The Derna dam tragedy has ramped up pressure on the country’s leading politicians, viewed by some as the architects of the catastrophe.
| Zahra el-Gerbi wasn’t expecting much of a response to her online fundraiser, but she felt she had to do something after four of her relatives died in the flooding that decimated the eastern Libyan city of Derna. She put out a call for donations for those displaced by the deluge.
The oil-rich country, once the most affluent in North Africa, has been divided between rival administrations since 2014, with an internationally recognised government in Tripoli and a rival authority in the east, where Derna is located.Both are backed by international patrons and armed militias whose influence in the country has ballooned since NATO backed an Arab Spring uprising and bombed Libya’s army toIn the early hours of September 11, two dams in the mountains above Derna burst,.
Ali Khalifa, an oil rig worker from Zawiya, west of Tripoli, said his cousin and a group of other men from his neighbourhood joined a convoy of vehicles heading to Derna to help out with relief efforts. Even the local scout squad participated, he said.“The wound or pain of what happened in Derna hurt all the people from western Libya to southern Libya to eastern Libya,” he said.The disaster has fostered rare instances of the opposing administrations cooperating to help those affected.
But the distribution of aid into the city has been highly disorganised, with minimal amounts of supplies reaching flood-affected areas in the days following the disaster.
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