Mr. High Commissioner, your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Thank you very much for this singular honour to appear before
you here today jointly with my esteemed good friend, the High
Commissioner -- who sets a torrid pace and is a role model for all
of us who want to see action and results.

For my part, I would like to make three points briefly:

I. Current Situation

The current crisis in Libya in one of the largest migration
emergencies in several years. Not since the Gulf War (1990), the
Lebanon crisis (2006) or Kosovo (1999) has the International
Community responded to an evacuation of this scale.

IOM and UNHCR have therefore joined forces to support a massive
humanitarian evacuation of tens of thousands of Egyptians and other
third country nationals who have fled into Tunisia from Libya.

As the High Commissioner and I noted in our Joint Press Release
last evening, more than 75,000 people have crossed the border from
Libya into Tunisia since 19 February, and the number now certainly
exceeds 100,000.

This is not counting the tens of thousands who have been
evacuated by their own countries’ means such as China.

At the moment, our staff on the ground in Tunisia report that
persons are fleeing at the rate of at least 1500 per hour, and that
rate, already high, is expected to increase as the conflict
continues.

Moreover, an estimated 40,000 people, the majority Egyptian, are
waiting to enter Tunisia from the Libyan side of the border,
desperate to make their way home.

II. IOM Evacuation Efforts

Since we began operations last week, IOM has conducted ten
charter flights, 2 rotations by ship, and ongoing ground
evacuations; as of yesterday, we had been able to evacuate some
4000 persons to various parts of the world, including Bangladesh,
Egypt, Mali, Niger, and elsewhere.

At present, we have formal requests for evacuation assistance by
22 countries, including Bangladesh, Ghana, Guinea, Iraq,
Montenegro, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka, and
Vietnam.

To evacuate even this modest number of persons, IOM exhausted
its original allocation of $3 million over the weekend and is
awaiting a response to its appeal for $11 million launched last
Friday. (We estimate that to evacuate 10,000 people by air from
Tunisia to a distant location such as Asia, nearly $10 million is
required.)

One of our major concerns is the safe evacuation of the large
number of African workers. In addition, there may be as many as
4,000 Africans of various nationalities who are believed to be in
numerous detention centers throughout Libya who will also need to
be repatriated. From IOM’s pre-crisis migration figures, we
estimated that there were at least 2.5 million migrants, including
an estimated 1 million Egyptian workers, within Libya.

In conclusion, there simply are not enough aircraft or ships
available and affordable to us right now, nor are there enough
tents, medical supplies, food or water. That brings me to my third
and final point – resources.

III. Urgent Requirements

Let me be frank. This will be a costly operation. For sake of
comparison, IOM's evacuation of some 250,000 vulnerable persons
during the Gulf War cost nearly $300 million. A similar evacuation
of approximately 13,500 persons at the time of the Lebanese crisis
cost $15.6 million.

What is required, in particular, are aircraft and air crews
– in other words, the whole package. The same holds true for
marine assets (aircraft, ships, crews, technical experts) and
financial or other support.

The High Commissioner and I acknowledge the heavy burden on the
shoulders of you, our Member States, from supporting the work of
our Organizations in multiple emergencies around the world,
including in West Africa, where nearly 350,000 people are displaced
within and across the borders of Cote d’Ivoire.

What we have, however, is a window of opportunity to immediately
assist a massive number of migrants and others – while at the
same time contributing to regional security and stability in North
Africa, the Middle and the Mediterranean.

But we need to act now.