The Derna Tragedy: A Natural or Imperialist Disaster?

Rescue operations continue in Darnah, Libya (16 September 2023). Photo via Shutterstock. Rescue operations continue in Darnah, Libya (16 September 2023). Photo via Shutterstock.

The Derna Tragedy: A Natural or Imperialist Disaster?

By : Hèla Yousfi

The chaos unleashed by storm Daniel on Derna, a city in eastern Libya, is nothing short of apocalyptic. The two dams that broke after the torrential rains flooded the city and tore the land out from under its inhabitants, washing away entire neighborhoods. This catastrophe not only took a tragic toll (with over 11,300 dead and 10,100 missing in the floods, according to a UN report), but also rekindled a decade-long trauma of civil war, leaving both infrastructure and populations vulnerable.[1]

While there is a consensus that the Daniel storm is linked to climate change, which is increasing the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, the reaction of mainstream Western media has been swift. The Derna tragedy is said to be compounded by the incompetence of local Libyan elites, tribal rivalries, and corruption.[2] Libya's ongoing destruction is presented as the result of historical grievances - to be blamed on the explosive legacy of Gaddafi's reign - which led to a civil war with devastating consequences for the population. It is true that the interrelated economic, political and social crises have been exacerbated by the conflict between the various parties - principally the Libyan National Army (LNA) and the Government of National Accord (GNA). However, while we must legitimately express our indignation at the responsibility of Libya's local political and economic elites in this tragedy, who are less concerned with the fate of the Libyan people than with maintaining their own power, we must also avoid pulling the wool over our eyes. For what have we been witnessing since 2011 if not a systematic invisibilization of the interdependence between local, regional, and global dynamics, including constant Western politico-military interference in Libya and the Arab region, and a consolidation of an imperial mode of inhabiting the earth?

It is therefore urgent to re-examine the Derna tragedy in light of a long history of colonialism, confiscation of natural resources and destruction of living and non-living things for Western hegemonic purposes via war and militarism.

Is Gaddafi the Only Culprit?


It has to be said that the representations conveyed by the media and by academic analysis have been determined to reduce everything Libyan to Muammar Gaddafi. The richness of Libya's social, economic and political dynamics have been systematically obliterated and presented as the whims of a mad leader.[3] The emphasis on the figure of one man is said to be reinforced by the absence of modern state institutions in Libya. A single prism is used to account for the functioning of Libyan society past and present: tribalism, which is said to have been meticulously and skillfully manipulated by Gaddafi to keep himself in power, and which explains the widespread chaos in Libya today. In this vision, Libyan society, if it exists at all, is but a shadow of Gaddafi. Thus, the long history of Western foreign intervention in Libya: sanctions, funding of armed groups, bombings, etc., is miraculously absent from the dominant Western media discourse.

In this respect, it's worth recalling that national borders in Arab countries (imposed by the Sykes-Picot agreements of May 16, 1916) correspond less to the emancipation aspirations of peoples than to the distribution of influence and energy resources between the European colonial powers in the region. The result was a heterogeneous and ambiguous path to statehood.[4] The launch of the al-Fātiḥ revolution in 1969 and the subsequent creation of the Jamahiriya in 1977 were part of a more general trajectory that had characterized Libya's historical development since the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century. The absence of a modern institutional framework had its origins in the historical inability of the colonial authorities to establish hegemonic institutions aligning with the colonized population. Thus, unlike neighboring Maghreb countries, Libya did not inherit a colonial state administration. As for the Libyan monarchy that proclaimed independence in 1951, it was disappointing for the people, since the country remained under British and Italian tutelage and allowed the Americans to open a military base.[5]

Then, when Colonel Muammar Gaddafi came to power, he launched the Islamic Cultural Revolution on April 16, 1973, and reorganized his country's institutions in 1977. In this way, he subjected the popular revolution to an authoritarian regime in which political, economic, military and diplomatic decisions were totally outside the scope of political institutions representing the "people" and conventional notions of the state. Neither savior nor demon, Gaddafi adopted the same mode of government as Arab rulers, based on rentier logic, trying as best he could to tame tribal structures that were insoluble in the State.[6] Libya is Africa's 4th-largest crude oil producer, 17th in the world, and has Africa's 5th-largest natural gas reserves. These revenues enabled Gaddafi to redeem popular legitimacy through the use of hydrocarbon revenues, which he sold to European countries with France as his main partner.

