It was one of the many disasters that took place last year on September 11, in the Libyan city of Derna in the eastern part of the country. And yet, it had no relation to any previous one. It was a biblical disaster. The blow came from Hurricane Daniel. The momentum of nature was enormous. The waters of the river, which crossed the city, swelled to such a point that they broke two old dams. People, houses were swept away by the fury of the water, the “heart” of an entire city disappeared from the map. Eight months and some days after the disaster, something seems to be moving again in the city. The television lens of the Reuters news agency, as well as journalists from the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, record construction activity.

A bumpy return to normality

On the dirt roads of the city, bulldozers remove mud, rubble and house debris, cranes transport materials, workers on scaffolding paint facades of mosques, others carry heavy tools by hand. They are mainly workers of the Egyptian company GIEGO, who have taken it upon themselves to make the coastal city of Derna viable again, to give it back its old face that was swept away by the rushing waters of the river into the Libyan sea. But despite months of efforts residents are concerned about the slow pace of the city’s recovery and fear the disaster will leave lasting scars.

“The work to clean up the mud caused by the collapse of the dam is ongoing, the work is apparently continuing,” says Derna resident Atia al-Hazzadi. “As far as the reconstruction works are concerned, the projects are underway, the companies have started working on the projects identified by the reconstruction fund. As for the humanitarian situation, we cannot say that it has improved significantly. People are still suffering from the effects of losing their homes, their possessions and their jobs. After determining the amount of payment of damages people did not receive any material compensation, not even a moral compensation for those directly affected by storm Daniel.

How many died? No one knows for sure. A report by the World Bank, the United Nations and the EU states that the disaster affected approximately 1.5 million people, 22% of the Libyan population. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs OCHA the number of confirmed deaths is 4,352, another 8,000 are missing.

“We are psychologically damaged”

But the victims are much more if the residents are to be believed, around 18,000 to 20,000. Property damage and losses from flooding in Derna and other cities from the typhoon totaled $1.65 billion, about 3.6 percent of oil-rich Libya’s GDP. “We are psychologically damaged,” says Mohammed al-Mansouri, “we find that things are not easy for us. Thank God, I did not lose any of my family members, but there are others who are suffering a lot. Some have lost parents, siblings. Others have lost their minds, gone mad. There are people we can no longer recognize. They walk and talk in a way that is unknown to us.”

The journey of the German newspaper in a country difficult to reach for journalists also explains the insurmountable problems of a piece of land so rich in oil reserves. One of them is the chaos in a politically divided country, with the warlords and militiamen who plunged the country into chaos and now claim to want to free it from it. In Derna, people praise the “stability” brought by General Haftar and his 6 sons after so many years of war, which they themselves helped to cause. Ruling in the eastern part as a family business, portraits of Khalifa Haftar hang everywhere in the streets, increasingly those of his sons. Members of the opposition “disappear” in prisons, opponents die under circumstances that no one wants to clarify.

Although there is a Parliament and a government in eastern Libya, they do whatever the 80-year-old Haftar and his sons want. They are all involved in their father’s affairs and two of them are considered to succeed him. They are Saddam, accused by Amnesty International of massive human rights violations and Belgacem, head of the Derna Reconstruction Fund. The Parliament passed a law exempting the Fund from any control.