The
remaining 1,121 Vietnamese workers who left Libya’s Benghazi Port on March 3
will arrive in the northern port city of Hai Phong in the next three or four
days.

Le Van Thanh, Vice chief of the Department for Management of
Overseas Labor said that the ship was previously expected to land in Hai Phong
on March 21, but bad weather and numerous stops at different ports for fuel and
cooking had prolonged the journey.

Thanh said the ship left the Singaporean port on March 30
afternoon and it was heading toward Malaysia’s sea territory and if
everything went right, it would arrive in three to four days.

According to Thanh, this was the first passenger ship to
follow this route and it normally took cargo vessels 15 days to travel from Benghazi to Hai Phong.

Timelines of the rescue of
Vietnamese workers from Libya

January
15: Benghazi
city in Libya
was shaken by the demonstration of thousands of people against the government
led by Colonel Muammar Qaddafi since 1969. There were around 10,400 Vietnamese
working at construction sites in Libya at the time.

February
18: Dozens of demonstrators
in Benghazi, the second largest state in Libya, were
shot dead. Vietnam stopped
sending workers to Libya.
Labor exporting firms were told to keep an eye on the situation in Libya and to
ask Vietnamese workers to avoid public sites.

February
24: Many countries began to
evacuate their citizens from Libya.
Vietnamese Ambassador to Libya Dao Duy Tien said that some Vietnamese workers
were evacuated from Libya
by land, air and water by their Korean, Brazilian, Turkish employers.

The
Vietnamese government established a steering board to assist Vietnamese in the
Middle East and North Africa. The board, led
by Deputy Prime Minister Pham Gia Khiem, was in charge of evacuating Vietnamese
from Libya
and bringing them home.

February
25: 2,000 Vietnamese
workers were evacuated from Libya
to Egypt, Turkey, Malta
and Tunisia.
Around 2,500 were on the way to the border of Libya.

Vietnam asked the IOM to assist Vietnamese workers
in Libya.

February
26: Around 4,600 Vietnamese
workers were brought to the neighboring countries of Libya and nearly 4,000 others were
on the way to the border.

The
same day, the first aircraft of Vietnam Airlines left Hanoi
with 8 tons of food, clothes and medicine to Egypt to help Vietnamese citizens.

March
1: The aircraft returned to
Hanoi with 318
Vietnamese workers. The same days, flights of other airlines also carried
Vietnamese workers from Libya
to Hanoi,
raising the total number to 1,450.

March
2: More than 6,000
Vietnamese left Libya
to third countries. Around 2,800 arrived home safely while 3,000 were on their
way to the border. Around 300 were still trapped in Libya.

March
3: 8,250 Vietnamese were
evacuated from Libya
to other countries, 2,740 of them returned home safely. The remaining workers
were in five neighboring countries of Libya were on the way home by
waterway. In addition, there were nearly 300 others trapped in Libya.

March
6: All 10,334 Vietnamese
workers were evacuated from Libya,
7,000 of them returned home.

March
9: The last flight brought
209 workers from Libya
back home, closing the rescue campaign. The last 1,000 workers will arrive at
the northern port
of Hai Phong in 3-4 days.

PV