However, Libyan society remains committed to "statelesness," rejecting modern state structures, resisting Gaddafi's total control and opposing Western imperialism.[7] This Libya, supposedly ruled by a single man who has been described as a madman, has rapidly become a threat to the stability of the international order. Western interference thus found the ideal scapegoat. From military bombardments to international sanctions, Western intervention in Libya has not only curbed the Gaddafi regime's ambitions to counter Western colonialism/imperialism, it has also led to internal violence which has largely contributed to blocking the emergence of relations of trust, legitimacy and solidarity likely to build an alternative government and a state corresponding to the aspirations of the Libyan people. Defeated militarily and ideologically, isolated by sanctions, the Gaddafi regime rapidly abandoned its revolutionary and egalitarian ideals and gradually lost its legitimacy. Gaddafi's status is gradually changing from that of a privileged partner of France and the United States to that of an unapproachable dictator. The affair surrounding the Lybian funding of Sarkozy's campaign is a fine illustration.[8]

This long history culminated in the popular uprising of February 2011, an uprising quickly confiscated by the Gaddafi regime's inability to listen to the rebels' demands, as well as by military intervention under the aegis of the UN and NATO - of which France was the main driving force - sinking the country into further destruction and internal violence.[9] In addition to the conquest of natural resources and political control pursued by the Western powers (France, USA, EU, etc.), there was also an incompetence of local political elites and a civil war crystallizing regional antagonisms between competing regional powers (the Turco-Qatari alliance, the UAE-Egypt-Saudi Arabia coalition in support of Haftar, Russia, etc.).

To this day, even if the alliances and players have changed several times, the civil war and the ensuing violence have only intensified, explaining the widespread collapse and chaos that led to the Derna tragedy. But while this war seems to have ravaged most of the country's infrastructure, it is clear that it has spared the oil wells and refineries where the major international oil groups are based.

An Imperial Way of Inhabiting the Earth Maintained by Perpetual Warfare


Hilary Clinton's famous phrase commenting on the assassination of Gaddafi, "We came, we saw, he died", sums up the logic of imperialism and the death it imposes on the countries of the South. Perpetual warfare in Palestine, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere is not just a means of maintaining the capitalist world order, but a vital condition for maintaining Western hegemony in the region. Libyans and the peoples of the South hear Clinton's phrase: "the Americans came, saw us and killed us to keep themselves alive". It is a reminder that the North-South divide does not only concern the production and transfer of value, but also about biophysical and moral issues that do not necessarily translate into monetary terms.

The global capitalist order was made possible by an imperial way of inhabiting the earth, which has its origins in the history of industrial capitalism in the 19th century.[10] This imperial mode of occupying the earth is an entanglement of power relations and domination, using classical means of resource extraction such as war, but also through countless strategies such as the colonization of minds and knowledge, or the export of modes of consumption and production that destroy social relations as well as nature. It is this imperial mode of land occupation that is historically at the root of climate change, for which oil companies bear a crushing responsibility.[11] In this respect, it is worth remembering that it is this Western imperialism that has also reinforced climate change, for which these oil companies bear an overwhelming responsibility.[12] Libya and the Arab world more generally, is one of the regions most exposed to the devastating political, social and economic effects of climate change: from rising sea levels on the Egyptian coast to unusual flooding in the Gulf States and worsening problems of access to drinking water in Tunisia, all the indicators are red. While the Arab world has contributed little to global warming, due to a mainly rentier and non-productivist economy, climate change cannot be analyzed without taking into account the centrality of colonial history and Western imperialism in the emergence of a fossil fuel economy. The use of coal, and later the discovery of oil, not only reshaped the landscape of the Arab region, but also had a lasting impact on the lives of humans and non-humans alike, introducing a rentier economy largely shaped by colonial capitalist intervention. This tragic history is limply recalled when Total's CEO hails the takeover of Marathon Oil Libya, in 2018: "this acquisition is part of Total's strategy to strengthen our portfolio with high-quality, low-technical-cost oil assets, while consolidating our historic presence in the Middle East and North Africa."[13]

It's clear that this imperial approach to inhabiting the earth is no longer confined to Western countries. Emerging actors from the South, such as China, India, and Russia, are also adopting it, accelerating and exacerbating in their turn the inequalities and ecological and social consequences of this devastating imperialist logic.

