Thousands of Filipinos still in Libya

MANILA, Philippines—Don’t forget there are still about 10,000 Filipinos left in Libya.

Joselito Lopez, 40, a Filipino worker back from the strife-torn North African country, gave this message to Philippine officials on Thursday, even as he thanked them for arranging his safe return home.

“I’m very grateful to the Philippine government for helping us, but please don’t stop saving the other Filipinos left in Libya,” he said at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport upon his return via a Philippine government-chartered flight from Greece.

Lopez, a quality control engineer at a cement plant in Al Nahr, about an hour by bus from Tripoli, said he believed there were still about 10,000 left in Libya.

The government earlier said some 12,000 of the 26,000 Filipinos in Libya had been taken out of the country, with more than 8,000 back in the Philippines and more on their way home.

Lopez and his group was part of the contingent that boarded the Philippine government-chartered Ionian Queen, a Greek-owned vessel that took them from Tripoli to the Greek island of Crete, from which they took the chartered flight.

He said the conflict in Libya appeared to be taking a turn for the worse. “At the rate it is going, it’s no longer going to be called Libyan unrest but Libyan war,” he said.

But Lynlee San Jose, 37, an office secretary, noted that some Filipinos opted to stay in Libya despite the volatile situation. She noted how a few of her co-workers had refused to join the group even though operations at their company had ceased.

Overseas Workers Welfare Administration chief Carmelita Dimzon said that was also the case for several Filipinos who had already been evacuated from the conflict areas. “They don’t want to take the flight to Manila, and we can’t force them,” she said.

said San Jose: “Matira matibay (the strong-willed remain).You have to have a steely interior to stay there.”