[News] NATO Destroyed Libya in 2011; Storm Daniel Came to Sweep Up the Remains
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Thu Sep 21 11:10:10 EDT 2023
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*NATO Destroyed Libya in 2011; Storm Daniel Came to Sweep Up the
Remains: The Thirty-Eighth Newsletter*
Shefa Salem al-Baraesi
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(Libya), /Drown on Dry Land/, 2019.
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
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Three days before the Abu Mansur and Al Bilad dams collapsed in Wadi
Derna, Libya, on the night of September 10, the poet Mustafa al-Trabelsi
participated in a discussion at the Derna House of Culture about the
neglect of basic infrastructure in his city. At the meeting, al-Trabelsi
warned about the poor condition of the dams. As he wrote
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on Facebook that same day, over the past decade his beloved city has
been ‘exposed to whipping and bombing, and then it was enclosed by a
wall that had no door, leaving it shrouded in fear and depression’.
Then, Storm Daniel picked up off the Mediterranean coast, dragged itself
into Libya, and broke
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the dams. CCTV camera footage
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in the city’s Maghar neighbourhood showed the rapid advance of the
floodwaters, powerful enough to destroy buildings and crush lives. A
reported 70% of infrastructure and 95% of educational institutions have
been damaged
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in the flood-affected areas. As of Wednesday 20 September, an estimated
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4,000 to 11,000 people have died in the flood – among them the poet
Mustafa al-Trabelsi, whose warnings over the years went unheeded – and
another 10,000 are missing.
Hisham Chkiouat, the aviation minister of Libya’s Government of National
Stability (based in Sirte), visited Derna in the wake of the flood and
told
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the BBC, ‘I was shocked by what I saw. It’s like a tsunami. A massive
neighbourhood has been destroyed. There is a large number of victims,
which is increasing each hour’. The Mediterranean Sea ate up this
ancient city with roots in the Hellenistic period (326 BCE to 30 BCE).
Hussein Swaydan, head of Derna’s Roads and Bridges Authority, said
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that the total area with ‘severe damage’ amounts to three million square
metres. ‘The situation in this city’, he said, ‘is more than
catastrophic’. Dr Margaret Harris of the World Health Organisation (WHO)
said
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that the flood was of ‘epic proportions’. ‘There’s not been a storm like
this in the region in living memory’, she said, ‘so it’s a great shock’.
Howls of anguish across Libya morphed into anger at the devastation,
which are now developing into demands for an investigation. But who will
conduct this investigation: the Tripoli-based Government of National
Unity, headed by Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh and officially
recognised by the United Nations (UN), or the Government of National
Stability, headed by Prime Minister Osama Hamada in Sirte? These two
rival governments – which have been at war with each other for many
years – have paralysed the politics of the country, whose state
institutions were fatally damaged by North Atlantic Treaty Organisation
(NATO) bombardment in 2011.
Soad Abdel Rassoul (Egypt), /My Last Meal/, 2019.
The divided state and its damaged institutions have been unable to
properly provide for Libya’s population of nearly seven million in the
oil-rich but now totally devastated country. Before the recent tragedy,
the UN was already providing humanitarian aid for at least 300,000
Libyans, but, as a consequence of the floods, they estimate
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that at least 884,000 more people will require assistance. This number
is certain to rise to at least 1.8 million. The WHO’s Dr Harris reports
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that some hospitals have been ‘wiped out’ and that vital medical
supplies, including trauma kits and body bags, are needed. ‘The
humanitarian needs are huge and much more beyond the abilities of the
Libyan Red Crescent, and even beyond the abilities of the Government’,
said
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Tamar Ramadan, head of the International Federation of the Red Cross and
Red Crescent Societies delegation in Libya.
The emphasis on the state’s limitations is not to be minimised.
Similarly, the World Meteorological Organisation’s Secretary-General
Petteri Taalas pointed out
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that although there was an unprecedented level of rainfall (414.1 mm in
24 hours, as recorded by one station), the collapse of state
institutions contributed to the catastrophe. Taalas observed that
Libya’s National Meteorological Centre has ‘major gaps in its observing
systems. Its IT systems are not functioning well and there are chronic
staff shortages. The National Meteorological Centre is trying to
function, but its ability to do so is limited. The entire chain of
disaster management and governance is disrupted’. Furthermore, he said,
‘[t]he fragmentation of the country’s disaster management and disaster
response mechanisms, as well as deteriorating infrastructure,
exacerbated the enormity of the challenges. The political situation is a
driver of risk’.
Faiza Ramadan
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(Libya), /The Meeting/, 2011.