The Derna tragedy demonstrates once again the urgent need for a political and ecological reflection capable of tracing the way in which the history and present of Western imperialism, its accomplices and rivals, is intrinsically linked to the exploitation of the resources and lives of the South, which has gradually turned into a massive destruction of the global ecosystem.



[1] https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/45368


[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/13/libya-floods-the-outcome-of-the-climate-crisis-meeting-a-failed-state


[3] Capasso, M. (2023). Everyday Politics in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. Syracuse University Press.


[4] https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/national-sovereignty-for-arab-countries-utopia


[5] https://books.openedition.org/ifpo/7016?lang=fr


[6] https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/42444


[7] L. Anderson, « La Libye de Kadhafi », Maghreb-Machrek, n° 170, 2000, p. 12-15.


[8] L’affaire du financement libyen de la campagne de Sarkozy


[9] https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/international/150916/le-parlement-britannique-remet-en-cause-les-raisons-de-la-guerre-en-libye-de-sarkozy


[10] Malm, A. (2017), l’anthropocène contre l’histoire, la Fabrique.


[11] Brand, U., & Wissen, M. (2021). The imperial mode of living: Everyday life and the ecological crisis of

capitalism. Verso Books.


[12] Brand, U., & Wissen, M. (2021). The imperial mode of living: Everyday life and the ecological crisis of capitalism. Verso Books.


[13] https://afrique.latribune.fr/finances/commodities/2018-03-03/libye-total-desormais-actionnaire-du-celebre-champ-petrolier-de-waha-770520.html

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Reconciling Ouarzazate with Solar Energy in Our Desert Town

[This article was published by The Markaz Review on 15 January, 2024.]

I grew up in an arid region. Anyone raised in a desert environment knows that arid areas help you develop a strong sense of observation. You remember when a small plant appeared to change the look of your environment. You smell rain from far away and know that it’s coming your way. You learn not to trust dry rivers even in the dead of the summer because torrential rains may fall far away and can cause the flooding of rivers at any time.

You also learn to gaze at the sky and notice everything that is happening in your surroundings.

In some places, this may be a kind of science, but for desert environments it is part of life and being fully immersed in one’s ecosystem. When it rains, your heart bursts in happiness because you will soon see grass, flowers or other desert roots sprout from the ground. This acute awareness of the environment inhabits you, never to leave — even if you live thousands of miles away from home. I would add that absence from the homeland heightens this sense of observation. The desire, when you return home, to find and reconnect with familiar people and places sharpens it even more. It’s completely normal for the migrant to come back home and seek both the people and places they had left behind. Anthropologist Aomar Boum has captured many of the intricacies of this homecoming in his article “On Coming Home: The Elasticity of Migration.” The temporal space between each time you leave and the next time you come back is when entire demographic shifts take place in the community through death, marriages, and newborns. While this biological shift is entirely normal and smooth, any topographic change, on the other hand, is brutal to witness.

Although I was aware of this basic fact, I was not prepared to experience the brutality of the transformation I noticed when I returned to my village in southeast Morocco in December 2022. My annual visits had been suspended by the global pandemic for two and a half years, making the changes even more apparent. Not even the void left by the passing of my mother in 2017 surpassed the striking change that a two-hundred-meter-high solar energy tower (ttāqa) made to my familiar surroundings during my extended absence. My family and I used to be able to look at the Drâa Valley while eating our breakfast on the roof of our house. We could see the Atlas Mountains and the lush green fields and palm trees that form two parallel, green lines alongside the Drâa river bed. This was my favorite part of coming back home. I could sip Moroccan tea and eat lmsmn (Moroccan crepes) with cheese and jam while enjoying the extended time I spent scanning the beautiful landscape that stretched beyond what the eye can see. Even downtown Ouarzazate is visible from the roof, and its historic landmark — a concrete water tank — was until recently the highest building in the city. The rest of the environment is a coherently-integrated landscape in which reddish soil colors are interwoven with the green oases, which in turn, blend nicely with the sandy and pebbly bed of the oftentimes dry river. The many kasbahs that the blue Atlas mountains overlook from a distance, like ferocious guards ready to pounce on anyone who misbehaves in this unattainable land, have countless stories to tell about a history that has yet to be written.

