PhotoIn an unusual gesture that could partly reverse a more familiar northward odyssey toward Europe, Rwanda offered on Thursday to house or help repatriate some of the thousands of African migrants being held in Libya and reportedly auctioned there as slaves. The evocation of Rwanda’s history apparently referred to bloodletting in 1994 when more than 800,000 people perished in an ethnically driven genocide. “We may not be able to welcome everyone but our door is wide open,” the Foreign Ministry said. The statement did not say how many people might be taken in by Rwanda, a small, landlocked country of 12 million in east-central Africa that ranks as one of the continent’s most densely populated. Advertisement Continue reading the main storyBut Moussa Faki Mahamat, the newly appointed head of the African Union, the continent’s biggest representative body, said on Twitter that Rwanda had offered to resettle as many as 30,000 migrants.

Source: New York Times November 23, 2017 16:52 UTC