SALUM - Hundreds of poor African migrant workers, including many women and children, waited to be evacuated from this dusty Egyptian border post after fleeing a revolt against Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. Sleeping on blankets amid piles of suitcases, the workers - part of an exodus international agencies say has exceeded a quarter of a million people since fighting broke out in Libya -- gathered inside the border office-turned-shelter, their fate in limbo because many lacked passports. "Most of us were farmers so we will return to being farmers when we go back home," said Mohammed Abu Bakr, 28, a Chadian who was working as a guard at a building site in Libya. "We were living in peace," Bakr said. Inside the crowded building, signs welcomed visitors with images of Egypt's beaches and scuba-diving, but the migrants say they have nowhere to go. The floor was strewn with discarded juice cartons and biscuit wrappers. Rafiq Khan, a child protection official with UNICEF, said 180 children and 149 women were waiting at the border, the highest numbers since the uprising began. He said many migrants, mostly from Chad but also Eritrea, Ethiopia, Niger and Somalia, were in Libya for years, working for Chinese and Turkish firms, but were forced to leave with the few belongings they could grab as violence escalated. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said on Friday the number of people who had fled Libya in the wake of the violence has reached 351,673, while the International Organization for Migration (IOM) put the number at 367,000. UNHCR said about 1,500 to 2,000 people were entering Egypt every day, while Tunisia was seeing 2,000 arrivals daily. The IOM said at least 12,000 had crossed into Niger since the crisis began, about half that number arriving in the past week. Aid workers said the number of women and children fleeing Libya had risen since Western powers, enforcing a U.N.-mandated no-fly zone in the north African country, began launching strikes against Gaddafi's forces last week. With no money, the migrants said many of them had been harassed, detained and beaten by Libyan gunmen after reports emerged that Gaddafi, the loyalty of his armed forces proving unreliable, had turned to mercenaries from elsewhere in Africa to support his crackdown. "Any black person, they call them mercenaries," said Suleiman Abdallah, a 24-year-old Somali worker. He said he fled Libya on a boat to Alexandria but was taken back to the border by bus because he did not have a passport. As they waited in Salum, many said retuning home in the near future seemed as unlikely as returning to Libya. "I am dependent on the United Nations," Abdallah said.
