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Suffering for Migrants in Libya 'Worse' Since Fall-off in Sea Crossings - April 30, 2018
...Migrants are being trapped for longer by [Libyan and East African armed smugglers and gangs] trying to extort more money from them through torture [by fire and electricity, or forced labour, in dire conditions, with deaths from disease and injury].
Departures from Libya accelerated rapidly in 2014 as armed conflict spread, with more than 600,000 crossing the central Mediterranean in the past four years. But the number of mainly sub-Saharan African migrants reaching Italy has fallen [80%] since last July, when a major smuggling group in the Libyan coastal city of Sabratha struck a deal to halt departures under Italian pressure and was then forced out in clashes.
Libya's EU-backed coastguard has also [intercepted more migrants] at sea.
...After losing secure camps on the coast where they used to hold migrants before sending them to sea, smugglers are operating further inland, particularly in desert areas around Bani Walid, about 145km (90 miles) southeast of Tripoli...
...Since clashes in Sabratha last September many migrants who were held in government-run detention centres have been repatriated by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), or through bilateral flights. UNHCR has also begun resettling small numbers of refugees and evacuating others through Niger, though the Niger evacuations have been suspended because of delays in resettlement to European countries...
In Saharan Outpost, Europe's Unwanted Stuck in Limbo — March 21, 2018
...In a dark, dirt-floor house in the back streets of Agadez in central Niger, 22 young women from Nigeria scrape by on sex work [making about a dollar a day and pooling their money for food, no longer caring to reach Europe, desperate to save] for the 900 mile journey home.
Around the corner, 50 Sudanese men huddle under a makeshift tent in a trash-strewn lot, unable to return to their war-torn region of Darfur with most having no plan and nowhere to go.
Down the road, migrants from half a dozen West African countries squat in mud ghettos, knowing it is too dangerous to continue on to Europe and too costly to turn back.
For years Agadez, an ancient trading town on the edge of the Sahara, has been a key stop for West Africans travelling north - mostly young men in search of better opportunities abroad. But since the European Union (EU) moved to cut off entry routes two years ago, it has become less a way-station and more a dead-end [with vulnerable refugees stranded for weeks to years from all corners of Africa, drawn by humanitarian efforts they looked to for a route to better life]...
...Migration through Agadez used to take place openly, with hundreds of overloaded pickup trucks leaving each Monday at sundown for a long drive across the desert. But in 2016, Niger began arresting smugglers and patrolling the main routes in exchange for EU development aid....Still, migrants continue to arrive...
From Agadez, the route to Europe splits northwest to Algeria and northeast to Libya, both adjacent to Niger and both gateways to the Mediterranean. But controls have tightened there too.Last year, for the first time, the U.N. migration agency recorded more people entering Niger from the north than leaving...
Now migrants arrive in Agadez from both directions, fleeing violence and slavery in Libya and being sent back across the border from Algeria, where anti-migrant sentiment has grown...
Health Staff in Southern Libya Strike After Doctor's Kidnapping — November 21, 2017
...Health services in Libya have been severely disrupted by years of conflict with the remote south particularly affected…"For a long time the medical staff of the Sabha Medical Centre have suffered attacks, abuse and been shot at," said ... a spokesman for the center...
Medical staff in the southern Libyan city of Sabha [suspended] work for 10 days ... after [an unknown group Thursday evening kidnapped a doctor,] Salem al-Selhab, who worked in the surgical department of the Sabha Medical Centre, the biggest hospital in southern Libya...
Staff at the center and at private clinics in the city announced a 10-day strike on Sunday to demand Selhab's release and the provision of security for medical staff.
Sabha is a major hub for the smuggling of migrants towards Libya's northern coast, some of whom seek treatment in local medical facilities. The Sabha Medical Centre receives 70% of its backing from international organizations in the absence of state support from rival governments in Tripoli and the east...
'Just Like Slaves': African Migrant Children Face Highest Risk of Abuse — September 13, 2017
Migrant children trying to reach Europe [risk] beatings, forced labor and sexual exploitation, with sub-Saharan African children [most vulnerable], a report found on Tuesday [issued jointly by] the United Nations children's agency UNICEF and its migration agency, the International Organization for Migration (IOM)...
