Communications were cut off on Tuesday in Derna, a town in eastern Libya devastated by deadly floods, the day after a demonstration by residents demanding accountability from the authorities they blame for the disaster.
The cellular and Internet network has been out of service since Tuesday morning, according to local sources. AFP was unable to contact its journalists in the city by telephone or messaging.
This event comes the day after a demonstration by residents of Derna demanding accountability from the authorities in the east of the country, whom they hold responsible for the disaster which left thousands dead and missing after the passage of the storm. Daniel on September 10 and the rupture of two dams upstream of the city.
The cut was caused by “a break in optical fibers in the town of Derna”, the national telecommunications company (Lptic) indicated on its Facebook account.
According to her, this outage, which also affects other localities in eastern Libya, “could be the result of a deliberate act of sabotage. Our teams are working to repair it as quickly as possible,” the company added.
Chaos
Gathered in front of the city’s large mosque, hundreds of residents chanted slogans against the eastern authorities embodied by Parliament and its leader, Aguila Saleh.
“The people want the fall of Parliament”, “Aguila (Saleh) is the enemy of God”, or even “those who stole or betrayed must be hanged”, “Libya, neither East nor West, national unity”, they -they chanted.
Several demonstrators burned the house of the city’s hated mayor, Abdulmonem al-Ghaithi, according to images widely shared on social networks and by Libyan media.
A few hours after the demonstration, the head of the executive in eastern Libya, Osama Hamad, dissolved the Derna municipal council, against which he ordered the opening of an investigation.
According to politicians and analysts, the chaos in Libya has relegated to the background the maintenance of vital infrastructure such as the Derna dams, the collapse of which caused floods which left 3,338 dead, according to the latest provisional official report released on Monday. evening by the Eastern Minister of Health, Othman Abdeljalil.
Wracked by divisions since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, Libya is in fact governed by two rival administrations: one in Tripoli, recognized by the UN and led by Prime Minister Abdelhamid Dbeibah, the other in East, embodied by Parliament and affiliated with the camp of powerful Marshal Khalifa Haftar.
Haftar’s forces seized Derna in 2018, then a stronghold of radical Islamists, and the only city in the east that escaped his control. But the eastern authorities maintain relations of mistrust with Derna, considered a protest city since the time of Gaddafi.
“Punish the protesters”
The rupture of two dams caused a flood of the magnitude of a tsunami along the wadi which crosses Derna, a town of 100,000 inhabitants bordering the Mediterranean.
“Two years ago, there were already leaks on the big dam when it was only half full. We had warned the municipality and demanded reparations,” Abdelqader al-Omrani told AFP from his hospital bed in Benghazi, the large city in the east. Those responsible for negligence “have our deaths on their conscience,” he said.
“Media blockade on #Derna in place now, communications cut since dawn. Make no doubt, it is not about health or security, but about punishing the demonstrators in Derna,” Emadeddin Badi, Libya specialist at the Atlantic Council, said on X (ex-Twitter).
“Extremely grim news from #Derna, still reeling from horrific flooding. Residents are now terrified by an imminent military repression, seen as collective punishment for yesterday’s demonstration and demands,” said Tarek Megrisi, Maghreb expert at the European Council for International Relations (ECFR), also on X.
Rescuers are still working Tuesday in Derna to find the bodies of thousands of missing people presumed to have died in the floods, according to local media.