Disastrous floods a rallying cry for divided Libya
Tripoli | Zahra el-Gerbi wasn’t expecting much of a response to her online fundraiser, but she felt she had to do something after four of her relatives died in the flooding that decimated the eastern Libyan city of Derna. She put out a call for donations for those displaced by the deluge.
In the first half-hour after she shared it on Facebook, the Benghazi-based clinical nutritionist said friends and strangers were already promising financial and material support.
A man sits by the graves of the flash flood victims in Derna. AP
“It’s for basic needs like clothes, foods and accommodation,” Ms el-Gerbi said.
For many Libyans, the collective grief over the more than 11,000 dead has morphed into a rallying cry for national unity in a country blighted by 12 years of conflict and division. In turn, the tragedy has ramped up pressure on the country’s leading politicians, viewed by some as the architects of the catastrophe.
The oil-rich country, once the most affluent in North Africa, has been divided between rival administrations since 2014, with an internationally recognised government in Tripoli and a rival authority in the east, where Derna is located.
Both are backed by international patrons and armed militias whose influence in the country has ballooned since NATO backed an Arab Spring uprising and bombed Libya’s army to topple ruler Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Numerous United Nations-led initiatives to bridge the divide have failed.
In the early hours of September 11, two dams in the mountains above Derna burst, sending a wall of water two storeys high into the city and sweeping entire neighbourhoods out to sea. At least 11,300 people were killed and a further 30,000 displaced.
An outpouring of support for the people of Derna followed. Residents from the nearby cities of Benghazi and Tobruk offered to put up the displaced. In Tripoli, some 1450 kilometres west, a hospital said it would perform operations free of charge for any injured in the flood.
Ali Khalifa, an oil rig worker from Zawiya, west of Tripoli, said his cousin and a group of other men from his neighbourhood joined a convoy of vehicles heading to Derna to help out with relief efforts. Even the local scout squad participated, he said.
The sentiment was shared by 50-year-old Mohamed al-Harari.
“The wound or pain of what happened in Derna hurt all the people from western Libya to southern Libya to eastern Libya,” he said.
The disaster has fostered rare instances of the opposing administrations cooperating to help those affected. As recently as 2020, the two sides were in an all-out war. General Khalifa Hifter’s forces besieged Tripoli in a year-long failed military campaign to try to capture the capital, killing thousands.
“We have even seen some military commanders arrive from the Tripoli allied military coalition in Derna, showing support,” said Claudia Gazzini, a senior Libya analyst at International Crisis Group.
But the distribution of aid into the city has been highly disorganised, with minimal amounts of supplies reaching flood-affected areas in the days following the disaster.
Across the country, the disaster has also exposed the shortcomings of Libya’s fractured political system.
While young people and volunteers rushed to help, “there was a kind of confusion between the governments in the east and west” on what to do, said Ibrahim al-Sunwisi, a local journalist from the capital, Tripoli.
Others have levelled blame for the burst dams on government officials.
A report by a state-run audit agency in 2021 said the two dams hadn’t been maintained despite the allocation of more than $US2 million for that purpose in 2012 and 2013. As the storm approached, authorities told people – including those in vulnerable areas – to stay indoors.
“Everyone in charge is responsible,” said Noura el-Gerbi, a journalist and activist who was born in Derna and is also a cousin of el-Gerbi, who made the call for donations online. “The next flood will be over them.”
AP
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