Awaiting safe passage from Misrata's bloody war

We’re sitting at the harbour master’s office perched on a dusty hill. To one side the Mediterranean shimmering in the heat, to the other the ghost like empty harbour.

A vast silent grain elevator, idle grim painted tug boats, huge silent container cranes and in the haze the three now cold blast furnaces of Misrata’s deserted steel works.

We’ve come up to this hillside because waiting at the closed dock gates is not a good idea. We were woken, several miles away, earlier this morning, by a volley of Grad missiles fired into the harbour area by Colonel Gaddafi’s forces.

So they say we are safe up on our little hillside, surrounded by late spring flowers growing in the sand dunes and swallows languidly hawking flies.

Beyond the horizon, 12 miles out at anchor, lies the Red Star ferry on charter to the International Organisation for Migration. Her 16 hour voyage from Benghazi to Misrata now an odyssey several days long as she waits offshore for notice that it is safe to dock.

In recent days NATO has apprehended Colonel Gaddafi’s forces lying sea mines around the harbour. The Colonel said on national TV two nights ago that any vessel entering or leaving this port will be a target.

So we are trapped, but our lot is as nothing compared to hundreds of migrant workers living in terrible conditions in the heat and dust, caught in the middle of somebody else’s war, now just trying to get home to Chad, Niger or Ghana.