Thanks to Qatari and Turkish boats, thousands of Egyptians stranded in Misrata were rescued, reports Doaa El-Bey Two Qatari ships and one from Turkey saved nearly 3,000 Egyptians who were stranded in the Libyan port city of Misrata for several weeks because of the Libyan uprising. "Two Qatari boats collected over 1,800 citizens on Saturday and a Turkish boat took another 1,000 from Misrata on Monday. The Qatari boats are supposed to return to ferry the rest of the Egyptians," Mohamed Ali, from the Misrata local council, told Al-Ahram Weekly in a phone interview. Misrata, in western Libya, has been the scene of bloody battles. It was subjected to heavy attacks by forces loyal to the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. The revolutionary forces are defending the port and managed to take control of many parts of it this week. NATO forces launched strikes against the city in order to protect civilians and enforce a no-fly zone. Caught in the middle of the fighting have been thousands of workers forced to leave their work at the start of the Libyan revolution in February, but were not able to leave Libya. They are mainly from Egypt, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Niger, Sudan and Bangladesh. The situation in Misrata is desperate and extremely dangerous, Ali said. Most Egyptian families left in the Qatari and Turkish boats, but there are still more than 1,000 Egyptians living in a temporary refugee camp built by the Red Cross. "Gaddafi is escalating his attack on the port at a time when food is getting scarcer. Queues for bread and other goods are becoming longer. Meanwhile, we are likely to face a fuel problem as cooking gas is also becoming scarce," Ali added. Communication is still a major problem as it is very difficult for Egyptians to call their families. The Egyptian Foreign Ministry said the first Qatari boat arrived in Cairo on Monday and the second arrived Tuesday. Mohamed Abdel-Hakam, assistant to the foreign minister for consulate affairs and Egyptian expatriates, expressed his appreciation to Qatar and Turkey for their efforts in returning the Egyptians. Meanwhile, Egyptians who returned to the country this week asked why Egypt did not send a boat instead of leaving them to live in highly difficult conditions for weeks before a non- Egyptian ship rescued them. "Where are the Egyptian boats?" asked Ragab Dahi, a moulder who returned from Misrata on Sunday. "Why do they appear only during the pilgrimage? Why didn't the embassy respond quickly to our plight?" Dahi said he had lived in fear for weeks because of the mercenaries that Gaddafi paid to fight for him. And whenever he or other Egyptians called the Egyptian embassy in Tripoli, they were told to stay home. Later, he added, mercenaries would break into homes and attack inhabitants. "Then, the embassy started not answering our calls and asking us to protect ourselves," Dahi told the Weekly. In some calls, he added, the embassy and the Foreign Ministry would tell them that it was not be safe for boats to come to Misrata. "But we saw Greek and Maltese boats which managed to reach Misrata and collect stranded refugees." When they lost hope, Dahi and some Egyptian workers decided to fix an old ship they found in the port. "We were a group of 20 who make a living as manual labourers. We fixed the boat and steered it to Benghazi. We faced death twice when the boat stopped in the middle of the sea. The trip took 50 hours because we had to go to international waters to avoid being picked up by Gaddafi forces," he said. While Dahi, who returned Sunday, said he was thankful that he arrived safely in Egypt he still wonders why the Egyptian authorities and the media did not show more concern to ease the plight of Egyptians stranded in a war-torn zone. The Egyptian Foreign Ministry managed to airlift more than 130 Egyptians who crossed to the Tunisian border this week. According to the United Nations, more than 400,000 people have fled Libya since the start of the Libyan revolution in February. More than 120,000 of them are Egyptian who arrived in Egypt either through the Egyptian border city of Salloum or airlifted from Tunisia.
