nickturse:

Anti-Government demonstrators in front of the University of Sanaa in Yemen.

IMAGE: © Antoine Gyori/ /Corbis

11:37 pm  •  25 April 2011  •  5 notes

Miliyon Gabrahiwt is a refugee from Eritrea. He’s stranded in Salloum, at the Egyptian border with Libya. That’s a picture of him, taken last week by Eric Kampherbeek. Like the other black African refugees in Salloum, he’s an innocent victim of the fighting in Libya. Darfuris, Eritreans, Somalis, Chadians and others found a home in Libya in recent years and, once the fighting began in mid-February, they had to leave. The rebels in the east, assuming — let’s be charitable — that these people were in the pay of Gaddafi, began killing them. I interviewed dozens of black Africans in Salloum who all spoke of the same story: the rebels told them they were no longer welcome in Benghazi and other cities in the east of Libya. Some of them reported seeing massacres (by the rebels John McCain hailed this week as “heroes”) simply for being the wrong colour, in the wrong place.

Miliyon’s family lives in Toronto, because Canada granted them asylum. He’s trying to get there. He claims he has the right — but, like others stranded at the border (many have been there for weeks, living in squalid conditions), his papers have been seized by border officials. I’m half Canadian, and when we talked in Salloum last week, Miliyon asked me to help. So I contacted a Canadian journalist in London who’s written about migration. This didn’t help. I contacted the foreign ministry in Ottawa and spent a while on the phone with them. Eventually, they put me through to another automated message. I phoned again, and was eventually told they wouldn’t help. The embassy in Cairo was my best bet, they said. The consular division there can be contacted — in person — between 0830 and 1030 on working days. I’m in the UK so I emailed them. No response.

Now I’m trying to chase up whomever might help. In my mind, it would be easy for someone in the Canadian embassy in Cairo to check out his story. I have some of his details, including the name of his family in Toronto. If his story is genuine, my guess is that a call from the embassy in Cairo to Salloum could at least ease Miliyon’s plight — if not resolve it immediately. 

8:54 pm  •  24 April 2011  •  6 notes

8:51 pm  •  23 April 2011

We had a look around a prison in the Katiba military base, scene of a vicious battle between loyalist and rebel forces when the rebellion started. A guy wanted to show me around, and said 120 people had been inside for more than two years. Alongside them: the bodies of 20 people who’d died two months before anti-Gaddafi forces blew open the vault. On the left, you can make out the entrance to another, deeper and even darker room. Children and families are now visiting the place like tourists. 

10:01 am  •  23 April 2011

Three news stories have gone up at Petroleum Economist: here, here and here. There’s a big magazine piece coming next week, and a photo essay from Eric Kampherbeek. The photo above is from Eric. It’s a building inside the Katiba compound, where a fierce Benghazi battle took place in February. Al Jazeera did a nice piece on it here. A lot of people in Benghazi now come to visit these sites as tourists.

9:51 am  •  23 April 2011

cjchivers:

To watch Libyan rebels head to battle is to watch young men calling for freedom step toward a bloody mismatch, often to their deaths. To arm them is to assume other risks. What might foreign supporters of Libya’s uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi do?

(How you answer that question is…

9:41 am  •  23 April 2011  •  271 notes

nickturse:

Chris Hondros: How He Got that Picture : CJR

From Columbia Journalism Review:

As the world knows by now, the photographers Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington were killed on April 20 in Misurata, Libya. Hetherington was the better known of the two for his documentary, Restrepo. But we have a special feeling for Hondros, whom we got to meet when he took part in a CJR panel discussion. In late 2006, for our forty-fifth anniversary issue, the magazine ran an extended oral history, which later became a book, Reporting Iraq, an oral history of the war by the journalists who covered it. It included photos, and every time we laid our potential choices out we were drawn to Hondros’s work. They had a recognizable humanity and an almost-beautiful light, even when they depicted the worst. One photo we chose was taken moments after a family car had been accidently shot up at a checkpoint. We see a soldier and a blood-covered little girl who had just lost her parents, not an image you can quickly get out of your head. When Judith Matloff interviewed Hondros for our history, we found the backstory of that photo so compelling that we used it to end the book. Here is the result of that interview, Chris Hondros on how he got that picture…

photo credit: Chris Hondros/Getty

10:05 pm  •  22 April 2011  •  436 notes