Stephanie T. Williams
Geography as destiny
The second factor that contributed to the Derna tragedy was the city’s geographic location, on Libya’s periphery, at a considerable distance from the capital and even far removed from the eastern region’s largest and most important city, Benghazi. So, it is the case that state-building, and the promotion of good governance, must also take into account Libya’s geography.
Many of Libya’s cities and municipalities are located far away from Tripoli, the country’s capital, which is located some 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) to the west of Benghazi. In addition, a good number of Libya’s far-flung municipalities are inaccessible due to inadequate road maintenance and persistent insecurity. Given the limited writ of the successive U.N.-recognized governments, even towns closer to Tripoli complained about not receiving adequate resources.
The resentment of the Tripoli armed groups’ monopoly over vital institutions stoked the mini-war on Tripoli that took place in August 2018 when forces from Misrata and Tarhouna attacked. The consistent marginalization of these non-Tripoli communities is a conflict driver and has produced calls for secession or a return to the federalist model that characterized the state in its first 12 years before the 1951 constitution was amended toward a centralized model in 1963.
Gadhafi’s frequent bureaucratic eruptions and his internal security forces’ brutality further frayed ties within and among communities near and far, sowing a great deal of mistrust, the resonances of which are still felt today. Marginalization, corruption, misgovernance, and repression have fed extremism in Libya. When a faraway city like Derna was identified as an extremist hotbed, it became the target of further repression, its citizens punished and neglected during the Gadhafi era and in recent years following the outbreak of violence in eastern Libya in 2012.
When I visited the city in the summer of 2019, after Haftar’s forces had “cleansed” it of extremists, its downtown area was totally demolished, reminding me of what was left of Mosul, Iraq, in the summer of 2017 after the Islamic State group was defeated. Due to conflict, distance, and neglect, the Derna dams and other critical infrastructure had not been tended to in decades, rendering the citizens of the coastal town entirely vulnerable in the event of serious flooding. Indeed, other communities are equally vulnerable to catastrophic weather events; last year’s heavy rains produced historically devastating floods in the southern Libyan towns of Ghat and Al-Kufra.
A quarrelsome ruling class that sometimes takes its quarrels to the streets
The third factor that contributed to the Derna catastrophe was the incessant quarreling among members of Libya’s ruling class, which has produced nothing beyond 10 years of divided government, persistent dysfunction, and occasional bouts of violence.
This broken political model has hampered the executive’s ability to respond to fast-breaking events and has stifled the fostering and development of experts and technocrats whose skills are desperately needed to address the country’s many challenges, including the effects of climate change and Libya’s overreliance on fossil fuels. Instead, the ruling class has prioritized patronage politics, battles over the shallow legitimacy of the remaining institutions, and the nepotistic appointing of relatives to important positions.
For instance, Derna’s mayor at the time of the epic 2023 storm just happened to be the nephew of parliamentary head Aguila Saleh, which seems to have been his only qualification for the job. It, therefore, comes as little surprise that responsibility for Derna’s reconstruction was handed to one of Haftar’s sons.
Meanwhile, across the country in Tripoli, the head of the U.N.-recognized government, Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, has granted extraordinary access and power to his cousin Ibrahim. While they disagree on almost everything and went to war in 2014 over the results of parliamentary elections, Libya’s political class is in absolute alignment on one matter: to maintain the status quo which enables it to continue to access the state coffers.
A recent manifestation of ruling class quarreling was last year’s food fight over the management of Libya’s most prized sovereign institution, the Central Bank of Libya, which fully erupted in August 2024. The internationally-recognized governor, Sadiq al-Kabir, had held the position for 13 years, during which time the board of governors rarely met, if at all, with the governor monopolizing all fiscal and monetary decisionmaking.
When his relations with the Tripoli authorities soured, Kabir turned his sights east, funding the rival government operating under Haftar’s thumb. This spurred the Tripoli-based presidential council (PC) to summarily dismiss the governor, plunging Libya into a full-fledged and dire economic and financial crisis.
The PC pushed the country ever closer to the abyss by not adhering to the 2015 Libyan Political Agreement’s strictures on the selection of sovereign positions (a decision that is monopolized by the country’s two dysfunctional and usually dueling legislative bodies), and by not respecting the narrow authorities granted to them by the 2021 Libyan Political Dialogue Forum. Thanks to adept U.N. mediation, the central bank crisis was resolved, but the underlying causes of the rivalry over control of vital institutions remain untreated.
The post-Gadhafi ruling class has consistently preferred to continue cutting the cake, playing musical chairs, and engaging in endless “muhassasa,” or power-sharing arrangements.
Effective state-building and good governance require a degree of national consensus on what kind of state citizens desire and their relationship to those who govern them. This is not helped by the fact that almost 14 years after Gadhafi’s demise, Libya still lacks a constitution that determines the nature of the state—whether it is a centralized or decentralized model, whether it is a presidential system or a mixed presidential-parliamentary one—the relationship between the citizen and the state, and importantly, how the country’s resources are apportioned and managed. Rather, the post-Gadhafi ruling class has consistently preferred to continue cutting the cake, playing musical chairs, and engaging in endless “muhassasa,” or power-sharing arrangements.
A gaping lack of accountability
A related fourth factor that caused that huge loss in Derna is Libya’s gaping absence of accountability. Good governance requires accountability. Accountability is also needed to check the endemic corruption, abuses of power, and flagrant violations of basic human rights that have plagued Libya for the last 50-plus years. The rule of law rather than the rule of the gun must prevail.
Too often, it is the small fry, the minor officials, who are arrested and held for abuses of power or stealing from the public treasury. Meanwhile, the real predators, those who engage in patronage politics, wholesale plundering, organized crime, and crony capitalism, remain at large, free to continue forging their dirty deals. In the case of Derna, in a decision shrouded in mystery, 12 unnamed civil servants were reportedly given prison sentences for their role in the dams’ collapse.
One form of accountability should normally come through the ballot box. However, as I can attest, it is much easier to talk about elections in Libya than it is to produce them. The members of the ruling class, desperate to hold on to power, have buried the elections project by refusing to allow advancement on the constitutional process and the required (and consensually agreed to) electoral laws, and they and their institutions are now entirely bereft of popular legitimacy.
Elections are surely not a panacea, and if the conditions are not ripe, they can lead to further conflict, as was the case 10 years ago. However, it is also clear that the pursuit of an electoral process in Libya is absolutely key in order to remind the current legislators, who have been in power for more than 12 and 10 years respectively, that over 3 million of their compatriots have consistently demanded the right to democratically and regularly elect their representatives.
An inclusive political process that goes beyond the same old faces and that incorporates the full panoply, richness, and diversity of the Libyan body politic is being relaunched by the United Nations and deserves the full support of Libyans and international actors. We came rather close to such a formula first in 2018 and 2019 with the building of the National Conference, the holding of which was aborted by Haftar’s attack on Tripoli.
Then, in 2020, after the guns were silenced and we in the U.N. facilitated the signing of the nationwide ceasefire agreement, we convened the Libyan Political Dialogue Forum (LPDF), an inclusive gathering, to produce a detailed and time-bound roadmap that resulted in the formation of an interim government and a call for elections.
The nationwide ceasefire continues to hold but the LPDF’s lofty goals have yet to be achieved. Unfortunately, many in the international community mistook the congeniality that accompanied that political agreement in early 2021 for a true desire to push forward the electoral project. Using the pretext of “respecting” Libyan sovereignty, the international community allowed the LPDF roadmap to be cynically abandoned, and decision-making was returned to the hands of the very architects of the political stalemate.
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