Watching Libya October 24, 2011

The global media portrayed Sirte as Gheddafi’s favourite Libyan city, his dream of Africa’s capital, and yet Sirte was not a place that Libyans yearned to live in. In the words of Gérard Verron, Sirte was “a failure of urban development”. This sad fact, however, could well be an opportunity for the new democracy that may arise from the end of the regime.  Rebuilding a better Sirte could be a test of the political wisdom of its new political class. Read Gérard’s view below. We thank him for his unique first hand testimonial.

When travelling east to west along the Libyan coast, or going to the south while passing through Sirte, you could barely see the small city from a distance. The ring road which surrounds the city had not been embellished with trees or other attractive sights. Nothing had been built for the travellers to take opportunity of this passage and to enjoy the place.

Those travellers who made the effort to visit the city could not find any welcoming place to rest, and they came out disappointed; they could just view a city with dull large avenues and no real central area where residents could concentrate. The sea front was always deserted, blown by winds and sand accumulations. Behind the sea-front, empty streets with high walls were hiding those bedouin settler families whose habitations became the last hideouts of Gheddafi and his goons.

Grandiloquent development plans had been designed to develop the small village and transform it like Brasilia: a new capital issued from nowhere. But, the project faded quickly as the staff of the transferred administrative departments found excuses to remain in Tripoli or Benghazi because nothing had been done to retain them in the city with basic leisure and adequate urban facilities. The city has kept the scars of a scheme built out without any concern for the inhabitants.

Sirte was a failure of urban development, a ghost city in the image of the delirium fantasies of its mentor. The dictator considered his people nothing more than the actors of his projects. In his utopian leadership mentality, his people had even to be deprived of public entertainments since he did not like them.

Sirte is also where the Mediterranean coast is at its closest distance from black Africa. The tyrant used this crossroad location to promote Sirte as the vanguard strategic base of his union dream from which Africa would stand against Europe. This phantasmagoric dream had become a nightmare for its inhabitants as blocks of the city had become a kind of Bogota suburbs where immigrant refuges were dealing drugs before being transferred to Europe.

What will Sirte become now that its mentor has gone? A destroyed ghost city? A city of sands? Indeed the city does not deserve to be left so badly destroyed by the fatal suicidal obstinate decision of the Gheddafi clan to die within a city in ruins.

It is hard to believe that the new regime will let the city remain for long in such a horrific state. Instead, one can only hope that the ‘Sirtawi shababs’ will swiftly win the hearts of the inhabitants and reconcile the city with itself, by showing bold reconstruction activities and by rebuilding the city, more beautiful and more attractive than before.

Gérard Verron is a public works engineer currently based in Benghazi. Gérard knows Sirte well, having been resident engineer there during the setting up of the ARABSAT 2 telecommunication station in 1996/1997, as well as , having managed civil works for the construction of the National Electrical Control Centre (NCC) in Sirte  (and the one inTripoli) in 2002-2006. The NCC-TRCC project will provide a digital control system of the Libyan electrical network, and its interconnection to the Mediterranean loop. For an idea of his elation at the news that the Sirte NCC had been taken over by the Transitional National Council militias on September 24, click here.  For the location of ARABSAT 2 and the National Electrical Control Centre in relation to the rest of Sirte, see our map in Watching Libya October 19, 2011. For the wider picture see Watching Libya September 2, 2011.