Storm Daniel made its way across the North African coast on 10 September 2023, leaving a trail of disaster along the Mediterranean coast of north-eastern Libya in its wake. The medicane, a mini-tropical cyclone, brought with it strong winds and heavy rainfall that resulted in devastating flash floods. Thousands of Libyans have been killed, although the total number of deaths remains unknown, while buildings, bridges, and other essential infrastructure have been badly damaged or destroyed.
The port city of Derna, 156 miles east of Benghazi-the largest city in the eastern region of Cyrenaica-took a direct hit from the medicane. Two Yugoslav-built dams dating back to the mid-1970s burst under the onslaught- an upper dam eight miles from Derna and a lower dam a few hundred metres outside the city. A “river tsunami” of muddy water swept away four bridges and flooded the streets of the city, which were littered with abandoned vehicles and fallen trees. The Wadi Derna, a seasonal river which bisects the city and is normally dry at this time of year, overflowed, causing the collapse of multi-storey apartment buildings along its banks. It is estimated that a quarter of the city lies in ruins. Many people were washed away and drowned, while others lie trapped under the rubble.
Derna lies within territory controlled by Libya’s eastern administration, where the cities of Al Bayda, Al Marj, and Soussa were also affected by the floods. Help was soon forthcoming, from the Tripoli-based western administration-the UN-backed Government of National Unity-which declared three days of national mourning, from Libya’s North African neighbours, Turkiye, the UAE, the EU, the US, and the UK among others, and from charities such as the Red Crescent. Immediate relief efforts included the provision of food supplies, medical assistance for survivors, search and rescue operations for the missing, and provision of body-bags for the less fortunate.
This tragedy has come at a most inopportune time in Libya’s history. The country has been in a state of limbo ever since the Libyan Revolution of 2011, its plight largely ignored by the rest of the world. The uprising against the dictatorship of Mu’ammar al-Qadhafi began in Benghazi on 15 February 2011. The ensuing civil war reflected festering differences between the former provinces of Cyrenaica in eastern Libya and Tripolitania in the west, which have played out to the present day. The Qadhafi regime was eventually neutralised by October 2011, with the help of NATO air power, enhanced by a naval blockade and the imposition of a no-fly zone. The opposition-nominated Transitional National Council then issued a Declaration of Liberty in Benghazi on 23 October. Qadhafi, who had overthrown Libya’s monarchy and assumed power on 1 September 1969, was ignobly executed by a mob of his countrymen in his home town of Sirte on 20 October.
Mu’ammar al- Qadhafi was mistrusted, indeed detested, by the Western powers, throughout his long career as head of the Libyan Arab Republic. Apart from nationalising the oil industry and other foreign-owned business and property interests, he imposed an anti-imperialist version of pan-Arab socialism that incorporated sharia law and was at odds with Western values and interests. His Libyan regime came to be linked with revolutionary armed groups around the world and implicated in various high-profile terrorist actions.
In removing Qadhafi, the Western powers misread the domestic politics of Libya and failed to establish that a credible and capable opposition had yet to emerge. An overwhelming desire to bring about regime change created a power vacuum, within which various Islamist armed militias thrived and engaged in unrestricted civil warfare. The transitional government soon gave way to the newly elected General National Congress, following Libya’s first-ever democratic elections in July 2012. A new transitional government then took over, but failed to establish its authority. The US consulate in Benghazi was then set ablaze on 11 September 2012, leading to the death of the ambassador and three other US nationals.
A key player, retired General (now Field Marshal) Khalifa Haftar, returned to Libya in 2011, after twenty years of exile in the US, and launched a campaign against Islamists and other political opponents in Benghazi in 2014. He developed a power base in eastern Libya. By July 2018 his Libyan National Army had captured Derna, the last Islamic State militant outpost in eastern Libya. Haftar’s eastern administration was supported by various Arab states and monarchies and by Russia, creating a proxy conflict in Libya against the Western-supported administration in Tripoli. The Government of National Unity in Tripoli is now pitted against the House of Representatives in Tobruk, as the key actors in Libyan politics. Both competing coalitions are also beset with internal divisions.
The natural disaster in Libya has drawn attention to political instability in the aftermath of Qadhafi’s enforced departure. The complexity of Libyan politics, the coexistence of parallel political and military institutions, pervasive maladministration, an inattention to infrastructure maintenance and resilience, a lack of reliable early weather warning systems, and deficiencies in emergency response management may all conspire to make the effects of this catastrophe worse than need have been. Our sympathies must lie with the ordinary and much-suffering citizens of Libya, who deserve all the support they can get in these difficult times. It is, however, probably too much to expect that the parties to the ongoing conflict in the country might for once overlook their differences and rally together in the reconstruction of their nation.
Ashis Banerjee