Abdel Moneim al-Arfi, a member of the Libyan Parliament (in the eastern
section), joined his fellow lawmakers to call for an investigation into
the causes of the disaster. In his statement, al-Arfi pointed
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to underlying problems with the post-2011 Libyan political class. In
2010, the year before the NATO war, the Libyan government had allocated
money towards restoring the Wadi Derna dams (both built between 1973 and
1977). This project was supposed to be completed by a Turkish company,
but the company left the country during the war. The project was never
completed, and the money allocated for it vanished. According to
al-Arfi, in 2020 engineers recommended that the dams be restored since
they were no longer able to manage normal rainfall, but these
recommendations were shelved. Money continued to disappear, and the work
was simply not carried out.
Impunity has defined Libya since the overthrow of the regime led by
Muammar al-Gaddafi (1942–2011). In February–March 2011, newspapers from
Gulf Arab states began to claim that the Libyan government’s forces were
committing genocide against the people of Libya. The United Nations
Security Council passed two resolutions: resolution 1970
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(February 2011) to condemn the violence and establish an arms embargo on
the country and resolution 1973
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(March 2011) to allow member states to act ‘under Chapter VII of the
United Nations Charter’, which would enable armed forces to establish a
ceasefire and find a solution to the crisis. Led by France and the
United States, NATO prevented an African Union delegation from following
up on these resolutions and holding peace talks with all the parties in
Libya. Western countries also ignored the meeting with five African
heads of state in Addis Ababa in March 2011 where al-Gaddafi agreed
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to the ceasefire, a proposal
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he repeated during an African Union delegation to Tripoli in April. This
was an unnecessary war that Western and Gulf Arab states used to wreak
vengeance upon al-Gaddafi. The ghastly conflict turned Libya, which was
ranked 53rd out of 169 countries on the 2010 Human Development Index
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(the highest ranking on the African continent), into a country marked by
poor indicators of human development that is now significantly lower
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on any such list.
Tewa Barnosa
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(Libya), /War Love/, 2016.
Instead of allowing an African Union-led peace plan to take place, NATO
began a bombardment of 9,600 strikes on Libyan targets, with special
emphasis on state institutions. Later, when the UN asked NATO to account
for the damage it had done, NATO’s legal advisor Peter Olson wrote
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that there was no need for an investigation, since ‘NATO did not
deliberately target civilians and did not commit war crimes in Libya’.
There was no interest in the wilful destruction of crucial Libyan state
infrastructure, which has never been rebuilt and whose absence is key to
understanding the carnage in Derna.
NATO’s destruction of Libya set in motion a chain of events: the
collapse of the Libyan state; the civil war, which continues to this
day; the dispersal of Islamic radicals across northern Africa and into
the Sahel region, whose decade-long destabilisation has resulted in a
series of coups from Burkina Faso to Niger
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This has subsequently created new migration routes toward Europe and led
to the deaths of migrants in both the Sahara Desert and the
Mediterranean Sea as well as an unprecedented scale of human trafficking
operations in the region. Add to this list of dangers not only the
deaths in Derna, and certainly the deaths from Storm Daniel, but also
casualties of a war from which the Libyan people have never recovered.
Najla Shawkat Fitouri
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(Libya), /Sea Wounded/, 2021.
Just before the flood in Libya, an earthquake struck neighbouring
Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains, wiping out villages such as Tenzirt and
killing about 3,000 people. ‘I won’t help the earthquake’, wrote
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the Moroccan poet Ahmad Barakat (1960–1994); ‘I will always carry in my
mouth the dust that destroyed the world’. It is as if tragedy decided to
take titanic steps along the southern rim of the Mediterranean Sea last
week.
A tragic mood settled deep within the poet Mustafa al-Trabelsi. On 10
September, before being swept away by the flood waves, he wrote
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‘[w]e have only one another in this difficult situation. Let’s stand
together until we drown’. But that mood was intercut with other
feelings: frustration with the ‘twin Libyan fabric’, in his words, with
one government in Tripoli and the other in Sirte; the divided populace;
and the political detritus of an ongoing war over the broken body of the
Libyan state. ‘Who said that Libya is not one?’, Al-Trabelsi lamented.
Writing as the waters rose, Al-Trabelsi left behind a poem that is being
read by refugees from his city and Libyans across the country, reminding
them that the tragedy is not everything, that the goodness of people who
come to each other’s aid is the ‘promise of help’, the hope of the future.
The rain
Exposes the drenched streets,
the cheating contractor,
and the failed state.
It washes everything,
bird wings
and cats’ fur.
Reminds the poor
of their fragile roofs
and ragged clothes.
It awakens the valleys,
shakes off their yawning dust
and dry crusts.
The rain
a sign of goodness,
a promise of help,
an alarm bell.
Warmly,
Vijay
Website <www.eltricontinental.org>
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