Engineer immolates self for Sri Lankan Tamils' cause
--thehindu--
April 19, 2011 23:25 IST | Updated: April 19, 2011 23:31 IST TIRUNELVELI, April 19, 2011

A young engineer from a poor family of a sleepy hamlet in Tirunelveli district immolated himself on Monday, apparently as an expression of sympathy to Tamils in Sri Lanka.

Though 23-year-old R. Krishnamurthy, an electrical and electronics engineer from Sundaresapuram under Kuruvikulam police station limits, had not discussed anything about the Sri Lankan issue with his friends, according to his cousin Suresh, also an engineer, he was very disturbed after coming to his birthplace from Rajasthan, where he works.

Suicide note

The suicide note stated that the Tamils, who were tortured by the Sinhalese, should be compensated adequately.

“The new government in Tamil Nadu should not assume office until a separate State for Sri Lankan Tamils is ensured.”

The letter admired the “valour” of Muthukumar, who killed himself in Chennai in protest against the killing of Sri Lankan Tamils.

According to Krishnamurthy's mother R. Subbulakshmi, her son asked her to prepare tea around 5 a.m. Even as she was preparing it, Krishnamurthy poured petrol and immolated himself. She tried to save her son and suffered burns.

“Even after sustaining serious burns all over the body, my son was saying that the Tamils in Tamil Nadu should do something to save the Sri Lankan Tamils,” she said.

Arrangement for mother's treatment

Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam general secretary Vaiko, who met the bereaved family at Seegampatti on Tuesday morning, made immediate arrangements for taking Ms. Subbulakshmi to a Madurai-based multi-specialty hospital.

Tax the Rich
Poll: Taxing the rich favored over Medicare cuts
JENNIFER EPSTEIN | 4/20/11 6:10 AM EDT

The potential solution to the debt crisis that gets the strongest support is raising taxes on Americans who make $250,000 or more annually, an idea that Obama campaigned on in 2008, backed away from last year to make a legislative deal with Republicans, but has returned to as he’s begun discussing his vision for long-term fiscal responsibility. Of those surveyed, 72 percent said they support tax increases on people with incomes of more than $250,000, including 54 percent who strongly support them. Twenty-seven percent are opposed, including 17 percent strongly.

China tense as teen Tibet monk immolates self
Saibal Dasgupta, Times of India, Mar 18, 2011, 06.04am
Sichuan provinceRadio Free Asia-

BEIJING: Tension gripped politically-sensitive Aba county of southwest China's Sichuan province after a teenager Tibetan monk who set himself on fire died on Thursday. Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported quoting local Tibetans that the police put out the fire and then beat the monk to death.

The incident resulted in demonstrations by nearly 1,000 monks who shouted slogans and were dispersed by baton-wielding policemen. The police attack resulted in injuries to some of the demonstrators , it said. RFA also differed with the Chinese media on other counts, giving a different name for the monk describing him as Lobsang Phuntsog, aged 21.

Tibetan monastery sealed off following monk's death
Saturday, March 19, 2011 10:15 pm TWN
--chinapost.com--

International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) said the monks had rescued Phuntsog from the police, who started beating him after extinguishing the flames, and took him back to the monastery. The monks then took him to hospital, where he later died, ICT said.

Hundreds of monks and civilians then protested near the monastery, located in Aba county, the campaign group said, although residents contacted by AFP were unable to confirm the demonstrations were that large. Police detained an unknown number of monks, according to the ICT. Seven were later released, including three who had been detained prior to the protests, it said. One of the monks had a serious head injury.

According to ICT, this marks the second time a Kirti monk has set himself on fire since authorities imposed a broad crackdown across Tibet and neighboring regions of China with large Tibetan populations following the 2008 unrest. The death of Phuntsog sparked a demonstration in Dharamshala, the home of exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, where about 500 people gathered at the Indian hill town's main temple.

Speaking beside a photograph of the dead monk projected onto a screen, local civil society leaders gave speeches denouncing the death and Chinese government crackdowns, leading to cheers and chanting from the crowd. Organisers said they wanted to “remind the government of China that the seismic waves of Tunisia and the Middle Eastern countries have reached Tibet” according to a statement handed to AFP.