..."If you try to run, they shoot you. If you stop working, they beat you," the report quoted Aimamo, a 16-year-old unaccompanied child from Gambia, as saying [of traffikers in Libya]. "We were just like slaves..."
...The global number of refugee and migrant children moving around alone has reached a record high, with at least 300,000 unaccompanied and separated children recorded in about 80 countries in 2015–2016, up from 66,000 in 2010–2011...
...Afshan Khan, UNICEF's regional director in Europe, said in a statement... "EU leaders should put in place lasting solutions that include safe and legal migration pathways, establishing protection corridors and finding alternatives to the detention of migrant children."
In a separate report published on Monday, the IOM said they had recorded more than 23,000 migrant deaths and disappearances globally since 2014 [with] the real number likely to be much higher … as many deaths go unrecorded or bodies are never found or able to be identified...
...Amnesty International last year accused Nigerian security forces of killing at least 150 Biafra separatists at peaceful rallies, which the military and police denied [saying] that the separatists, often armed, had behaved violently, killing several policeman and attacking both military and police vehicles.
...An overwhelming majority of African migrants who passed through Libya on the way to Italy witnessed or suffered a series of abuses including murder, rape and food deprivation, according to a study by British NGO Oxfam….
...Almost 600,000 migrants arrived in Italy during the past four years. Most sailed from Libya in flimsy vessels operated by people-smugglers. More than 13,000 have died trying to make the crossing...
Foreign Medics Give Children Life-saving Surgery in Libya's Benghazi — June 30, 2017
Attacks on Health Sites Occurring 'With Alarming Frequency'— May 24, 2017
Attacks on healthcare facilities, health workers, and ambulances have continued "with alarming frequency," through 2016 and into 2017, according to a new report from the World Health Organization (WHO).
In 2016, 302 attacks occurred across 20 countries. The attacks were directed at 207 healthcare facilities, 52 providers, 40 transport vehicles… Most of the attacks were from bombing (74%), followed by shooting (7%), looting (6%), assault (5%), abduction (3%), arson (1%), threat (1%), and other (eg, obstruction, militarization) (4%).
The Syrian Arab Republic was the hardest hit, with 207 attacks, followed by Libya (20); Central African Republic (18); the West Bank and Gaza Strip (11); Democratic Republic of the Congo (9); Mali (6); South Sudan (6); Yemen (4); Ethiopia, Iraq, and Pakistan (3 each); Nepal, Nigeria, and Somalia (2 each); and Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Niger, Sudan, and Ukraine (1 each).
Already in Q1 2017, there have been 88 attacks, with 80 deaths and 81 injuries across 14 countries and territories. Those attacks have targeted 47 healthcare facilities, 20 transport vehicles, 19 health providers, and 2 patients. Most of the attacks (65%) have been bombings.
There were 256 attacks, with 434 deaths and 537 injuries, in 2015, and 338 attacks, with 525 deaths and 1024 injuries, in 2014.
Libyan Health Crisis Sharpens as Resources Dwindle — July 26, 2016
Nearly 1000 Healthcare Workers Killed Since 2014, WHO Says— May 27, 2016
Between January 2014 and December 2015, there were 594 reported attacks on healthcare that led to 959 deaths and 1561 injuries in 19 countries, according to a report from the World Health Organization (WHO). "...The high tolls of death and injury to our health colleagues and the inevitable impact on health service delivery [is tragic]..."
...More than half of the attacks were against healthcare facilities (63%) and more than a quarter were against healthcare providers (26%). Sixty-two percent of the attacks were reported to have intentionally targeted healthcare.
...The Syrian Arab Republic had the most reported attacks on healthcare each year — more than twice as many as any other country or territory in 2014 and nearly four times as many in 2015.
...in some countries a single attack resulted in a significant proportion of the total deaths and injuries for that year. For example:
In the Central African Republic, 16 of the 26 deaths attributed to attacks on healthcare in 2014 occurred in a single attack, on April 28, during an armed robbery on a Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in the northern town of Boguila.
