Libya’s catastrophe is everyone’s fault

利比亚的灾难是每个人的错

Analysis by Ishaan Tharoor
Columnist
September 14, 2023 at 8:27 p.m. Derna, Libya, in the aftermath of the floods. (Ayman Al-Sahili/Reuters)
There’s plenty of blame to go around in the wake of an apocalyptic disaster in eastern Libya. Torrential rains brought by a major Mediterranean storm led to the failure of a series of dams near the coastal city of Derna. The sudden, overwhelming flooding that followed washed whole neighborhoods into the sea, leading to perhaps as many as 20,000 deaths, with thousands still missing in what Libyans are describing as their war-torn nation’s 9/11.

利比亚东部发生了一场天启/末日式的灾难，随之而来的是许多指责。一场大型地中海风暴带来的暴雨，导致沿海城市德尔纳附近的一系列水坝崩溃。随后突如其来的巨大洪水将整个社区冲入大海，导致可能多达2万人死亡，数千人仍然失踪，利比亚人称这是他们饱受战争蹂躏的国家的911事件。
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Days later, areas of the city still remain underwater. Thousands of bodies are decomposing in the muddied streets, raising fears over the spread of disease. Tens of thousands of residents have been displaced by the catastrophic floods. “I don’t think I can ever go back,” a survivor in Derna told the BBC. “Those streets were my whole life. We knew every corner of the city. Now it’s gone.”

几天后，这座城市的多个地区仍在水下。成千上万的尸体在泥泞的街道上腐烂，这增加了人们对疾病传播的担忧。成千上万的居民因特大洪水而无家可归。“我想我再也回不去了，”德尔纳的一名幸存者告诉BBC。“那些街道是我生活的全部。我们熟悉这个城市的每一个角落。现在它不见了。”

The wrath of the heavens, local Libyans contend, was matched by the incompetence of those calling the shots on the ground. Oil-rich Libya — beset by crises for more than a decade since a pro-democracy uprising precipitated the violent overthrow and killing of long-ruling dictator Moammar Gaddafi — is divided between two parallel, weak governments in the country’s west, based in the capital Tripoli, and east. The volatility of recent years meant the country’s separate regimes and their feckless officials have left critical infrastructure in a state of neglect.

当地的利比亚人认为，这次上天的愤怒（造成的伤害）堪比地面上那些无能的发号施令者。石油资源丰富的利比亚十多年来一直受到危机的困扰——自从一场仓促发生支持民主的起义导致长期执政的独裁者穆阿迈尔·卡扎菲(Moammar Gaddafi)被暴力推翻并被杀害以来，——分裂为两个相似的、软弱的政府，（分别）位于西部（包括首都黎波里）和东部。近年来的动荡意味着该国的分裂政权及其无能的官员致使关键的基础设施处于被忽视的状态。

That included two large dams built a half century ago by a Yugoslav company that sat in the narrow river valley above Derna. The structures had been left in a considerable state of decay and disrepair, to the point that experts last year warned the dams may fail if faced with massive flooding.“Between 2011 and 2014, there were already concerns about the state of Libyan infrastructure,” Mary Fitzgerald, a Libya expert at the Middle East Institute, told my colleagues. “And then Libya went through a six-year civil conflict from 2014 to 2020 and a lot of infrastructure was damaged during that conflict. In the three years since, you have a situation of rival government, which has yet again complicated political dynamics. Political elites, whether in Tripoli or eastern Libya, haven’t prioritized the huge infrastructural challenges Libya faces.”

其中包括半个世纪前由一家南斯拉夫公司建造的两座大型水坝，它们坐落在德尔纳上方狭窄的河谷中。这些结构已经处于相当严重的腐烂和失修状态，以至于专家去年警告说，如果面临大规模洪水，水坝可能会倒塌。中东研究所(Middle East Institute)的利比亚问题专家玛丽·菲茨杰拉德(Mary Fitzgerald)告诉我的同事:“2011年至2014年间，人们已经开始担心利比亚的基础设施状况。”“从2014年到2020年，利比亚经历了为期六年的内战，许多基础设施在冲突中遭到破坏。在那之后的三年里，出现了敌对政府的局面，这再次使政治动态复杂化。无论是的黎波里还是利比亚东部的政治精英，都没有优先考虑/处理利比亚面临的巨大基础设施挑战。”

Libya’s feuding factions and fractured polity laid the groundwork for the devastation that followed. Libyans have suffered through years of intermittent fighting and lapsed cease-fires; the years that followed Gaddafi’s fall saw Libyan cities become beholden to a hodgepodge of warring militias and tribes. The country is a security official’s nightmare — the conduit for vast, sprawling illicit networks where smugglers move drugs, arms and people. Derna itself was the site of a brief takeover by an Islamic State offshoot in 2014, which was eventually quashed by local forces. The petty squabbles and rivalries of the country’s minor potentates have led to human rights abuses.

利比亚的派系争斗和支离破碎的政体为随后的灾难埋下了伏笔。利比亚人经历了多年的间歇性的战斗和停火中止; 卡扎菲倒台后的几年里，可以看到利比亚的城市变成了交战的民兵和部落的大杂烩。这个国家是安全官员的噩梦——庞大而非法的网络通道，走私者在这里运送毒品、武器和人员。2014年，德尔纳曾被伊斯兰国的一个分支短暂占领，但最终被当地武装力量镇压。这个国家的小权势者之间的琐碎争吵和竞争导致了对人权的侵犯。

【beholden ：[Middle English biholden, past participle of biholden, to observe; see behold.]】
But Libya’s unstable status quo is also the result of the intervention of outside actors. That began with the NATO-led intervention in 2011, where Western governments invoked the need to protect civilians from the Gaddafi regime to embark upon a bombing campaign that steadily moved the needle of the conflict in favor of a coalition of rebel groups. The West’s enthusiasm to enter the war was not equaled by its commitments to the peace; Libya receded from the global conversation as brutal post-Arab Spring conflicts in Syria and Yemen exploded.