The Ouarzazate Solar Power Station, also called Noor Power Station, in Morocco (courtesy Noor).
 

I first encountered the solar energy tower last December. I realized that the field of vision from the roof of my house had been changed forever. This very high tower with scorching hot projector-like mirrors at the top dominated the entirety of the area. When I first saw it, it reminded me of the high atomic towers that nuclear states build in deserts to drop their lethal creations. I knew it was not an atomic tower, but wherever I went and wherever I turned my face, I only saw one thing: an incandescent solar energy tower. It occupied my visual landscape, dominated the nature around us, and overshadowed the life that was, for sure, unfolding in its vicinity. Even when I did not want to look toward the tower, it looked at me and sent the reflections of its scorching hot flames in my direction, forcing me to stare at it longer and wonder about the impact of the burning fire at its pinnacle.

This phallic structure’s sudden appearance in my space spurred me to think more about its significance for the environment and the people who have now added a new word to their register. Ttāqa (both the energy and the tower) is now Amazighized, and the place is so self-referential that no one even bothers to define it. When you say ttāqa you mean the solar energy farm, the tower, and the energy it produces in the meantime. You also mean this monstrosity that has stolen visual attention from everything that Ouarzazate used to stand for.

Sattelite photo of the power station (Wikipedia).
 

Ttāqa in the local language refers to the local Noor-Ouarzazate solar project but also, albeit inadvertently, to a national project with transnational ramifications on renewable energies. As its “Value Chains” video posted on YouTube shows, the Moroccan Agency for Sustainable Energy (MASEN) was created in 2010 to harness all renewable energies across Morocco. In its brochure entitled “MASEN: An Inexhaustible Force of Development,” the agency seeks to produce %42 and then %52 of Morocco’s electricity from renewable sources. Seen from the Global North, this goal is both lofty and commendable. 

Ouarzazate Solar Power Station, also called Noor Power Station. 
 

It dovetails entirely with the global move towards renewable energies to mitigate the effects of global warming on planet earth. As a country that produces no gas, Morocco has pressing economic reasons to harvest sun and wind energy to achieve both energy security and self-sufficiency. However, there is always a gap between official discourse, which is abreast of international developments, and the way projects like ttāqa impact ordinary people. In a trenchant article entitled “Life in the Vicinity of Morocco’s Noor Solar Energy Project,” Moroccan sociologist, Zakia Salime, who conducted meticulous fieldwork in this area, has written that the lands on which the project is located “consist of 3,000 hectares slated to host the largest solar energy complex in the world.” Salime also draws attention to facts that the agency’s glossy literature has not addressed, adding that “8,000 villagers lost their access to collective pasture in 2010 due to this massive land acquisition.” Further complicating the issue of renewable energies, Salime highlights the long-term consequences of the discursive practices that are enmeshed in the agency’s integrated extractive approach. Salime’s compelling analysis opens up a breach in the temporality of solar energy and its devastating impact on the communities’ way of life and sense of self.

The station seen from a drone.
 