In Iraq, 18 of the 71 reported deaths in 2014 occurred when the obstetrics section of the Hawija Hospital was bombed on September 6.
Thirty-one of the 43 deaths in Iraq in 2015 occurred during a bombing on Fallujah's maternity hospital on August 13.
In Libya, 34 of the 39 deaths in 2015 occurred on August 14, when 12 care providers and 22 patients were executed…
“...we witness with alarming frequency a lack of respect for the sanctity of health care, for the right to health care, and for international humanitarian law: patients are shot in their hospital beds, medical personnel are threatened, intimidated or attacked, hospitals are bombed..."
Ceaseless Middle East Wars Forcing Change in Approach to Medical Care — May 16, 2017
BEIRUT (Reuters) - The Middle East's protracted conflicts have caused a region-wide health crisis that goes beyond war wounds to heightened resistance to antibiotics and a collapse in vaccination drives, leading to a resurgence of diseases tamed in peacetime.
Health threats are so varied that one of the Middle East's main teaching hospitals, the American University of Beirut Medical Center, has introduced a conflict-medicine program to equip students to cope in an environment afflicted by chaos.
"What you need is a completely different way of viewing war-related ill health that goes beyond the shrapnel, bullets and the blast injury and looks at the bigger system," said Ghassan Abu-Sittah, co-head of the AUBMC program.
As fighting has engulfed Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Libya since 2011, doctors and nurses have had to adjust not only to treating terrible injuries but to a faster spread of disease and growing threats to their own safety from combatants…
...A fifth of patients at AUBC are from Syria and Iraq, of whom the overwhelming majority suffered from war wounds, though the burns department noted a big rise in cases among children because of tent fires in refugee camps.
Doctors in war zones have had to radically alter their approach, rationing resources, operating in primitive conditions and changing the way they treat trauma injuries….
….The collapse in national health systems has accelerated resistance to antibiotics because of drug usage in excess of prescribed limits. At the same time, infections have spread as war has destroyed sanitation and clean water systems and triggered chaotic population movements….
Libyans Lack Food, Health Care: Aid Agencies — March 23, 2011
...Most of Libya remains off limits to aid workers, who say they have sketchy information about the humanitarian situation, especially since Western air strikes began at the weekend.
Most foreign medical staff have fled the country, leaving few doctors and nurses to run intensive care units taking in greater numbers of casualties.
Muammar Gaddafi's forces attacked two west Libyan towns on Tuesday, killing dozens. Rebels are pinned down in the east and NATO is trying to resolve a heated row over who should lead the Western air campaign….
..."The conflict has led to acute shortages of many essential medicines, including anesthesia drugs. This poses particular problems given the current high rate of patients admitted to hospitals with acute trauma injuries that require urgent surgical intervention," Fadela Chaib of the World Health Organization (WHO) told reporters.
There is also a huge shortage of drugs to treat chronic diseases…
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), one of the few aid agencies deployed in eastern Libya, is trying to deliver emergency health kits to both rebels and government forces near Benghazi, ICRC spokesman Marcal Izard told Reuters.
...The U.N.'s World Food Program (WFP) has sent 1,500 tons of food, mainly wheat flour and high-energy bars, into Benghazi so far, enough to feed 114,000 people for 30 days, a spokeswoman said. It plans to send in 30 tons of lentils and vegetable oil from Egypt in coming days..
...WFP spokeswoman Emilia Casella told reporters "We've heard reports, from people who made it to the border, of prices for wheat and bread more than doubling, rice increasing by 88% and vegetable oil by 58%," she said. Most shops in Zawiyah, Misrata and Sirte were closed.
The WFP is gearing up to provide up to 25,000 hot meals a day at Tunisia's border for people fleeing Libya. It now provides about 4,000 hot meals a day to migrants who await evacuation to their home countries at Tunisia's Djerba airport...
Aid Agencies Shut out From Libya as Needs Grow — March 09, 2011
Doctors Without Borders Blocked From Entering Western Libya — March 03, 2011
A Libyan American Cardiologist in Benghazi: 'I Wanted to Help However I Could' — March 07, 2011