The Conversation asked William Lawrence, a professor of political science and international affairs who has served as a senior diplomat at the U.S. embassies in Morocco and Libya, to explain why responding to these disasters has been especially hard.
Is enough aid reaching communities harmed by these disasters?
No. With Morocco, there’s strong government bureaucracy, and in Libya, the authorities are weak. But the results are the same: Not enough aid has gotten where it needs to go.
Thousands of Moroccan villages have been damaged and hundreds destroyed, according to sophisticated mapping and eyewitnesses. The government is responding, but this is beyond its capacity. Even if the country’s entire army and everyone providing social services in Morocco were deployed, it wouldn’t be enough.
Usually, with huge disasters like these, problems arise over the coordination of aid, rather than its acceptance.
Libya is contending with another unimaginable disaster. One quarter of the city of Derna, which previously had a population of 100,000, was completely flattened. In the first week, very little of the aid that arrived was getting where it needed to go because the access roads and bridges to Derna were wiped out.
It’s macabre and devastating, but what Libya most desperately needs right now is specialized equipment to extract bodies from the flood plain and rubble – and body bags. Islam, Libya’s dominant religion, normally requires a speedy burial, but local people can’t do that and dispose of corpses properly.
And Libya has little ability to coordinate the aid that’s getting there.
The Conversation asked William Lawrence, a professor of political science and international affairs who has served as a senior diplomat at the U.S. embassies in Morocco and Libya, to explain why responding to these disasters has been especially hard.
Is enough aid reaching communities harmed by these disasters?
No. With Morocco, there’s strong government bureaucracy, and in Libya, the authorities are weak. But the results are the same: Not enough aid has gotten where it needs to go.
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