The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. - Marcel Proust

Evidence of "Extrajudicial" Death Squads Emerging in Mexico the narcosphere

The WikiLeaks cable, drafted by the U.S. consulate in Juárez in late January 2009, provides the following description of the Pepes-like paramilitary group established in Juárez:

…There have been indications that local businesses are taking a different approach to self-protection, that of vigilantism. In October, the press carried stories of business people forming paramilitary groups to protect themselves from extortionists and kidnappers. On November 28 [2008], seven men were shot dead outside a school a few blocks from the Consulate, and placards were hung over their bodies (a fact not reported to the public) claiming that the executions were carried out by the `Yonkeros Unidos (United Junkyard Owners of Juárez)'.

In another notorious incident, a burned body was left outside a Juárez police station with its amputated hands each holding a gas fire starter, and with a sign saying that this would be the penalty paid by arsonists. During the week of January 11 [2009] an email circulated through Juárez, claiming that a new locally funded group called the `Comando Ciudadano por Juárez (Juárez Citizen Command, or CCJ)' was going to "clean (the) city of these criminals" and "end the life of a criminal every 24 hours."

… City and state government officials have argued that there exists no evidence of a vigilante movement in Ciudad Juárez, and that the messages by the CCJ are a hoax. A Consulate contact in the press, however, suggests that the CCJ is a real self-defense group comprised of eight former `Zetas' hired by four Juárez business owners (including 1998 PRI mayoral candidate Eleno Villalba). According to the contact, the former `Zetas' paid a visit on local military commanders when they arrived in Juárez in September 2008, and purchased previously seized weapons from the army garrison. According to the contact, the former `Zetas' pledged not to target the army, and made themselves available to the army for extrajudicial operations. [Emphasis added.]

Social Conservatism Based On Lies

By John P. Avlon, CNN Contributor
April 15, 2011 -- Updated 1740 GMT (0140 HKT)
New York (CNN)
This was the sound of the curtain coming back on what passes for political debate too often these days.

The now-infamous statement from Sen. Jon Kyl's office was released after he said on the floor of the U.S. Senate that abortions represent "over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does."

It turns out that the actual number is 3%, a mere rounding error of 87%. But it was presented to the American people and enshrined in the Senate Record as a means of arguing that Planned Parenthood should be entirely defunded in the current budget.

This has nothing to do with fiscal responsibility and everything to do with the disproportionate influence of social conservative activists.

Their most compelling argument is that the American people don't support federal taxpayer money paying for abortions, which is true -- and why federal funding of abortion has been banned since 1976.

But the facts are inconvenient, and so they are ignored. Instead, talking points taken from talk radio are repeated until they take on a life of their own and eventually get the validation of a U.S. senator.

The news wasn't that Kyl made a mistake; it was his staff essentially acknowledging that in the current hyper-partisan environment, facts are a secondary concern, even on the floor of the U.S. Senate, even when they are paraded as statistics. The important thing is to scare the hell out of people so that they remember your political point and pass it on.

Like the mirror image of some hippies of old, emotional truth is more important than literal truth. It creates a political tower of Babel.

In this absurd spin cycle, there's one dependable place to look for sanity: satire. And on cue came Stephen Colbert, who took Kyl's statement as a challenge and dialed it up to 11. Using the Twitter hashtag #NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement, Colbert unleashed a steady stream of Jon Kyl mistruths with the requisite denial. Among my favorites:

• Jon Kyl developed his own line of hair care products just so he could test them on bunnies.

• Jon Kyl can unhinge his jaw like a python to swallow small rodents whole.

• Every Halloween Jon Kyl dresses up as a sexy Mitch Daniels.

• Jon Kyl sponsored S.410, which would ban happiness.

• Jon Kyl let a game-winning ground ball roll through his legs in Game 6 of the '86 World Series.

• Jon Kyl once ate a badger he hit with his car.