Ttāqa disrupted valued connections between people and territory, ushering in its commodification. In desert people’s value system, land has never been a commodity. It is inherited and passed down from generation to the next, and woe to the one who sells land! After all, land is mother earth and the connection to it should be one of nurturing and respect within a strict balance between need and desire rather than exploitation and extraction. Although he grew up thousands of kilometers away from southern Morocco, Ibrahim al-Koni, the Libyan Amazigh novelist, has written in his book Wațanī șahrā’ kubrā  (My Homeland is Great Desert) that, “The bleeding of the earth, which is called oil, has managed to bring a curse on the people of the land because this liquid was really never petrol. In fact, it was the blood of our mother earth. Drilling it is a violation of the belly of this mother and a defiling of its sacred soul.” However, the advent of extractive entities has upended these value systems, creating, along the way, the conditions for additional precarity and dispossession in areas formerly spared the encroachment of extractive capitalism. Because land was not commodified, communal land ownership practices ensured that everyone had a parcel of land to build a home, and homelessness is unheard of. Until recently, renting a house was not even a thing in the region. If you owned an empty house that you no longer needed, you lent it for free to a property-less family until they could afford to have their own house built.

Ksar of Ait Ben Haddou, region of Ouarzazate.
 

There is a saying that one can hide hunger but they cannot hide homelessness. This proverb emphasizes the importance of having a place to live. The communal land that was distributed amongst community members, despite all the problems that stemmed from intra-community favoritism and internal power dynamics, created a land-based safety network for everyone. Land and water have always been essential for sustained existence in any desert community. Starting from 2000, however, many village communities lost their ancestral lands to investment schemes that dispossessed people in the southeast. The process started even before the 2000s in places that had valuable land. This land governance appeared in the early 1990s in different places, where state agents kept simple intra-community conflicts unresolved within land-rich villages in order to sustain the factors of inter-communal conflict irresolution to, as a result, expropriate their valuable lands. Only recently did it become clear that the irresolution of technical disagreements over land in land-rich communities was a strategy to facilitate the confiscation of their ancestral lands, which are now parceled out to rich investors who have turned them into lucrative projects. As a result, the rich are getting richer whereas the descendants of those who once owned the land are doomed to buy it from the descendants of these land grabbers in the future.

The solar fields.
 

Beyond the questions of land and dispossession of local communities, ttāqa’s exuberant presence colonizes Ouarzazate’s identity. Whether you fly into or out of Ouarzazate, the solar power tower is the first thing you see from the airport. During the day, this panopticon structure, which my wife likened to the “Eye of Sauron,” acts like an omnipresent, divine eye that has a 360-degree field of vision. Whichever direction I went, the tower was there to remind me that the space I had known my entire life is no longer what it used to be. The sea of solar panels, which exquisite Moroccan engineering skills combined with cutting-edge European technology and multinational adventure capitalist investors’ money built, swallowed a sprawling 8,000 acres of communal land. What once served as a pasture terrain and potential land for farming and construction is now occupied by a colossal and far-reaching technostructure that transforms sun rays into electricity. The imposing nature of the structure inspires awe. Seen within the semi-desertic environment, ttāqa has a sublime presence that dazzles the eyes of those who have not encountered technology of this scale in their immediate environment.

Ttāqa tower is not different from the various desert-focused projects in different parts of the world. From California, where the US, Department of Land Management has developed a Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan to generate electricity to western Saudi Arabia, where the state is building the Neom desert city, these different approaches have a longer history that is embedded in the understanding of deserts as spaces for pioneerism, testing and experimentation.

Saharanism, the imaginary, which I argue, underlies these endeavors, has a long history of perceiving deserts not only as empty and extractable but also as safe spaces where what happens in deserts stays in deserts. The desert is mistakenly seen as a sealed off world where things can be hidden. As I show in my forthcoming book Desert Imaginations, images of virginity and novelty were projected on deserts to accommodate the myriad extractive activities that took place in them. MASEN’s aforementioned promotional video states that “[b]efore the intervention of MASEN and the National Office for Electricity, these barren lands were devoid of any activity. The wind blew on the mountains without turning any turbines and the water flew in the rivers without being stored in dams.” These statements are part of a long lineage of colonialist thinking about deserts spaces as exploitable and extraction-friendly spaces, revealing, in the meantime, the Saharanism’s pervasive nature even in places where we might expect awareness of its dangers.

The visitor who only sees the universalized “Eye of Sauron,” which waylays them in every direction, may leave Ouarzazate thinking that it is only a place for films and solar energy. The tower’s overbearing presence and its sublime presence foster amnesia.

A Desert Named Peace cover

A Desert Named Peace is published by Columbia.
 

