On 10 September 2023, torrential rains, over 410mm in 24 hours, swept over the Libyan city of Derna. The record level of rainfall – Derna typically only receives 274mm in a whole year – caused two ageing dams to collapse and release a further 30 million cubic metres of water into the city. Massive flooding from a combination of these events has destroyed an estimated 25% of the city with death toll estimates of 11,300 and rising, over 10,000 still missing and 34,000 displaced in a city of only 90,000.
The catastrophic rainfall was associated with Storm Daniel, a weather system that had already poured record amounts of rain on Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey on 5 and 6 September, killing 18 people. Three years’ worth of rain fell on Greece and destroyed a quarter of its agricultural production capacity. Abnormally high sea surface temperatures, which were above 26°C in the Mediterranean Sea and above 27.5°C near the coast of Libya, intensified Storm Daniel into what meteorologists call a Medicane – a Mediterranean storm with hurricane-like characteristics – before landfall in Libya. The levels of rainfall and flooding were unprecedented across all of Libya; climate change has contributed to the high frequency of extreme weather events like Storm Daniel which has already been classified as a one-in-200+ year event. It is only the latest in an increasing trend of extreme rainfall and flooding events in Europe. Studies show that in the past 30 years, Europe has witnessed more floods than any other period in the past 500 years.
Despite similar scales of rainfall and flooding across Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey and Libya, the total death toll across Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey only amounts to 18 people compared to Libya’s 11,300+. This magnitude of difference in loss is a direct consequence of NATO’s bloody war on Libya in 2011 (see FRFI 220 ‘Imperialist Hands off Libya’).
2011 NATO intervention in Libya
Prior to 2011, Libya was ranked 53rd out of 169 countries on the 2010 Human Development Index, the highest in all of Africa, and had the fifth highest per capita income in Africa including free universal healthcare and education. After Western mass media waxed poetic about the need to protect civilians in Libya, the 2011 United Nations Security Council vote to impose sanctions on Libya for ‘gross and systematic violation of human rights’ and UN vote to impose a no-fly zone were used as the pretext for full-blown war on Libya. The reality is that from the mid-1800s until 1951 Libya had been passed from colonial power to colonial power and divvied up because of its vast oil wealth. It is seated in a region that contains approximately two thirds of the world’s oil reserves for which the British military has intervened some 30 separate times since the end of the Second World War to preserve British and US hegemony.
While Libya has a tumultuous history of sometimes allying with or against Western imperialist powers, by 2011, Libya was demonised primarily because it had become a block to Western imperialism. In a well-known pattern seen in Afghanistan, Serbia, Iraq and other wars, the vilification of then-leader of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi, and internal protests fomented by the Arab Spring were used as a pretext to justify a war in which NATO aircraft flew 28,000 sorties, an average of 133 a day for nearly eight months, killing between 50,000 and 70,000 people. It destroyed countless cities and towns, targeting civilian state infrastructure, a war crime, including factories producing the components to build and maintain the Great Manmade River project, the world’s largest irrigation system, transporting water from aquifers beneath Libya’s southern desert to 70% of the population. The destruction wrought by NATO in 2011 has left Libyan infrastructure and government in tatters. Libya’s warring governments, the UN-backed Government of National Accord in the west and the National Salvation government in the east, make critical social services impossible to administer and maintain, leaving a land where slavery and exploitation of migrants and refugees are conducted in a systematic way as sources of income across the country.
In this context, today’s Derna disaster condolences from former US President Barack Obama who presided over the NATO bombardment in 2011 are insulting. The British and US governments have offered aid of £1m and $1m respectively, pittances: cruel jokes given the expenditure of £600m-£1.25bn by Britain and $869m by the US in their 2011 bombing campaign.
Deep infrastructural consequence of 2011
The disaster in Derna began far ahead of rainfall as forecasters spotted the danger to Libya three days earlier as Storm Daniel ravaged Greece. Despite the days of notice, survivors in Derna report received contradictory alerts from different authorities in the hours before the storm. Division between Libya’s eastern and western government meant there was no coordinated emergency preparation, no evacuation for the population living along the Wadi Derna, the river that runs through the city that flooded during the devastating rainfall. The system of alerts communication was so poor that it is unclear if large portions of the population received any type of communication about the storm, meaning that many were completely unaware that risky areas of the city should be evacuated.
While the rainfall was a catalyst, the main contributor to Derna’s destruction was the collapse of two dams made of clay, rocks and earth which released a tide of devastation across the city. Both the dams, Abu Mansur and Al Bilad, were constructed between 1973 and 1977. A 1998 study commissioned by the Libyan government revealed cracks and fissures in the dams. This was further confirmed in 2003 when a group of Swiss engineers examined them and concluded the structures were under stress and recommended strengthening them and building a third dam to ease the pressure. The Libyan government awarded a repair and maintenance contract to a Turkish company in 2007, but work didn’t start until 2010 and stopped less than five months later, in 2011, when the NATO onslaught began. A decade later, a 2021 audit found that over $2.3m allocated to the dam’s maintenance was never used. Even as recently as 2022, a study written by hydraulic engineer Dr Abdelwanees Ashoor rated residents of Derna as ‘extremely vulnerable to flood risk’. All these warnings were ignored. The two dams’ shoddy maintenance and Derna’s subsequent decimation continue the bloody legacy of the 2011 NATO bombardment of Libya.
Soma Kisan
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 296 October/November 2023
