As around 150,000 foreign workers – mainly from the oil industry – gather at the border with Tunisia thousands of them have already been evacuated. China and Turkey were the fastest in getting their evacuations under way followed by Egypt and India and Greece.
- A total of 35,860 Chinese citizens had been evacuated from Libya up to 23:10 Wednesday Beijing time (1510 GMT), according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Among them, 20,745 are already back in China, Vice Foreign Minister Song Tao said.
- Almost 20 per cent of an estimated 18,000 Indians in Libya have been evacuated even as the government received landing clearance for 3 special flights daily from India to Tripoli up to March 12, extending the March 7 time period.
- After several consecutive meetings, Turkish officials decided to evacuate the close to 25,000 Turkish citizens in Libya. The Turkish government launched its largest evacuation operation ever. Close to 7,000 people have been evacuated from Libya via air, sea and land transportation. Several countries with communication problems with the Libyan administration and a lack of logistical means have asked Ankara for support to get their citizens out of the protest-ridden country. Turkey is so far believed to be the most successful country in evacuating its people from Libya.
- Tripoli has given Cairo a green light to carry out 37 evacuation flights for Egyptians caught up in the Libyan uprising. Some 1.5 million Egyptians work in Libya. Thousands have streamed back through the Salloum border crossing on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast into oil-producing eastern Libya. Egypt also plans to send ships to Tunisia to pick up nationals who fled Libya by going west.
- Foreign Affairs Minister Ali Shami thanked on Wednesday Egypt for facilitating the evacuation of Lebanese in Libya through the Egyptian border.
- The last Europeans who want to get out of Libya will be evacuated within days, an EU official said Monday. Only about 500 European Union passport-holders are still waiting to leave and about 1,000 wish to stay.
But in the meantime a Swedish Hercules plane was denied landing permission in Tripoli and had to return empty to Malta. 56 Swedish citizens have left Libya and of the 45 left 41 have indicated that they want to stay.
It is mainly foreign workers trying to get out and there does not seem to be any great number of Libyans trying to “invade Europe” as was feared by the Italians. The oil industry in Libya will suffer from an acute shortage of workers for some time to come.
The k2p blog 