Images of desert virginity and unusedness actively wipe out multi-secular histories of pastoralism and nomadism on the land. The shepherds who used to cross these acres with their sheep do not count in the age of solar energy, which mobilizes advanced technologies to harvest the sun rays. The life style Saharans have always taken for granted is now declared useless by solar energy gurus who rewrite history based on a land’s contribution to myriad forms of extraction. This same line of transforming the desert underlies the statement of MASEN’s head of the Department of Technical Design at MASEN when she takes pride in “transforming a bare, sterile, and unusable land into something green, flamboyant that will enlighten the lives of many households.” The insistence on the land’s barrenness and sterility is not a new trope in deserts spaces. Deserts have always been seen as tabula rasas where inventors of all persuasions could leave their imprint by testing the next thing that would change the course of human history. After all, as historian Benjamin Brower argues compellingly in his book A Desert Named Peace, the desert has been associated with desires, but also with various forms of violence meted to the people, ideas, property, and the environment.

As ttāqa’s era reconfigures the visual and territorial makeup of my hometown, there is a real danger that solar modernity will overshadow the area’s rich cultural histories. Our world will definitely be a better place with less gas emissions. The more humans are able to decrease the greenhouse effect’s impact on the environment, the better for our planet earth. However, we also have to take heed of the fact that producing cleaner energy takes a toll on communities whose lands are seized to generate this exportable energy. Each time I looked towards the ttāqa or rather, more accurately, each time it looked at me, I could not but worry about the myriad local histories that will be relegated to oblivion. Ouarzazate has already experienced several erasures as a global open-air cinematic studio for Hollywood movies. Pursuing a Saharanism-infused vision, the desert landscape has stood in in multiple movies for ancient Arabia, war-torn Yemen, biblical Palestine, and World War II Sahara, among others. Its identity as a historical space that once linked Morocco to the Sahara and the role it occupied in colonial strategies have become arcane knowledge glossed over by more powerful images of international cinema.

The ttāqa adds more complexity to this situation, the pasture lands, which were used for generations, have already been cast as virgin or sterile lands in the discourse of energy technocrats. History-rich villages, which witnessed tremendous historical events, are already tucked away in the mountains, where centuries-old kasbahs are falling to ruins, but solar energy technomodernity will further eclipse them. Who will remember El Glaoui and his lengthy rule in the region? Who will remember that the dam that feeds the enormous installation with water used to house political prisoners in the 1970s? Who will remember that General Madbouh, the first governor of Ouarzazate after independence, was the mastermind of the first coup against King Hassan II? This is not to say that the solar energy agency is actively erasing history, but rather that there is a risk that all people will remember about the place is the cinema studios and the ttāqa’s technostrucure. The visitor who only sees the universalized “Eye of Sauron,” which waylays them in every direction, may leave Ouarzazate thinking that it is only a place for films and solar energy. The tower’s overbearing presence and its sublime presence foster amnesia. Even as local sites of historical significance wane as a result of negligence, ttāqa glows every day under the watchful eyes of an army of dedicated technicians and engineers. The imposing nature of the installation discombobulates the mind and prevents one from asking questions about the land and its ownership.

At sunset, ttāqa disappears. Its incandescent eyes stop glowing even as the energy it stored during the day continues to generate electricity for another seven hours after the sun sets. Because of its omnipresence during the day, I could not but look for the tower at night only to be reminded that it is like an elusive phoenix; it appears during the day only to disappear at night. This reminded me of my childhood in my 1980s electricity-less village. We enthusiastically waited for sunset in order to form a circle around the fire or lamba (the lamp) to hear stories from the mouths of our parents. Now that the sunset had weaned off the tower, and its light has gone out for the night, I wondered what stories the elders were telling their children, if any. I wondered if somewhere in the villages closer to the ttāqa a grandfather or a grandmother starts a story to their grandchildren with the mantra “once before ttāqa, we had access to our land….” There was no way for me to know, but I am all hope that the story of the land is passed down to the next generations.

The only thing I knew for certain was that ttāqa followed me into the plane the next morning, and it was the most visible part of the city as my flight took off to Casablanca.