Britain, France and the group of 57 Islamic nations each launched refugee operations yesterday as UN experts warned of an urgent need to prevent racially charged violent clashes among a crush of people fleeing Libya to Tunisia and Egypt.

With more than 140,000 refugees pouring over the borders and tens of thousands more arriving by the day, Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron said his nation had launched an airlift to help Egyptians stranded on the Libyan-Tunisian border.

"These people shouldn't be kept in transit camps," Cameron said of the Egyptians that are to be flown back to their country, with the first flight scheduled for later yesterday.

France, too, announced an airlift and naval operation. The French Foreign Ministry said it would involve large airliners and a French Navy ship heading to the region to evacuate at least 5,000 Egyptian refugees and return them to Egypt within a week.

France is also "studying means to provide tents and emergency equipment to vulnerable people" who remain in Libya, it said.

The 57-nation Organisation of The Islamic Conference said yesterday it would set up two fully equipped field hospitals and provide ambulances on the Tunisian and Egyptian sides of their borders with Libya.

The group's emergency plan also called for providing temporary shelters for 10,000 people and handing out flour, sugar, rice, canned food and infant

formula to the vast number of refugees camping out in those places.

UN experts warned yesterday of an urgent need to protect sub-Saharan Africans, foreigners, migrant workers and other minorities caught up in a fast-developing humanitarian crisis.

A statement issued yesterday by the UN committee responsible for monitoring racial discrimination worldwide says the UN and its member governments must act to prevent further bloodshed.

The committee's 18 independent human rights experts - who oversee a 1969 treaty that is the main international legal instrument protecting against discrimination on the basis of race -formally alerted the world's nations to "the risk of interethnic violence and divisions which might worsen the deteriorating situation in Libya."