Libya: An Ongoing War Crime
We Came, We Saw, They’re Still Dying
Andrew Cockburn September 15, 2023The sudden catastrophic flood that drowned at least 20,000 people in the eastern city of Libya in the early morning of September 11 should not have come as a surprise. Derna has been swept by floods many times just in the last 100 years- 1941, 1959, 1968 with the 1959 event being especially violent. In the 1970s the Qaddafi government hired a Yugoslav company to build two dams on the normally dry riverbed upstream from the coastal city, which appear to have served their purpose in protecting Derna from another deluge in 1986.
Excuses for this disaster are coming in thick and fast, including climate change,or just “fate,” according to Agile Salah, “prime minister” of the eastern half of the country controlled by former (?) CIA asset Khalistan Haftar, recruited by the Agency in Chad back in the 1980s. But the finger of blame must surely point to the Obama-Clinton regime, sponsors of the 2011 insurrection that overthrew and murdered Muammar Qaddafi. As Hilary Clinton memorably and disgustingly crowed: “We came, we saw, he died!”
Qaddafi was not the only Libyan who died, given that the country has been riven by civil war ever since, notably thanks to Haftar’s efforts to take total control. Mass graves consequent on heavy fighting around Tripoli in 2019-2020 are, according to Human Right Watch, still being unearthed.
Inevitably , the chaos has led to a breakdown of care and maintenance of vital infrastructure, including the vital dams protecting Derna. As recently as last November, Abdelwanees A. R. Ashoor, of Omar Al-Mukhtar University in Albeida, Libya, warned that “without immediate measures” to maintain the dams, the result could be a “huge flood” with catastrophic” effects. Nothing was done.
However, thanks to the destruction of the Libyan state and ongoing anarchy, a threat more serious than the Derna flood threatens the existence of the entire population.
Though the poor people of Derna were swept away by raging waters, the major underlying problem for most of the population, especially in the coastal cities, has formerly been a lack of drinking water as local supplies dried up or became unusable brackish. Without redress the cities, including Tripoli and Benghazi, would become uninhabitable. Qaddafi set out to change all that, and largely succeeded.
In 1983the Libyan leader launched the “Great Man Made River” (MMR) project, a $30 billion scheme to bring water from distant aquifers deep under the Sahara. The water flowed along thousands of miles of giant concrete pipes to thirsty city-dwellers and newly irrigated farmland. By the early 2000s much of the project was complete.
Ironically, while Washington echoed with threat-inflationary cries regarding Qaddafi’s malign intentions- including claims by the CIA that irrigation project excavations were in reality a giant underground chemical weapons factory - the project was actually in the hands of U.S. construction engineering corporation Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Haliburton, whose CEO for much of the 1990s was none other than Richard B. Cheney, later infamous as Vice President to George W. Bush and principal architect of the Iraq invasion. When U.S. sanctions on Libya precluded direct American participation in the project, control, at least on paper, shifted to Haliburton’s European subsidiary. I recall how, during a visit to Libya in 1999 a Libyan engineer took me to his warehouse outside Tripoli. Inside were large crates stacked floor to ceiling, each boldly labeled HALIBURTON. “You see,” he said, “the Americans went out the door, but they came back in the window.”
Come 2011 and the martial fervor of Secretary of State Clinton, not to mention the cupidity of French President Nicholas Sarkozy, eager to get his hands on Libyan oilfields, such amicable arrangements went away and construction gave way to destruction. Among other assaults, on July 22, 2011, NATO bombers struck and heavily damaged the factory that supplied the concrete pipes used for necessary repairs to the MMR, claiming that it was a weapons storage plant.
The vast extent of the MMR, as well as its dependence on pumping stations and a reliable power supply, render it highly vulnerable to sabotage. On July 23 this year, for example, someone blew up a portion of the line supplying the eastern town of Ajdabiza, causing widespread flooding across several villages. Sabotage on another artery, supplying Sirte, cut off supplies there. Two years ago, Senussi tribesmen cut off Tripoli’s water pending the release from prison of one of their number by the authorities there. Overall, the whole infrastructure of the system is decaying for lack of investment, raising the grim prospect down the road of an entire country losing its drinking water.
The wreckage and suffering inflicted by the U.S. and its allies in their whimsical drive-by military interventions, including in Libya, may not be as immediately visible as the horrific images from Derna. But they will endure for a very long time
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