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00:00 To tell us more is Oliver Ferry from our foreign desk. Hello to you, Oliver. This crisis can
00:04 be laid at the door of climate change, but the state of Libya over the past decade has
00:08 also had an influence.
00:09 Yeah, Libya is, to be frank, not a fully functional state following the successive conflicts of
00:14 the past decade, which followed in turn the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Now,
00:21 this has had serious implications for infrastructure, such as the two dams in the Der Nawadi that
00:27 collapsed on Sunday night, leading to what has been referred to as a tsunami that engulfed
00:32 the city of Derna. Now, the dams were undergoing maintenance work by a Turkish contractor from
00:38 2007, but that company left Libya after the outbreak of the civil war in 2011. Getting
00:45 foreign companies to return to Libya over the past decade has been near impossible,
00:50 both because of the actual physical insecurity of the country and also the governmental insecurity,
00:56 the chances of not getting paid by a government were fairly high. The fact that Libya is being
01:01 run by two separate governments, one in Tripoli, the other in Tobruk, led by General Khalifa
01:07 Haftar, has complicated things further, not to mention the fact that there have been other
01:11 actors, such as the Islamic State, that have periodically ruled parts of Libya. And there
01:17 seems to have been little introspection on the part of the Libyan ruling class. The head
01:21 of the parliament, Agi Lasalas, yesterday described the catastrophe as "fate and a natural
01:26 catastrophe from which there was no mistake". This is actually reminiscent of Turkish President
01:31 Recep Tayyip Erdogan's comments after the earthquake in Turkey earlier this year. At
01:35 the time it was pointed out that actually a non-compliance with building codes by generally
01:41 people, builders who actually were his supporters and allies was actually responsible, largely
01:47 responsible. Now, not surprisingly, this has drawn a lot of outrage within Libya, particularly
01:51 as the dangers posed by the lack of upkeep on the dams was common knowledge among people
01:56 in Darnan. It was very much discussed. There was a public meeting about it as recently
02:00 as the 6th of September. There were even the subject of a poem called "Rain", written
02:06 just days before the flood by the local poet Mustafa al-Trabelsi, who himself died in the
02:11 disaster. And not only has the political situation prevented the required upkeep of the dam,
02:16 it's often actively facilitated its neglect. There are allegations hanging over the current
02:21 mayor of Darnan, who's accused of embezzling reconstruction funds that were allocated in
02:26 2021. This has naturally fed into a lot of cynicism among the Libyan people about the
02:33 official will to tackle both these long-standing problems and the disaster itself.
02:39 How are these existing conditions complicating the response?
02:41 Well, the scale of the disaster is daunting. According to the Red Crescent, the death toll
02:45 stands at over 11,000. A further 10,000 people are unaccounted for. And this is potentially
02:52 a massive portion of Darnan's population of 90,000. With clean drinking water now unavailable
02:58 to most people in the city, a humanitarian catastrophe awaits. And as ever with natural
03:03 disasters like this, the days and weeks following can be even worse than the disaster itself.
03:08 There's a strong sense that the response in Libya is not happening fast enough. The United
03:13 Nations is coordinating the relief response, but even they say the extent of the problem
03:18 is unclear. This is the scale of the actual problem that Libya is facing.
03:25 The same old problems are also rearing their heads in the aftermath. The Libyan parliament
03:29 has earmarked 1.9 billion euros to an emergency committee set up recently, actually before
03:35 the flood. This is earmarked specifically for a response. However, there's widespread
03:41 belief within Libya that much of this will not be used for its intended purposes because
03:46 the emergency committee is stuffed with cronies of General Khalifa Haftar, including his son
03:51 Saddam. Now, the past track record of the Eastern-based government does not bode well
03:57 for the management of these funds.
03:58 All right, Oliver, thank you very much. Oliver Ferry from our Foreign Desk.