You get the idea. But the problem is much bigger than Jon Kyl. Colbert is going to have to get a bigger hashtag. Because we're heading to a strange place where Daniel Patrick Moynihan's truism "everyone is entitled to their own opinion but not their own facts" no longer applies.

Exhibit B this week: Donald Trump's re-enflaming of the thoroughly discredited birther conspiracy theory. When he repeats this falsehood in interviews, he is too often treated as a man with an unorthodox opinion, not someone repeating a lie on national television.

As a result, more people are duped and the country more divided, not on the many rational reasons to oppose President Obama's policy agenda but on paranoid fantasies cut out of whole cloth.

Perhaps not surprisingly, a man responsible for pushing the birther myth -- and a reported recent Trump adviser -- Joe Farah of the fringe website World Net Daily freely admitted to Salon.com this week that his site publishes "some misinformation."

"Misinformation" is a fancy word for lying with an ideological agenda in mind. It has become more acceptable and more influential with the rise of partisan media. It preys on the gullible and the stupid and the ditto-head alike.

The cycle of incitement that afflicts our politics ensures that this dynamic bleeds into both sides of the aisle. For example, the liberal Campaign for America's Future recently declared that "Congressman Eric Cantor wants to eliminate Social Security," a flat-out "pants on fire" lie, as described by indispensable PolitiFact.

A little-noticed local example of this strangeness caught my eye this week, courtesy of the website ThinkProgress. It seems that Texas state Rep. Leo Berman put forward a bill to ban sharia law in the Lone Star State.

When he was asked why such a step was necessary, he cited the city of Dearborn, Michigan, six times in testimony: "It's being done in Dearborn, Michigan ... because of a large population of Middle Easterners. The judges in Dearborn are using and allowing to be used sharia law."

This would indeed be troubling (and unconstitutional) if true, but when Berman was pressed about the source of his facts, here's what he told J. Patrick Pepper of the Press and Guide in Dearborn: "I heard it on a radio station here on my way in to the Capitol one day. ... I don't know Dearborn, Michigan, but I heard it on the radio. Isn't that true?"

No, it's not, as Dearborn Mayor Jack O'Reilly has been forced to make abundantly clear, stating that "these people know nothing of Dearborn, and they just seek to provoke and enflame their base for political gain."

But the misinformation percolating around the fringes of hyper-partisan media is creeping into state capitals and the U.S. Congress. Ignorance and incitement begin to blur, compounded by the civic laziness of speakers who don't care to fact-check.

"Not intended to be a factual statement" is an instant dark classic, a triumph of cynicism, capturing the essence of Michael Kinsley's definition of a gaffe in Washington: when a politician accidentally tells the truth.

No wonder "people are taking their comedians seriously and the politicians as a joke," as Will Rogers once said and Colbert increasingly embodies. But we can't keep depending on comedians to be the voices of sanity.

And don't be fooled. There are real costs to this careless courtship of the lowest common denominator. Without fact-based debates, politics can quickly give way to paranoia and hate. Our democracy gets degraded.

Americans deserve better, and we should demand better, especially from our elected representatives. Empowering ignorance for political gain is unacceptable.

Veteran Loses Battle With Depression After Helping Others With Their Own
By JAMES DAO
April 15, 2011, 10:14 am
--NYtimes.com--

It was mid-January, 2010, just days after a powerful earthquake had reduced much of Haiti to rubble. Jake Wood, a former Marine and now the head of an international aid organization called Team Rubicon, arrived in Port-au-Prince with a group of volunteers to provide emergency medical care.

Out of the blue, an old friend, Clay Hunt, showed up. Mr. Hunt and Mr. Wood had served together in Iraq and Afghanistan with the Marine Corps and were almost brothers. Mr. Hunt had found them using a day-old GPS coordinate posted on Team Rubicon’s Web site. Minutes after arriving, he was helping to splint a patient’s leg.



“He couldn’t stand that we were down there and he wasn’t,” Mr. Wood said. “That was Clay.”

Mr. Hunt had battled depression and post-traumatic stress disorder in the year since he left the Marines, but volunteering with Team Rubicon and veterans organizations like Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America seemed to have given him a new sense of purpose.

