Libya flood: Civil society unites in ramping up aid

For Haleema Rajab, a 39-year-old store owner, the frantic search for her son ended on Wednesday.

"We found him dead," she told DW in Derna, a coastal city in northern Libya hit by flash floods after two dams collapsed last Sunday.

"We buried him together with 600 bodies in the cemetery," Rajab said quietly while sitting down. She said she can't stop thinking about the bulldozer that dug out the mass grave for her 22-year-old son and the other bodies.

Community efforts to swiftly construct a cemetery for victims of the devastating floods stand in stark contrast to Libya's fractured attempts to coordinate disaster relief to the affected areas.

These shortcomings are also reflected in the inconsistent death toll figures. On Thursday morning, the news agency AP reported that the death toll was 5,100, while the Libyan Ministry of Interior said that numbers are close to 7,500. Those figures were announced only hours after Abdulmenam al-Ghaithi, Derna's mayor, told the Arabic TV channel Al Arabiya Wednesday night that they expected 18,000 to 20,000 deaths in the city.

Since 2014, Libya has been practically divided into two regions — east and west — under rival governments. The Government of National Unity, an internationally recognized UN-brokered provisional government based in Tripoli under Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Mohammed Dbeibah, holds sway in the west. The eastern region, where Derna resides, is governed by the Government of National Stability of Prime Minister Osama Hamad, based in Tobruk and backed by the Libyan National Army under General Khalifa Hiftar.

Libya's two competing governments have made coordination nearly impossible in the past, and disaster relief efforts for the floods in Derna have proven that once more.  

'Coordination of aid is knotty'

The catastrophe has brought a rare moment of unity, with government agencies across Libya rushing to help the flood-affected areas. The Tobruk-based government has led relief efforts, while the western government has allocated $412 million worth of funding for reconstruction in Derna and other towns in the east. But broader coordination remains to be seen.

"While both governments in the east and the west have announced the creation of coordination committees and allocated budgets, it remains unclear how this will translate on the ground," Virginie Collombier, professor at Rome's Luiss School of Government and co-editor of the recently published book"Violence and Social Transformation in Libya," told DW.

"Even in normal times, it is not exaggerated to say that the coordination between the central government in Tripoli, municipalities across Libya and international organizations is very knotty," she adds.

Moreover, researchers doubt that the full amount of domestic aid will reach the population.

"Years of not having a reliable government or any system that distributes needed resources fairly and efficiently through the country has left the civil society with a deep mistrust towards the administration," Hager Ali, a researcher at the German think tank GIGA Institute for Global and Area Studies, told DW. 

"Libya is not just divided between east and west," she said. "It will take decades to mend the deep split between national level politics and what is happening on municipal and community level."

Wolfram Lacher, Libya researcher at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), a think tank in Berlin, and co-editor of the book on Libya together with Collombier, told the German news broadcaster ZDF on Wednesday that he worries the rival governments and Hiftar will focus more on exploiting the crisis politically than on addressing it.

"I fear that they are primarily concerned with appearing as aid providers and influencing public opinion and much less with actually achieving something tangible," he told DW. "It will certainly involve carving up and embezzling the large amounts of money that the government in Tripoli has already allocated to Derna."

Civil society takes support into its own hands

For now, the mourning mother, Haleema Rajab, doesn't even expect government help, shelter or trauma aid. She is just happy that her brother and his family survived. "We will support each other," she said.

Due to conflicting agendas and unsuccessful coordination efforts nationally, Libyans have become used to being organized at a grassroots level.

"They have had to rely on each other because people know that help is not going to come from either of the two administrations," Ali said. 

This was also true once news of the flash flood started circulating a day after the dams broke. Libya's civil society stepped in immediately, online and offline.

"Libyans all across the country and the political divide have demonstrated huge solidarity, which is an important signal given the polarization between the people over the past years," said Collombier.

The Rome-based researcher said that Facebook was a central communication tool to share information on missing people, their phone numbers, and coordinate information and names. Libyans abroad set up online donation campaigns, which were hugely successful.

"Personally, I also know that the Libyan scout movement and a number of young people, especially from the eastern region, went to Derna to try and support," Collombier said.

She still regards the lack of a centrally coordinated aid system as the biggest obstacle, in addition to the damaged access to the city, which is an obstacle for the incoming international help. 

Weakened by political crackdown

However, despite the massive effort to help on a grassroots level, the Libyan civil society is far from robust.

"We should not forget that the eastern and western authorities have been cracking down on civil society organizations for many years," Collombier told DW.

"The civil society in Libya is trying to [provide] support, but since they have been subjected to major pressure of the past years, they are weakened, and their work is less efficient."

Meanwhile, the population of Derna has started looking full of hope at the incoming international aid teams and sniffer dogs in their search to find surviving people in the debris.

Also, Haleema Rajab welcomes the support despite her loss. "I pray they find more people alive," she told DW.

Edited by: Davis VanOpdorp