2023-09-26 19:00:15
Shrouds, on a table at Aldaher Alahamer, mass grave site of victims of Storm Daniel, near Derna, Libya, September 21, 2023. NISSIM GASTELI FOR “THE WORLD” NISSIM GASTELI FOR “THE WORLD”
“I think I have all the capabilities to relieve and stabilize Libya. » On September 11, Elseddik Haftar, eldest son of Marshal Khalifa Haftar, the strong man of eastern Libya, announced from Paris that he plans to run in the presidential election, scheduled for 2023 but constantly postponed, confirming that the family clan is preparing for the octogenarian’s succession. At the same time, the city of Derna was swallowed up by the waves.
Twelve days later, Saturday September 23, a South African rescuer summed up the scale of the cataclysm that befell the city: “In thirty years of external interventions, I have never seen this. » About to leave the country, the head of the mission dispatched by Pretoria was then in the process of evacuating one of the very few professional rescue teams who had come from abroad to find survivors.
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Two weeks after the passage of Cyclone Daniel, Derna is nothing but pain. The population is left to its own devices, physically and psychologically, and finds itself struggling with bankrupt institutions in a country fractured between two governments which absolve themselves of any responsibility in the face of the tragedy. The West, recognized by the international community, and the East, each with their own administration and militias, making aid coordination more complex.
Unbearable blur
In fact, it was on the shoulders of an army of civilian volunteers, coming from all over the country, in convoys formed from villages and towns, that the relief operations rested. With only their bare hands and shovels to dig a sea of mud and rubble in search of survivors and bodies. Wandering in the streets, traumatized, the survivors are reduced to waiting for news of their loved ones, carried away by the thousands. Throughout the week following the disaster that occurred on the night of September 10 to 11, the number of identified remains increased and decreased according to contradictory statements from the authorities. The majority of victims, whether buried or considered “disappeared”, are condemned to anonymity: an unbearable and traumatic blur for the living.
You have to travel around twenty kilometers to reach what seems to be the unspeakable: the mass grave of Derna. Isolated and far from the city, the place is a symbol of the confusion and opacity surrounding the question of the number of victims.
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There is neither peace nor contemplation there: the shrill retreat alarms of the bulldozers busy digging a new trench drown out the conversations. While the official toll has only evolved marginally for a week – 3,875 dead, according to the latest report provided by the authorities on Monday – we continued to bury dozens of anonymous people here: 120 in the hours preceding our visit , September 21.
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