Third Place
Jacob Ehrbahn
Politiken
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"FLEEING THE WAR IN LIBYA"
Refugees on the border between Libya and Tunisia, March 2011
After the successful revolution that swept through Tunisia and Egypt, disgruntled Libyans began to protest the Gaddafi regime in mid-February 2011. But Muammar Gaddafi swiftly cracked down on the protestors, and before long the country appeared headed towards civil war, with a rag-tag army of rebels trying to wrestle control from Gaddafi's well-armed soldiers.
The unrest in the country triggered a tidal wave of refugees who sought safety in the neighboring countries of Egypt and Tunisia.
According to the UNHCR, by early March the two neighbors found themselves struggling to cope with more than 212,000 refugees, almost equally distributed between the two countries.
Most of the displaced were immigrant guest workers, who had been working for large foreign-owned construction companies in Libya. The majority were young men from Egypt, Bangladesh, and Tunisia, but in the UNHCR's transit-camp 7km inside Tunisia there were refugees with 25 different nationalities.
In Tunisia, the authorities, the citizens and the military joined forces with international organizations and worked around the clock to provide the refugees with the most basic necessities, such as food and shelter. In addition, they faced the logistical challenge of arranging transport home to their native countries. But time was of the essence. The steady flow of people streaming across the border threatened to overwhelm the aid organization’s relief capacity. At the time the UNHCR transit-camp was only equipped to hold a maximum 20.000.
Another logistical challenge was that fact that some of the refugees were unable to return to their native homes, having fled their native country because of war and misery.
Most of the refugees were happy to have escaped Libya, but at the same time a dream had been extinguished - or at least put on hold: the dream that hard work in Libya could create a better future and help them provide for their families *** Refugees from Libya move through a sort of no-man's land towards the Tunisian border guards.
Ras Jdir border crossing. |
