‘It’s a hard place to live, especially with children’
After years of civil war, privation is biting and chaos looming for Libya’s displaced and dispossessed
For Yusuf al-fitori, the battle for Tripoli began at 8pm on April 4 last year. He remembers the moment exactly, because the shelling cost his wife her unborn child. “We were watching television in the living room. Suddenly, the light went out, there was a power cut. Then there was the sound of medium and heavy artillery,” the 40-year-old customs officer said.
At 11pm, three hours into the bombardment, his wife noticed she was bleeding. To get to hospital, they had to sneak out the back of the house, and run zig-zag across fields to dodge gunfire, but the miscarriage could not be prevented. Two days later, the couple and their two children fled Khalet al-furjan, an area south of Tripoli, and became refugees in their own country.
At least 2,000 people have been killed since General Khalifa Haftar triggered a civil war by attacking Tripoli, the capital of the Unrecognised Government of National Accord, on April 4 2019. The UN estimates that at least 150,000 have been displaced in the same period, but the true figure could be much higher.
Tripoli’s police department says 55,000 families have fled their homes since April in the capital alone. Since Libyan families are seldom small, that could easily amount to a quarter of a million people. “There are more every day,” said police Lt Col Akram Arajhi, who is responsible for helping interior ministry employees displaced by the violence. “The most difficult thing is finding them accommodation. Tripoli already took in thousands of people displaced by fighting since 2011, so all the housing has gone.”
In Ain Zara, the largest of Tripoli’s six municipalities and the one worst affected by fighting, several hundred families have been put up at student halls belonging to Tripoli university.
Another 27,000 ration cards have been issued for those living off site. Roughly 1,000 more people, including Mr al-fitori, his wife and their two children, were found space in the unfinished shells of a housing complex a few miles from the front line.
Surveying the barren courtyard of the building site, Mr Fitori, visibly fatigued, said: “It is a very hard place to live. Especially with small children.”
The six eight-storey buildings are among hundreds of ambitious Gaddafi-era projects abandoned since the dictator’s overthrow in 2011. Intended for military intelligence officers, the flats would be spacious and comfortable if they had been completed. But the walls are unplastered, steel rods project at precarious angles from concrete, and stairwells and balconies are without bannisters or other protection. Two young children fell to their deaths in December, residents said.
The plumbing was never completed, so some of the men dug a well for water. When the pump works, residents are able to get some water, and disappear into the cavernous, unlit basements to relieve themselves.
The same goes for electricity and gas – there is no lighting to speak of, and cooking is done on primus stoves.
Mr Fitori has tried to do up his family’s ground-floor apartment, putting in his own windows and doors, and throwing down some carpets on the bare concrete floor. But they are still camped out on mattresses. No one had time to bring furniture when the war slammed into Tripoli 10 months ago. “We soldiered on as long as we could, hoping there would be a ceasefire, a truce, anything,” said Leila Kareem, a 30-year-old teacher who lives in a windblown flat without windows on the fifth floor, “but there was shrapnel flying everywhere. Eventually, we had to give up and leave. We at least feel safe here. And it is like one big family. We all look out for each other.” Salem Ali Mostabah, one of the immigration officials who manage the site, said that support, including from civilian charities, was crucial. “We have had one delivery of fuel from the Red Crescent in one month. Apart from that, we are entirely reliant on donations, because even residents who have jobs seldom get money because there’s a shortage of cash in the banks.”
On the surface, much of Libya does not look like a country at war. Streets clogged with cars, restaurants full and civilian and commercial traffic zooming up and down the coastal highway. But the country’s economy is under growing pressure.
On Jan 17, tribes affiliated with General Haftar began a blockage of oil terminals in the east to put pressure on the GNA. Within a week, production fell 75 per cent to just 320,000 barrels per day. On Monday, Bloomberg reported that production was down to just 204,000 bpd – the lowest since the 2011 revolution. It is a move ordinary Libyans needed “like a bullet in the head”, said Sadiq al-kabir, the governor of Libya’s central bank. “It is extremely serious. Oil exports contribute almost 95 per cent of our total foreign revenue and cover 70 per cent of government expenditure. There is no other source of income. You might as well take the oxygen mask off a patient in intensive care. What does it mean? Killing everyone.”
Meanwhile, increasing numbers of people are turning to semi-legal enterprises that often appear in wartime economies. In old Tripoli’s jeweller’s yard, a square in the shadow of the capital’s imposing Ottoman fortress, hundreds of men gather daily to trade dollars and dinars in an informal and entirely illegal street bourse. One 24-year-old trader told
The Daily Telegraph he could expect to make 30 to 50 dinars (around £15 to £25 at the black market rate) a day if he traded cleverly. Not much, but enough to get by from day to day.
Inevitably, it is the most vulnerable who suffer most from the privations of the war economy.
“Some people lost their humanity and kindness trying to make money out of the situation,” said Mr al-fitori, who ended up at the unfinished flats after a price-gouging landlord doubled the rent he was paying in a private flat to 1,000 dinars a month.
“Our house is no longer there. It has been flattened. But when the war is over, I want to go back and rebuild it.
“It is much better to have a place you can call home.”
‘We rely on donations. Even residents with jobs seldom get money because of a shortage of cash in banks’