Contreras, 37, an English teacher. “Our neighbors were giving us water. They sometimes were knocking on our door and then just giving us food.”
Not all of the foreign workers in Misurata had been so fortunate, they said. A group of evacuating nurses said more than a dozen of their friends and colleagues in Misurata had been missing since mid-March, when the pro-Qaddafi forces occupied the neighborhood near their apartment building.
The missing, they said, included five Filipino and four Bangladeshi nurses, as well as an Egyptian nurse and her husband and three children. The account underscored that the toll of the fighting in Misurata, which rebels say has killed more than 1,000 people, is far from tallied, and that there are potentially many classes of victims whose fates remain unknown.
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