São Paulo – Clashes between government troops and rebels in Libya have left 400,000 people forcibly displaced. According to information from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (Unhcr) disclosed by UN Radio this Friday (16th), escalating conflicts across the country have driven up the number of people who leave their homes and then try to return to their former households.
In some areas, residents have abandoned their cities as many as five different times. In Benghazi, in northern Libya, 90,000 people are homeless.
The Unhcr spokesperson in Geneva, William Spindler, said people from other northern cities are also being forced to leave their homes in order to escape the clashes.
“The displacement has been centred around Benghazi, Derna, and near the Gulf of Sidra in Ben Jawad and Ras Lanuf. This is just one of the areas of Libya seeing people in mass flight. Across the country we estimate that approximately 400,000 people are displaced. In addition, Libya is host to nearly 37,000 refugees and asylum-seekers of different nationalities whose humanitarian conditions are increasingly precarious,” he said.
The majority of foreigners are Egyptian and Tunisian. In some cases, asylum-seekers and even Libyans are leaving the country.
The North African country has plunged into a crisis ever since the ousting and killing of dictator Muammar Gaddafi, in 2011. Since then, rebel groups and government forces have gone into battle. Oil production, the country’s principal revenues source, has been halted in several areas within Libya.
*Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum
