King Mohammed VI of Morocco Photograph: Map/AFP/Getty Images Offers of help from the US, Tunisia, Turkey, Taiwan and, significantly, the former colonial power France have not been accepted. So far only search and rescue teams from the UK, Qatar, Spain and the United Arab Emirates have been allowed in. While it is much easier to get international aid to Morocco, the government has been criticised for not accepting more assistance. We need bags for the bodies.”Īnother official said the number of dead people could increase significantly as the “sea is constantly dumping dozens of bodies”. The mayor, Abdulmenam al-Ghaithi, said: “We actually need teams specialised in recovering bodies.”Ī search team director, Lutfi al-Misrati, told Al Jazeera: “I fear that the city will be infected with an epidemic due to the large number of bodies under the rubble and in the water. International aid only started to reach Derna on Wednesday afternoon, two days after the catastrophe. Is it 20,000 dead, as the mayor of Derna says? It could be more.” Libya’s attorney general has been asked by senior politicians to launch an urgent inquiry “to hold accountable everyone who made a mistake or neglected by abstaining or taking actions that resulted in the collapse of the city’s dams”.īeaumont says: “We still don’t really know the scale of the disaster. And we could have avoided most of the human casualties.” “The emergency management authorities would have been able to carry out evacuation of the people. “They could have issued warnings,” said Petteri Taalas, its secretary general. The World Meteorological Organization said the huge death toll could have been avoided if Libya, a failed state for more than a decade, had a functioning weather agency. It was a place that worked – in a horrible way with no rights or freedoms, but it had decent infrastructure.
“As nasty, autocratic states go, Libya under Gaddafi functioned and it had a huge amount of money from oil. These safety concerns, and crumbling infrastructure since the death of Gaddafi, have made it very hard for international aid agencies or reporters to get a real sense of the devastation in Derna. “Reporting from Libya was one of the most dangerous jobs I’ve ever done,” says Beaumont, who was last in Libya to cover the toppling of its previous dictator, Col Muammar Gaddafi, in 2011. But the flooding is in Derna, in the eastern region controlled by Gen Khalifa Haftar of the Libyan National Army, who has been supported by Egypt and helped by Russian mercenaries from the notorious Wagner group. If a visa was granted, it would be for the western areas controlled by the government in Tripoli. But there’s no telling if one would be granted, or how long it would take to come through. Photograph: Esam Omran Al-Fetori/Reutersįirstly, you need a visa. People walk amid the wreckage, in the aftermath of the floods in Derna, Libya. I have worked in Libya and it is an incredibly difficult place to work.” “One of the challenges of covering disasters that coincide with conflict are fractured lines of control: it’s not a question of just flying to Tripoli and getting a car. He says it would be a totally different story if the news desk had sent him to report on the Libyan flooding. “Within an hour, I was at an earthquake-hit village and speaking to people affected and those providing help.” Ordinary people have been mobilised on a mass scale, and there is a very strong sense of nationhood.” The difference between Libya and Moroccoīeaumont arrived in Morocco on Sunday and was able to drive directly to above the epicentre near Adassil. The place works – Marrakech, Tangier, Rabat are all modern cities. “Morocco, on the other hand, is a functioning modern state. He says: “Libya is a failed – or semi-failed – state that has been caught up in a protracted civil war since 2011, which has obviously had a massive impact on the country’s infrastructure and social cohesion. Peter Beaumont, a senior Guardian international reporter, has spent this week in the Atlas mountains and is a veteran of several reporting trips to Libya.
This has had a huge impact on their ability to respond to the disasters. Morocco and Libya may be geographically relatively close to each other – just a 2,000km hop across Algeria – but they could not be two more different countries. A family shelters near a damaged building in Targa, Morocco.
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