The Tunisia Libya border: not catastrophic, not comfortable

At the border, at the final gate with Tunisia, ten to fifteen thousand people are crammed against a barrier.

Soldiers throw sticks of bread and water into the crowd crammed under the blazing sun.

Tunisia can only let them in in small groups because there simply isn’t the transport to get them down the road, to the airport, and home to Algiers or Egypt.

On the whole these are young men, fit, healthy and solvent – not the normal definition of refugees.

And for aid agencies, the Tunisian Army and others that fact is what stands between this situation being what it is – a logistical crisis – and a genuine humanitarian crisis.

Around the border area I guess at least 20,000 people are spread around, some under desert trees playing cards, some inside small compounds made from their bulging packing cases.

Others join the long queues to Tunisian volunteers doling out bread, dates, water and fruit juice.

Up the road the Tunisian army and the UNHCR – the UN refugee body – has set up tents in the desert scrub for these people to await transportation.

There’s no shortage of food or water and these people are not, by any means, desperate. The problem is getting the transport to shift them on to the airport – to get the buses to do that, to get the planes to fly them home.

Aid agencies reckon 70,000 or so have come across in the last few days and the situation is altogether different from that I witnessed here three days ago.

It is true some people are succumbing to fatigue and illness

You see them manhandled over the 10 foot wall – all this under the eyes of Gaddafi’s regime, whose officials look over from their offices at their frontier post 50 yards away.

Some though get a better deal. There are currently at least 60 Chinese workers enjoying a buffet, sun loungers, idyllic beaches and even the odd cigar  poolside at the Odyssey Hotel on Djerba’s righty renowned coastline.

But it’s clear our Chinese friends are in something of a minority.

Right at the border it is not chaotic or catastrophic – but it’s not comfortable.