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In battle for Libya’s oil, water becomes a casualty

By Newsdesk
July 03, 2019

TRIPOLI: While Libya’s oil lies at the heart of three months of fighting over Tripoli and years of power struggles before that, water is becoming a far bigger concern for its people.

Interruptions to water supplies are common after eight years of near-anarchy since Muammar Gaddafi was ousted, but a wider crisis is now coming to a head in a country made up mainly of arid desert and split between competing administrations.

In western Libya, finding clean water has become difficult because both the power grid and water control system have been damaged in an offensive by forces loyal to eastern-based Khalifa Haftar on Tripoli, where the U.N.-backed government is based.

“Drinkable water is a daily issue for my family,” said Usama Mohamed Dokali, a cashier in a cafe in Tripoli, who buys bottled water when he can and gets it from a charity when his money runs out. Other people fill bottles from wells and hope for the best.

Looting and neglect have made the situation fragile and armed groups have exploited the unrest. In May, gunmen pressing officials to release a detained relative forced water workers to turn off supplies to all of Tripoli for two days.

The United Nations has warned all sides that water should not become a weapon of war, but the water system is already badly damaged in western Libya where the capital is located, according to unpublished reports by the water authority and the United Nations Childrens’ Agency.

Even local bottled water in a country which sits on Africa’s biggest proven oil reserves has become contaminated. If the damage does not get fixed, there could be a “sudden, unexpected, uncontrollable and un-prepared for” shutdown of the main water pipeline system, the water authority said in a March presentation to international organizations seen by Reuters. “The consequences will be catastrophic as there is no viable alternative water supply system,” it said. That warning of a possible systematic failure, echoed in a draft UNICEF report the same month, is the most dramatic sign of a collapse of state services in what was once one of North Africa’s richest countries. It would have far-reaching consequences in a country where lawlessness is being exploited again by Islamist militants, armed groups and people promising to smuggle African migrants and refugees to Europe.

“An estimated 4 million people would be deprived of access to safe water,” UNICEF Libya spokesman Mostafa Omar said by email, listing cholera, hepatitis A and diarrhea, a major childhood killer, as the likely result.

“GREAT MAN MADE RIVER”

Poor public services were one of the drivers of the uprising against Gaddafi, but a 4,000 km (2,485-mile) pipeline system known as the Great Man Made River (MMRP) was a world-leading civil engineering project when it was built in the 1980s.

Some 80 percent of the population of six million live along or near the northern Mediterranean coast and depend on fresh water pumped via its pipelines from vast aquifers further south, where Libya’s abundant oil reserves also lie.

Ground water in coastal areas is salty and contaminated by sewage and around 80 percent of desalination plants have broken down, water authority officials and diplomats say. The pipes supply Libya with more than 70 percent of its fresh water and remain crucial because desalination plants are complicated to fix and vulnerable to attack, officials at the United Nations’ children’s agency say.

People dismantle well heads to sell the copper and tribesmen living in the neglected south close or destroy pipes to press their demands with officials in the capital.

As a result, 101 of 479 wells on the western pipeline system have been dismantled, Abdullah El-Sunni, head of the Tripoli-based water authority said in an interview with Reuters. Asked if there could be a water crisis, he said power cuts were already threatening supplies.

Since the central monitoring room of the pipeline system for western Libya was hit around early May, engineers have been unable to gauge water pressure and flows. A Tunisian maintenance firm working on the system left because of the fighting. “The water flow to Western Libya has dropped from the normal flow of 1.2 million cubic meters per day to about 800,000 cubic meters per day now, due to sabotage and lack of funding and maintenance,” Sunni said. Across Libya, demand has risen to 7 billion cubic meters annually, up from 5.5 billion in 2011, as farmers and others have drilled wells or tapped reservoirs, Sunni said. By 2025, Libya will need 8 billion.