Derna flood disaster: triumph for some

 Perversely, the sons of Khalida Aftar, whose dereliction of duty of care to the people of Derna led to tens of thousands of deaths and displacements, have benefited from the disaster. France24 reports:

Khalifa Haftar, the strongman of eastern Libya, has placed his six sons in positions of political and military power. The deadly floods in Derna have seen his youngest, Saddam, rise to head of disaster relief management and the top of his succession charts. The youngest son of Khalifa Haftar, Saddam is often cited as the “possible successor” to the 79-year-old strongman who has controlled eastern Libya for nearly a decade.

As the head of Tareq Ben Zayed (TBZ) brigade in his father’s self-styled Libyan National Army (LNA), the youngest Haftar is better known for seizing money from Libya’s Central Bank vaults, according to the UN, and “inflicting a catalogue of horrors” in eastern Libya, according to Amnesty International.

At 32, the Haftar scion has no experience in relief administration or management. But last week, he was appointed head of the Disaster Response Committee to handle a humanitarian crisis of shocking proportions.

As millions of dollars of humanitarian aid pours into eastern Libya, the international community will be forced to coordinate relief operations under a strongman’s son with a documented record of embezzlement and human rights violations. For the Libyan people, this is yet another source of despair heaped on the loss and trauma of the flooding, which was caused by decades of state neglect.
Gaddafi falls, Haftars rise

Saddam Haftar was born in 1991, a year after his father, a top commander in Muammar Gaddafi’s army, fled into exile in the US.

The youngest of Haftar’s six sons grew up in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi with his mother while his father was in the US, according to The Africa Report. “Little is known about his youth apart from the fact that he has no known secondary school qualifications,” noted The Africa Report.

He was 20 when the 2011 anti-Gaddafi uprising erupted, bringing his father back home from exile. The young man’s fortunes started to rise after 2014 when his father attacked rival armed groups, triggering the second Libyan civil war, which resulted in Khalifa Haftar’s LNA controlling the eastern Cyrenaica region.

In 2016, Saddam Haftar was appointed head of the TBZ brigade, one of the most powerful armed groups operating under the LNA. “Since then, TBZ fighters have been committing violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, some of which may constitute war crimes,” noted Amnesty International in “We Are Your Masters”, a chilling, 21-page report detailing rampant violations committed with impunity in LNA-controlled areas.

Saddam Haftar’s name also appeared in a 2018 report by a UN panel of experts on Libya, which accused him of seizing control of the Benghazi branch of the country’s Central Bank in 2017 and transferring “substantial amounts of cash and silver to an unknown destination”.

The contents of the bank safe included $159,700,000, €1,900,000 and 5,869 silver coins, noted the report. “Several bank managers indicated that LNA commanders had put them under serious pressure to grant them access to cash and letters of credit. Some had decided to move abroad for security reasons,” the UN report noted.

Avoiding the ire of the Haftar family is a fundamental survival strategy that residents of eastern Libya have adopted for nearly a decade, with good reason. On November 10, 2020, Hanan al-Barassi, a Libyan human rights lawyer and women’s rights activist, was shot dead in broad daylight in Benghazi a day after she posted a Facebook message promising that she would reveal alleged corruption by Saddam Haftar, according to Amnesty International.

Toleration of the corrupt rule in Benghazi has a direct effect on the UK and even more on southern Europe, especially Italy. People smugglers would not be able to operate from ports in/Cyrenaica without the connivance of Haftar and his sons, as this report details.