And yet it was not enough. On March 31, Mr. Hunt committed suicide in his apartment in Sugar Land, Tex. He was 28.

News of Mr. Hunt’s death has ricocheted through the veterans’ world as a grim reminder of the emotional and psychological strains of war — and of the government’s inability to stem military and veteran suicides, which have climbed steadily in the decade since the 9/11 attacks.

“The message I’ve been trying to convey to people is that if this can happen to Clay Hunt, it can happen to anyone,” said Paul Rieckhoff, the president and founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “He was involved. He had a supportive family. He was going to the V.A. He was doing the right things. And it still happened.”

According to a profile in the Houston Chronicle, Mr. Hunt grew up in Houston and attended Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles before joining the Marine Corps in 2005. He deployed to Iraq’s Anbar Province in January 2007 as part of the Second Battalion, Seventh Marine Regiment.

Within weeks, several friends of his were killed, and then Mr. Hunt himself was shot through the wrist by a sniper, Mr. Wood said in an interview. He had to be medically evacuated, ending his deployment early. Back home, he felt anguish at not being in Iraq with his unit, Mr. Wood said.

When the battalion returned in late 2007, Mr. Hunt and Mr. Wood joined the sniper platoon and were deployed to Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan the next year. During that deployment, at least two more friends of theirs from their former platoon were killed.

After returning home from that second deployment, Mr. Hunt got married. But he was already struggling with depression and what doctors diagnosed as P.T.S.D., Mr. Wood said.

“There were a lot of reasons,” Mr. Wood said. “Survivor’s guilt. Struggling with not knowing why guys had been lost for, what we were trying to accomplish, what we had accomplished. He carried that burden.”

He returned to Loyola Marymount, but felt adrift and unappreciated, Mr. Wood said. Then he began throwing himself into volunteer work.

He built bikes for Ride 2 Recovery, a rehabilitation program for injured veterans, went to Haiti and Chile with Team Rubicon and helped organize events for I.A.V.A. He even appeared in this well-received public service announcement by I.A.V.A. and the Ad Council encouraging veterans to seek help for mental health problems.


“Whenever we were doing an event on the West Coast, he put his hand up and said, ‘I want to help,’” Mr. Rieckhoff said.

But then came a series of troubles. His marriage began to crumble in the summer of 2010, Mr. Wood said. He quit college, and a full-time position at a refugee camp in Haiti fell through. He stopped taking his medications. By December, he showed up at Mr. Wood’s door looking for help.

“He had hit rock bottom,” Mr. Wood said.

Mr. Wood convinced him to seek help, and he did. He started going to a veterans’ clinic, returned to Houston, found work and started dating. He even discussed re-enlisting in the Marine Corps.

“I told him the structure would be good, and the pride would be good for him,” Mr. Wood said. It was the last time the two men spoke, just weeks before Mr. Hunt killed himself.

No one, of course, could say exactly what went wrong. Perhaps it was his failed marriage. Perhaps it was frustration with the government for rejecting his petition to increase his disability rating. Perhaps he still felt guilt that his friends had died while he had not.

“He had a big heart, with a high opinion of what the world should be,” Mr. Wood said. “But he was always disappointed about how petty and selfish the world was. For everything he did to try to make the world better, he didn’t see improvements.

“He couldn’t handle the disappointment of not being able to effect change.” More than 1,100 people showed up for Mr. Hunt’s funeral in Texas.

His family requested that memorial contributions in his name be directed to:

Team Rubicon, Inc.
P.O. Box 7476
Santa Monica, CA 90406

or

Ride 2 Recovery
23679 Calabasas Rd., #420
Calabasas, CA 91302

1 out of 5 Barcelona citizens vote in favour of secession of Catalonia
AP - 04/11/2011 | Barcelona, Spain |
now The referendum had a 21.37 percent turnout with 257,745 participants, including registered foreign immigrants and anyone over 16.