但利比亚不稳定的现状也是外部势力干预的结果。这始于2011年北约(nato)领导的干预行动。当时，西方政府以保护平民不受卡扎菲政权伤害为理由，展开了一场轰炸行动，这一行动稳步推动了冲突的走向，有利于反对派组织的联盟。西方加入战争的热情并没有与其对和平的承诺相称; 随着“阿拉伯之春”后叙利亚和也门爆发的残酷冲突，利比亚退出了全球对话。

That didn’t mean that foreign powers weren’t influencing conditions in the country. When the civil war flared a few years later, the rival forces would end up receiving significant support from abroad — Turkey and Qatar backed the U.N.-recognized government in Tripoli, while Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Russia and, to a certain extent, France found common cause with the fighters in the east, led by controversial Field Marshal Khalifa Hifter.

这并不意味着外国势力没有影响这个国家的局势。几年后，当内战爆发时，敌对势力最终得到了国外的大力支持——土耳其和卡塔尔支持联合国承认的的黎波里政府，而埃及、阿拉伯联合酋长国、俄罗斯，在一定程度上，还有法国，与有争议的陆军元帅哈利法·希弗特(Khalifa Hifter)的领导下东部的武装分子找到了共同的目标。

For each of these countries, the actual fate of Libyans was secondary to their particular vested interests. Qatar and the UAE played out their geopolitical rivalry through a proxy embrace of Libyan Islamists and anti-Islamists. Turkey and Russia used Libya as a testing ground for affiliated mercenary companies. After the surge of 2015 migrant crisis, European governments focused on whatever incentives could be arranged to keep migrants boats from leaving Libya’s long Mediterranean coast.

对这些国家来说，利比亚人民的实际命运要次于他们的既得利益。卡塔尔和阿联酋通过接纳利比亚的伊斯兰主义者和反伊斯兰主义者来展开地缘政治竞争。土耳其和俄罗斯将利比亚作为附属雇佣军公司的试验场。在2015年移民危机激增之后，欧洲各国政府专注于如何使用奖励措施，以阻止移民船只离开利比亚漫长的地中海海岸。

In the United States, meanwhile, a solipsism took root. Former president Donald Trump decried the toppling of Gaddafi and waved away any future American responsibility for the country. Benghazi, the main seat of power in Libya’s east, became a buzzword in the context of U.S. political theater, the watchword for an earlier era of Republican hysteria over the killing of four U.S. diplomats that launched a marathon series of congressional hearings. All the while, an under-resourced U.N. mission struggled to achieve any meaningful political reconciliation among the warring parties, which were motivated to fight for maximal gains in part because of the continued support of outside backers.

与此同时，唯我论在美国生根发芽。美国前总统唐纳德·特朗普谴责卡扎菲被推翻，并表示美国未来对利比亚不承担任何责任。班加西(Benghazi)，是利比亚东部的主要权力中心，在美国政治舞台上成了一个热词/流行词，在四名美国外交官被杀引发了一系列马拉松式的国会听证会之后，共和党人歇斯底里地用了这个词。与此同时，资源不足的联合国特派团一直难以在交战各方之间达成任何有意义的政治和解，交战各方都有争取最大利益的动机，部分原因是外部支持者的持续支持。

Libya’s calamity now offers the chance for a reset. “After years of treating Libya as a problem to contain and keep at bay, the United States has an opportunity, now, through this disaster, to re-engage directly with the Libyan people,” wrote Ethan Chorin, a former U.S. diplomat in Libya, pointing to the Biden administration’s new pledges of aid. The European unx is also mobilizing a humanitarian response.

利比亚的灾难现在提供了一个重启/重新开始的机会。前美国驻利比亚外交官伊桑·乔林(Ethan Chorin)在提到拜登政府新的援助承诺时写道:“多年来，美国一直将利比亚视为一个需要控制和保持距离的问题，现在，通过这场灾难，美国有机会重新与利比亚人民直接接触。”（而）欧盟也（做出响应）正在进行人道主义动员。

Skepticism abounds among embittered Libyans. Libyan social media “is already rife with criticism of European governments,” noted Tarek Megerisi of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “The narrative is that Europeans’ active interventions in Libyan politics helped create the corrupt Libyan politicians being blamed for the disaster, but those same Europeans vanish when they could really help.”

愤怒的利比亚人对此充满怀疑。利比亚的社交媒体“已经充斥着对欧洲政府的批评”。欧洲外交关系委员会的塔里克· 梅格里斯（Tarek Megerisi）指出，“人们的说法是，欧洲人对利比亚政治的积极干预帮助造就了腐败的利比亚政客，这些欧洲人被指责为这场灾难的罪魁祸首。同样的，当这些欧洲人真正能够提供帮助时，他们就消失了。”

And then there are fears over what may happen with major flows of aid into the country.

此外，人们还担心大量援助物资流入这个国家可能会发生什么（意外）情况。

“At the societal level, there is a huge outpouring of solidarity and spontaneous support for Derna,” observed Wolfram Lacher, a Berlin-based expert on the country. “But for Libya’s political players … this is all just another episode in the struggle for money and power.”

“在社会层面上，（人们）对德尔纳表现出了巨大的团结和自发的支持，”（一位在利比亚的）来自柏林的专家沃尔夫拉姆·拉彻(Wolfram Lacher)观察后说。“但对利比亚的政治参与者来说……这只是争夺金钱和权力的又一个插曲。”

原创翻译：龙腾网 https://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处