Stephanie T. Williams
Some 17 months ago, in the early hours of September 11, 2023, thousands of residents of the quaint port city of Derna, nestled at the foot of the Jabal al-Akhdar (the Green Mountains) on Libya’s eastern coast, were washed out to sea by catastrophic flooding caused by Storm Daniel and the collapse of two dams that had been built in the 1970s during Moammar Gadhafi’s regime.
So great was the devastation and the loss of life that to date, thousands of bodies remain unrecovered and the death toll could well be close to 20,000; another 40,000 people were displaced (out of an overall city population of 90,000).
I can find no better words to describe the tragedy than those spoken by my former boss, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, when he mourned the loss of so many innocents: “They were victims many times over. Victims of years of conflict. Victims of climate chaos. Victims of leaders – near and far – who failed to find a way to peace. The people of Derna lived and died in the epicenter of that indifference – as the skies unleashed 100 times the monthly rainfall in 24 hours – as dams broke after years of war and neglect … as everything they knew was wiped off the map.”
This essay intends to use the Derna tragedy and its lessons to cast light on Libya’s long-running governance crisis and to propose a way forward. It is reasonable to ask whether Storm Daniel’s unusual magnitude would have caused death and destruction regardless of the state of Derna’s dams—that this was an act of nature, a freak storm of the kind we have increasingly witnessed as global warming wreaks havoc on the planet. Yet, this is at best a partial explanation, and it therefore cannot obscure the fact that there were other factors at play, explanations that are rooted in Libya’s history and its present.
I have identified five factors that led to the dreadful outcome in Derna: the legacy of statelessness left by Gadhafi; the historic marginalization of populations on Libya’s periphery; post-2011 conflicts and the irresponsibility of the current ruling class; the overall lack of political accountability; and the international community’s indifference.
From the onset, I wish to note that in my capacity as a U.N. mediator, I endeavored to avoid the inevitable reductionist narratives surrounding the Libyan conflict, such as the facile proposition that the 2011 revolution led to the division of the country into two parts. Rather than a split, what occurred in 2011 was a full-scale and deep societal implosion, resulting in the atomization in which Libya has languished.
Therefore, as a mediator, I believed that my primary task was to try to somehow reassemble all those fragments into a coherent whole. Indeed, some kind of societal cohesion is a vital ingredient for state-building. No less important is a common national identity. Both are absent in today’s Libya. Following Gadhafi’s demise, the grinding conflict in Libya has produced a bitter and unresolved contest over which Libyan figure has the capacity to assume the dictator’s two most salient qualities: his monopoly over the use of violence and his role as the (capricious) allocator-in-chief of the country’s vast riches.
Gadhafi’s legacy: An enduring
statelessness
In assessing the Libyan governance conundrum through the lens of the devastating Derna flood, the first factor to consider is the glaring absence of a strong, representative, and capable state, the achievement of which has eluded Libyans for many years. Indeed, a state (re)building project presumes the existence of a strong state prior to the upheaval in 2011.
In fact, as scholars such as Dirk Vandewalle in his book “A History of Modern Libya” have noted, what characterized both the Sanussi monarchy (1951-1969) and the Gadhafi (1969-2011) eras was something much closer to statelessness than a state in the modern sense of the word.
Following the nascent and unfinished institution-building efforts of the short-lived monarchy, Gadhafi—who disingenuously labeled himself as the “Brotherly Leader” or “Guide of the Revolution”—engaged in a 42-year experiment dedicated to the centralization of power and state deconstruction, epitomized by his frequent upendings of the status quo and declarations of one “revolution” after another, not to mention his swings from pan-Arabism to pan-Islamism and finally, pan-Africanism.
The net effect of these eccentric and theatrical perturbations was to keep Libyans off-balance, distrustful of each other, and perpetually in a state of flux and insecurity. To the extent that there were institutions during the tumultuous Gadhafi period, they were penetrated by a coterie of regime loyalists, fellow tribesmen, and their allies. Gadhafi also built a powerful internal security and intelligence system, ruthlessly punishing those who questioned his rule.
All of this turmoil had a direct impact on the building and maintenance of critical infrastructure, such as the dams in Derna, which were originally built in the 1970s but whose structural weaknesses were identified in the early 2000s. The regime waited for five years to address the maintenance issues and then got caught up in the maelstrom of the 2011 revolution.
In the euphoria that accompanied Gadhafi’s ouster in 2011, his Libyan successors and their foreign backers failed to adequately tackle the ‘day after’ challenge.
In the euphoria that accompanied the dictator’s ouster in 2011, his Libyan successors and their foreign backers failed to adequately tackle the “day after” challenge, which is not an easy task given authoritarian regimes’ tendency to capture institutions. The regime’s collapse rendered what was left of those institutions entirely brittle and vulnerable to predation by armed actors. This lack of institutional “puissance” (or power) continues to plague Libya today.
At the same time, the vengeful 2013 Political Isolation Law did not help in ensuring some continuity as it cast even minor “regime” officials (including those who had publicly and bravely joined the opposition) into purgatory and alienated many others who could have helped with the state-building task.
The absence of meaningful disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration and security sector reform efforts further contributed to the chaos that ensued, causing the ranks of the “revolutionaries” to swell from 30,000 to 300,000 personnel by the time I arrived in Libya in 2018.
In the years following Gadhafi’s downfall, the logic of perpetual conflict and the resort to arms soon overtook the pursuit of state and institution building. The state-building task, such as it existed, was assigned internationally to a United Nations political mission that often lacked the resources and personnel to tackle Libya’s unique set of issues.
Furthermore, for four and a half years, between mid-2014 and early 2019, due to ongoing conflict and instability in Libya, the U.N.’s international personnel were based in Tunisia. Places like Derna were entirely beyond our reach in this period, not to mention Libya’s south, which had fallen into the hands of extremist groups and thugs engaged in every type of illicit trade imaginable.
During my nearly four years working on Libya, from early 2018 through mid-2022, I would struggle to identify Libyan officials who were interested in any state-building exercise that would impede their ability to plunder and engage in patronage politics. The prime minister’s office was staffed by 900 people but only a few of these officials made any decisions.
On the other side of the country, former CIA asset Khalifa Haftar had launched his own project, building a military machine to seize control of the capital and render the “state” a mere appendage to his decidedly authoritarian project.
As for the rest of the international community, it did not appear to be prepared to invest much in what would be a painstaking, tedious, and long-term institution-building process. Instead, it seemed to have been converted to the paradigm of “stabilization” and the containment of issues such as terrorism and migration rather than the harder task of state-building.
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