Thousands of refugees pour out of Libya

Djerba, Tunisia (CNN) — The evacuation of the tens of thousands of refugees who continue to stream across the Libyan border to Tunisia has stepped up dramatically.

Tunisian authorities have established an air bridge from a provincial airport on the island of Djerba that is now moving out thousands of migrants a day.

“We are expecting 10,000 passengers to leave every day with 66 movements, that’s to say 66 planes,” said Djerba airport director Zouhaier Badreddine in an interview with CNN.

“The majority go to Egypt. But there are also Chinese, Pakistanis, Filipinos, Bangladeshi, Vietnamese, Turks in the beginning but now they all seem to have left. There are many nationalities and many destinations.”

A U.S. military official told CNN that two planes carrying humanitarian supplies are expected in Tunisia on Friday afternoon, but they are not yet cleared to bring refugees out.

On Thursday, President Barack Obama said he approved the use of U.S. military aircraft to help return to Egypt those Egyptian citizens who have fled to Tunisia to escape unrest in neighboring Libya.

In all, 200,000 people have fled the escalating violence in Libya, according to the International Organization for Migration, which has been working with the U.N. refugee agency on mass evacuations.

Badreddine stood in the departure hall of an airport that normally welcomes sun-hungry European tourists traveling to the wind-swept beaches of Djerba’s Mediterranean coast.

Instead, the hall was filled with hundreds of tired and dirty migrant workers. Some camped out on the floor on blankets. Others stood in orderly lines in front of a booth normally reserved for car rental companies and money exchange, which instead held Tunisian volunteers distributing sandwiches, fruit and water to hungry refugees.

“Of the 50,000 refugees who have come through here” since the crisis began, Badreddine said, “everybody has been given shelter and food at the airport.”

The conditions at the airport are dramatically better than the scene that awaits many migrants immediately after they cross the border from Libya into Tunisia.

On Thursday, more than 5,000 Bangladeshi men were camped out in a vacant lot next to the border gate, huddled under blankets next to a fetid pond of muddy water as howling winds whipped dust through the compound.

Tunisian authorities and volunteers distributed food and water. A tent city that serves as a transit center has also been erected this week some 10 kilometers from the border.

But the camp has a capacity only for an estimated 15,000 people. And with approximately 15,000 people entering across the border every day, the flood of refugees has overwhelmed the transit center system.

Conditions improved dramatically since Wednesday afternoon, however, after Libyan authorities began regulating the flow of refugees through the border. Instead of allowing them to mass by the thousands in front of the Tunisian border gate, refugees now approach Tunisia in orderly groups in single file.

The Libyan government appeared eager to show off this development on Thursday. Officials bused in a group of foreign journalists from Tripoli Thursday afternoon, as part of a guided tour of the frontier region.

But upon arrival in Egypt, dozens of refugees have told accounts of being robbed at Libyan checkpoints. They said that on the journey out of Libya, they are routinely stopped and searched by Libyan security forces who confiscate their cell phones and computers. Many refugees have also described how Libyan police and soldiers robbed them at gunpoint of their meager earnings.

“I have no passport, only a passport photocopy,” said Mohammed Shafiq al Islam. The 29-year-old man sat on the floor of the airport with more than 100 Bangladeshis waiting for a flight back home.

He still wore a uniform labeled “Hanil,” the name of a supply company which paid al Islam the equivalent of $250 a month to work in Libya.

“The Libyan people take my money and passport and all the time say “I will kill you, I will kill you,” al Islam said, speaking in broken English. “I am run away (for) my life.”

Like many Bangladeshi migrant workers, al Islam took out loans of up to $4,000 from creditors to pay employment agencies to give him a job in Libya. Upon arrival in Libya, many migrant workers were forced to hand over their passports to their employers.

Human rights groups have denounced such practices, arguing they amount to little more than indentured servitude. Now, al Islam and his fellow migrants will be flown home after fleeing Libya for free. But they will land in Bangladesh facing crushing debts.

“We are very helpless now. We are beggars now,” al Islam said. Djerba airport officials said 25 flights were scheduled to take off to Cairo on Friday. The French government has helped with the Egyptian airlift by chartering several passenger planes to Cairo.

A number of charter flights are scheduled as well to India, Jordan, China, Vietnam and Dubai.