Seventy-nine refugees and asylum seekers from Libya will arrive in Rwanda on Thursday, November 19, at 8 p.m. This was confirmed by the Ministry of Emergency Management (Minema). The evacuation is part of the commitment by the government of Rwanda to provide a safe passage for Africans who have been stranded in countries located in the Horn of Africa. Concerning nationalities of new refugees and asylum seekers, Olivier Kayumba, the Permanent Secretary in Minema, told The New Times on Thursday that it will be communicated after their arrival. Like previous ones, the new batch will be accommodated in Gashora Emergency Transit Centre in Bugesera District. Rwanda pledged to host stranded refugees and asylum seekers from Libya in 2017, after harrowing revelations that African immigrants were and are still being sold openly in modern-day slave markets in Libya. They ended up stranded in Libya after a failed bid to cross the Mediterranean Sea to go to Europe for greener pasture. Since then, current statistics from Minema show that 306 refugees and asylum seekers have been evacuated to Rwanda, and a third of them is expected to have been relocated by the end of this year. Out of these, 121 of them have been resettled to third-party states, mainly in Europe. Of these, 98 were resettled to Sweden, and 23 to Canada.
