The Derna Tragedy: A Natural or Imperialist Disaster?

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.