The citizens of the Spanish city of Barcelona voted on Sunday by more than 90 per cent in favour of independence for the province of Catalonia from the central government in Madrid.

The unofficial referendum was organised by Decideix, which describes itself as "a citizen's initiative to organise a referendum in the city of Barcelona on Catalonia's independence from Spain."

The referendum had a 21.37 percent turnout with 257,745 participants, including registered foreign immigrants and anyone over 16.

By 23.30 local time (21.30GMT) some 44 percent of the votes had been counted, with just over 91 percent in favour of the secession of Catalonia from the rest of Spain.

Critics say this had more to do with warm spring-like weather than political commitment and democracy.

Barcelona is the last city, and the second biggest in Spain, to symbolically decide about independence following a series of plebiscites across Catalonia over the past 18 months.

The Spanish government has tried to stop all unofficial referendums but so far 515 Catalan towns and villages have held them, around half of Catalonia's municipalities.

Next Wednesday, April 13, the Catalan parliament will debate a bill to unilaterally declare independence from Spain.

Catalonia accounts for around one-fifth of Spain's economy, about one seventh of the population, and has long complained it contributes more than a fair share.

Along with the Basque region, Catalonia was heavily oppressed under the 1939-1975 dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, which made it a crime to speak the Catalan and Basque languages in the interest of promoting Spain as a Madrid-run Castilian-speaking unified country.

Texted Death Threats to Human Rights and Indigenous leaders Martha Giraldo and Aida Quilcue
The Black Eagles are a Colombian paramilitary organization. A prime example of the degree of violence and chaos that has spread through the current Machiavellian political system that embraces the paramilitary, mercenary, and police brutality.

At 9.39pm on 30th December 2010, the following text message was received by Martha Giraldo, coordinator of the National Movement of Victims of State Crimes Valle del Cauca branch (MOVICE), and Aida Quilcue, ex-leader of the Cauca Regional Indigenous Council (CRIC) and the Minga of Social and Communitarian Resistance:

“guerrilla rats, this is how we wanted to have you, cornered and crying for help all over the place. MOVICE, ECATE, CUT, NOMADESC, death to you communist dogs.

Tonight at midnight we start with Martha Giraldo, Berenice, Luz Marina, Cristina, the Indian Quilcue, Yon, Posso, Wilson and with every one of your children.

Black Eagles cleansing the country of these communist sons of bitches, you won’t see the New Year.”

The message was sent from the same number which has been used to send previous threats to the same organisations.

Impunity

impunitythefilm.com
freedom for colombia

Five Facts About Immigration
--MexicanAmericanLegalDefenseFund.org--
We all know that the United States is primarily a nation of immigrants and their descendants. But, it is also true that the United States is an independent nation in part because of a reaction to a restrictive immigration policy. Among the grievances against King George set forth in the Declaration of Independence in 1776 was a concern that the king had worked to prevent and discourage immigration to the colonies.

Our status as one united nation also depends on having one immigration and immigration enforcement policy set by the federal government in Washington, DC. When the United States adopted its Constitution in 1787, the nation settled on being one united nation rather than a loose confederation of separate independent states. If each state, as Arizona attempted in SB 1070, could adopt its own immigration enforcement policy, we would cease to be one nation.

Critical industries in the United States depend on undocumented immigrant workers.Agricultural farming has been an important part of our history and remains a crucial industry today. Several studies have estimated that well over half of all agricultural crop workers in the United States are undocumented.(1) Moreover, there are no indications that American-born workers have an interest in adopting the lifestyle of migratory farm workers.

There is no single “line” to wait to immigrate legally to the United States.Our current immigration system discriminates on the basis of national origin, or ancestry, requiring much longer waits for those from countries like Mexico, China, India, and the Philippines. For example, the adult son or daughter of a United States citizen who comes from most countries in the world currently waits four to five years to immigrate, while the adult son or daughter of a naturalized United States citizen from Mexico must wait almost 18 years to receive a legal immigrant visa.(2)

More than two million undocumented immigrants came to this country as minor children.(3) Many of these immigrants went to school here and were raised as American kids. Our national values have never punished or blamed children for acts that they committed while under the direction of their parents.


