Residents of Derna in eastern Libya demonstrated on Monday (September 18) to demand accountability from authorities after deadly floods devastated the town, according to Agence France-Presse (AFP) correspondents.
Hundreds of residents gathered in front of the city’s grand mosque where they chanted slogans against the eastern authorities embodied by Parliament and its leader Aguila Saleh. “The people want the fall of Parliament”, “Aguila [Saleh] is the enemy of God”, “the blood of martyrs is not shed in vain”, or even: “Those who stole or betrayed must be hanged “, they chanted.
In a statement read during the demonstration on behalf of the “residents of Derna,” they called for “a rapid investigation and legal action against those responsible for the disaster.” They also called for “the urgent establishment of a UN support office in Derna” and the launch of “the city’s reconstruction process and compensation for affected residents.” The statement further demands the dissolution of the current city council and an investigation into the city’s previous budgets.
“The survivors of the city, in what remains of the city, against those who sowed death and destruction in the city,” Libyan analyst Anas El Gomati wrote on X (ex-Twitter), commenting on images of the demonstration.
Nearly 3,300 dead
According to politicians and analysts, the chaos in Libya has relegated the maintenance of vital infrastructure to the background, such as the Derna dams, the collapse of which caused the floods that devastated the city on September 10, killing 3,338 people according to the last provisional official report, communicated Monday evening by the Minister of Health of the East, Othman Abdeljalil.
Wracked by divisions since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, Libya is in fact governed by two rival administrations: one in Tripoli (west), recognized by the UN and led by Prime Minister Abdel Hamid Dbeibah, the another in the East, embodied by Parliament and affiliated with the camp of powerful Marshal Khalifa Haftar.
Haftar’s forces seized Derna in 2018, then a stronghold of radical Islamists and the only city in the east that escaped his control. But the eastern authorities maintain wary relations with Derna, considered a protest city since the time of Gaddafi.
The demonstration comes as rescuers are still searching for the bodies of thousands of missing people presumed to have died in the floods in this city of 100,000 inhabitants bordering the Mediterranean.
“Avoid a second devastating crisis”
The UN announced Monday that its agencies, including the World Health Organization, are working to “prevent the spread of disease and avoid a second devastating crisis in the region”, warning of a risk from “water contaminated and lack of hygiene”. “For your safety, it is forbidden to use or drink water from the local network, because it is polluted by flooding,” warned the Libyan Center for Disease Control.
International humanitarian organizations and Libyan officials have warned that the final toll could be much higher due to the very large number of missing people, estimated at thousands. In the city, bulldozers and workers tried to clear the earth from the courtyard of a mosque on Monday, amid a nauseating odor, according to an AFP journalist.
Rescuers sent by the United Arab Emirates met on Monday morning at the port of Derna, with their Libyan counterparts, to coordinate efforts to recover bodies at sea, according to an AFP correspondent on site. Other teams of divers, sent by Russia and Turkey, are active in the same sector.
Rupture of two dams
Storm Daniel caused the rupture of two dams upstream and caused a tsunami-like flood along the wadi that runs through the city. She took everything in her path.
Dozens of bodies are extracted daily from the rubble of neighborhoods devastated by floods or washed up by the sea and buried in an apocalyptic landscape.
An Egyptian helicopter carrier that will serve as a field hospital arrived Sunday, with emergency and rescue teams on board, according to Egyptian state media.
France, which deployed a field hospital and sent rescuers to Derna, announced Monday that it would also allocate “4 million euros to the United Nations for emergency aid and reconstruction in Libya.”
The European Union, for its part, announced the release of 5.2 million euros for humanitarian aid in the country.