MANILA, Philippines—In the emergency room of Tripoli’s largest hospital, a young Filipino nurse, Abdul Bashit, spent several weeks tending to wounded Libyans amid sounds of gunfire outside and whispers of an approaching war inside.
The 25-year old said he saw firsthand the horrors of the escalating conflict, heard the horrific tales of patients, including a mercenary who confessed to killing 1,000 prisoners in Moammar Gadhafi’s infamous dungeons, and saw countless bodies sent to the morgue.
At the height of the conflict, the huge ER, the size of a district hospital in the Philippines, was filled to capacity with patients, mostly antigovernment rebels and civilians with serious wounds, many with gunshots to the head, Bashit recalled.
“It’s hard to describe. The ER was completely filled with patients. At the end of every day we would have 10 to 16 dead, and the cadavers would be sent straight to the morgue,” he said.
When word got out that the Ionian Queen, a Greek-owned vessel chartered by the Philippine government, was making its final trip to fetch Filipinos from the Tripoli seaport, Bashit finally decided to leave the hospital and seek refuge at the Philippine embassy.
Like Bashit, dozens of Filipino nurses working in the 1,600-bed Tripoli Medical Center (TMC), Libya’s main government hospital, have abandoned their posts, even under threat of being blacklisted from Arab countries and without receiving their salaries.
“Everybody was leaving and we didn’t want to get left behind,” said Bashit, a graduate of the Fatima University and a resident of Quezon City.
He said other Filipinos, comprising the bulk of the nursing staff of the TMC, had “gone AWOL (absent without leave)” out of fear that the Libyan crisis would turn into a full-scale civil war, even though that part of Tripoli where the hospital was located was not as wracked by violence as the rest of the country.
“The medical director didn’t prevent us from going but he said we would be blacklisted from the Arab world,” he said.
“Now, our problem is that we were not given our salaries and benefits,” he said on his arrival at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport.
With 30 others, Bashit, who had been working at the TMC for more than a year, returned home from a Philippine-government chartered Air Pullmantur flight that landed on Thursday morning carrying 475 Filipinos, the largest group to be evacuated so far.
The Filipinos boarded the Ionian Queen at the Tripoli seaport and were taken to the Greek island of Crete, from where they took the chartered flight.
As of Thursday afternoon, 8,256 Filipinos had returned from Libya on 122 flights, including special Philippine Airlines flights that went directly to Crete and fetched more than 300 Filipino evacuees.
The head of the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (Owwa), Carmelita Dimzon, said there were still about 4,000 who had left Libya and are out of harm’s way but were just waiting to be accommodated in commercial flights to Manila, to be arranged by embassy officials.
Another group of returning nurses, numbering about 40, were from the National Heart Center of Tajoura, a smaller hospital.
“It was peaceful in our area, but given the situation, you couldn’t really tell if it was going to be peaceful one moment, and then violent the next,” said one nurse, who asked not to be identified.
Joselito Lopez, 40, a quality control engineer at a cement plant in Al Nahr, said the conflict in Libya was taking a turn for the worse, as Gadhafi, who was given the code name “Kaka” by the Filipinos in Libya, held on to power.
“At the rate it is going, it’s no longer going to be called Libyan unrest, but Libyan war,” he said.
Unlike other Filipino returnees who were critical of the Philippine government’s response to the Libyan crisis, Lopez was thankful to the agencies that arranged his repatriation from Libya.
“Obviously without them, I wouldn’t be here,” he said, noting that his company had not helped him or any of his coworkers.