------
1. 2002 National Agricultural Workers Survey
2. Oct. 2010 State Department Visa Bulletin
3. “DREAM vs. Reality” Report, Migration Policy Institute, 2010

Brazilian deputy suspected in a series of murders
Thursday, April 14, 2011, 01:04 GMT 05:04 MCK
--bbc.co.uk/Russian--
The police of the Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro local parliamentarian arrested on suspicion of involvement in a series of murders.

According to investigators, André Luiz Ferreira da Silva heads the illegal paramilitary group, which controls the 13 districts in the west of the city of Rio de Janeiro.

Such groups are operating in many poor neighborhoods of major Brazilian cities. Initially, many of them arose as a reaction to the lawlessness of drug cartels.

But some of these illegal units today are actually very engaged in extortion and robbery.

Sun during 3.2011

Solar Flare at Earth, 4.19.11

Aurora Borealis on flight from San Fransisco to Paris

Belarus bombing farce?
Colum Lynch
Wednesday, April 13, 2011 - 7:56 PM
--foreignpolicy.com--
Earlier this week, a subway terror bombing reportedly occured in the Belarussian capital of Minsk, killing 12 and wounding about 150 people. Russia's U.N. envoy Vitaly I Churkin immediately issued a draft press statement asking for a standard condemnation on behalf of its regional ally.

But the problem was that not everyone believed Belarus was actually a target of terrorist violence. "Well informed sources around Minsk believe that there was an even chance that the government might be behind this," said one skeptical council member.

Reports from the region -- including this piece in the Christian Science Monitor -- also point out that there has been no history of violent opposition during the 17 years of repressive rule by Alexander Lukashenko, and that most of his political opposition leaders have been imprisoned during a sweep earlier this year.

Norman Finkelstein pt1

Migrants forced to fight for Gaddafi

-- Al Jazeera --
Anna Branthwaite
09 Apr 2011 16:14


Among the reports of atrocities occurring in Libya are claims from African migrants that they were abducted and forced to fight with Gaddafi's forces.

Nearly all migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, who arrive at the desert refugee camp in Tunisia, have fled in fear of violent reprisals by Libyans who accuse them of being mercenaries. The extent to which Gaddafi's military has used foreign mercenaries, or press-ganged migrants into fighting, remains unclear.

A former Nigerian police officer, who had worked in Libya for eight years as a technician, alleges he was abducted in mid-March at a military checkpoint in Tripoli, along with other men from Ghana, Mali and Niger, before being taken to a military centre.

"There was up to 100 people in the courtyard and military trucks were arriving and leaving with more people. They started beating people, I saw them shoot one Ghanaian in front of me. The atmosphere was very intimidating," he explained. "They put us into a vehicle and we were driven into the desert. I saw an oil refinery, there was evidence of bomb strikes, burnt out vehicles and a strong smell. I think it was Ras Lanouf."

A Ghanaian worker claimed to have been abducted by Libyan military when they stormed his house in Sirte.

"They asked us why we were trying to leave the country and that we must stay to fight for when the Americans come," he explained. "We were taken to a police station and then to an underground hospital which they ordered us to clean."

Importing mercenaries

Reports of foreign mercenaries being shipped into Libya and shooting protesters emerged within the first weeks of the uprising.

"There's certainly evidence that Algeria sent pilots in before the no-fly zone and provided military transporters to move people, possibly mercenaries, maybe even equipment… but it is difficult to get them into the country," explains Jeremy Keenan, a professor specialising in the Maghreb who suggests that between 5,000 and 10,000 mercenaries may have entered Libya during this uprising, but that there is no concrete evidence.

"If you've got a million migrants milling around in Libya, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa, all paperless with no ID, I suspect he's using them, not Libyans, as human shields… the key thing is he (Gaddafi) has got them over a barrel, they can't leave," said Keenan. "I think the opposition people, when they bump into anyone fighting against them who is speaking another language and looks black, irrespective of how they got into Gaddafi's hands, they are using the word mercenary. There is a lot of confusion there."

