The avoidable disaster in Cyrenaica

 There is a table of twentieth century lethal dam failures in a DEFRA report (pdf here).

I remember the impact news of the Malpasset dam collapse and how it virtually wiped out the village of Fréjus. The even greater disaster of Valont in Italy four years later made similar headlines world-wide. There have been incidents in Britain thankfully not resulting in loss of life. The fatality figures above put in perspective the tens of thousands of lives lost in Derna in Libya in an area controlled from Benghazi in defiance of the interantionally-recognised Libyan government by warlord Khalifa Haftar.

Each of the disasters in the table occurred in states with a stable (though not necessarily democratic) government. Lessons were learned from each of them and there has been no repetition in Europe of a dam failure on the scale of Valont. By contrast, though Haftar rules over Derna, he has shown only distrust of its citizens and certainly no concern for their well-being. Haftar ignored warnings about the state of the dams which were breached. Even now, his forces are making it difficult for aid agencies to come to the help of Derna citizens. 

Haftar rose to power as a client of Western powers seeking to overthrow the Ghedaffi régime. He has been kept in power by an unholy alliance of Egypt, the UAE, Russia's Wagner group and, according to some reports, France, instead of being compelled to give up his weapons and cede power to an elected government  in Tripoli. Derna has paid the price for this international power game.