Gaddafi has supported past Tuareg rebellions and allegedly backed candidates in recent elections in Niger, who may be beholden to support him.

Local African media have recently reported the recruitment and movement of young men into Libya, but others indicate that Tuaregs were recruited by the Libyan military several years beforehand. What is certain in recent weeks is that more people are leaving Libya than entering.

"Certainly Gaddafi uses mercenaries from abroad and from the foreign community in Libya. In Misurata, there are reports that the Africans are on the frontline, but the snipers are foreigners, mostly from Belarus, Eastern Europe," says Sliman Bouchuiguir, secretary-general of the Libyan League of Human Rights. "He has already used poor Africans as a political weapon against Europe saying he will let this African population go to Italy and Europe."

In an interview with French newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche, in February Gaddafi warned, "You will have the immigration of thousands of people who will invade Europe from Libya, and there will be nobody to stop them."

One million sub Saharan migrants, among them political refugees, are estimated to live in Libya, but there is virtually no documentation of the population. Many make the treacherous journey through the desert into Libya, either en route to Europe or to settle in oil rich Libya.

On entering Libya, thousands of migrants have been arrested and held in detention centres. Many of them are now escaping Libya and can speak openly about the appalling living conditions in the centres, torture resulting in scores of deaths, corruption, lack of legal and medical aid, all of which corroborates with earlier reports made by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Global Detention Project.

Libya has never signed the 1951 Refugee Convention, and after allowing the UNHCR to provisionally re-open its office in Tripoli last year, the UNHCR has only ever been allowed to visit a few centres.

"There are 27 centres known to us. We can't even find out where the detention centres are, there is so little information. I would have little confidence that the treatment of detainees would be to EU standards," explains Michael Flynn, a researcher at the Global Detention Project based in Geneva.

Italy and other EU countries have made it policy to manage immigration from the source of its origins, and in recent years have collaborated with Gaddafi in stemming the flow of African migration – following the 2008 Friendship Pact, Italy has provided Libya with funding to build detention centres and surveillance equipment; the European Commission offered Libya up to 50 million Euros in aid last year to stop the flow of immigration.

"I don't know to what extent there were benchmarks built into these agreements between EU countries and Gaddafi, many of these were verbal agreements," explains Flynn. "There may have been some sort of reporting requirements on conditions, but I would have very little confidence that these requirements would have been met in Libya."

'I need to start again'

With the violence continuing in Libya, journalists and independent observers unable to access many parts of the country, the blight of Libyan and non-Libyans civilians remains largely unknown, but events inside Libya will have far reaching consequences beyond its borders.

As thousands of migrant workers return to their respective countries, Mediterranean and Western countries wrangle over their obligations to the displaced and refugees, neighbouring African states may face the migration of armed mercenaries crossing their desert borders, if, or when, they are no longer required in Libya.

Back in the desert camp in Tunisia, over 60,000 people have been evacuated by the UNHCR and the IOM to their respective countries, with on average of 2,000 flown out each day.

Others nationalities - Somalians, Eritreans, Sudanese, Iraqis and now Ivorians - with no safe country to be returned to, know they will be here for weeks if not months and attempt to make their desert camp as bearable as possible whilst awaiting to told where they will be resettled. Nearly all the families with young children belong to this group.

Waiting his turn to be told when he will be allocated a seat on a flight to Nigeria, the former police officer speaks of his future: "I left everything behind in Libya, all my clothes, savings, property and now I don’t even have one dinar with me. I need to start again. If I can go home I will start to look for a job."

He currently shares a tent with five other men, all facing the same predicaments. "But even though I should be relieved to be going home, I’m still very worried about the people who are trapped inside Libya, the ones who can't get out and have been left behind. I have a bad feeling about what will happen to them."

Anna Branthwaite worked at the Choucha transit camp in Tunisia, taking photographs and interviewing case studies as a freelancer for the Office of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees UNHCR.

Que le bon dieu vous garde... = That the good God be with you...

Appeasing Syria's Kurds - Inside Story - Al Jazeera English