Salah Najm, a civil activist, and his eight-year-old son are sitting next to Najib Bin Dardaf in a red Matiz roaming Benghazi’s streets in search of families displaced from their homes due to war, and forced to take refuge in schools.

In the back seat and in the trunk of the small car, blankets, pillows, children’s food and even bridal accessories are piled up to be distributed to the poor and those who were displaced from the neighborhoods which were destroyed during the battles between the Libyan army and Ansar al-Sharia groups.

Salah Najm, a civil activist, and his eight-year-old son are sitting next to Najib Bin Dardaf in a red Matiz roaming Benghazi’s streets in search of families displaced from their homes due to war, and forced to take refuge in schools.

In the back seat and in the trunk of the small car, blankets, pillows, children’s food and even bridal accessories are piled up to be distributed to the poor and those who were displaced from the neighborhoods which were destroyed during the battles between the Libyan army and Ansar al-Sharia groups.

Najm, who works as a journalist and photographer to document the city’s destruction, said he started working in 2012 with his colleagues in an organization called ‘I Take Action for Benghazi’. However, the need to help the displaced and provide supplies increased after the battles escalated in October in light of the absence of any governmental role.

Najim receives donations through his personal connections from benefactors who sometimes give Najm and his colleagues a ride in their cars.

Najm is working with many other volunteers including his wife and son, Madda, and four other people from the city’s displaced, including Najib and his daughter whose neighborhood was reduced to rubbles since it became an ideal battlefield since it is close to the sea and its buildings are close to each other.

Destroyed neighborhoods

“We helped the displaced in ten schools by providing them with food, blankets, milk, cotton for children, home supplies, electrical stuff and medicines,” he explained.

Najim and his team launched a campaign called ‘From Tawfik’ which was dedicated to Tawfik Bin Saoud, an activist who was assassinated in Benghazi. It included providing two wheelchairs for the Displaced Center in addition to seven wheelchairs, two blood pressure measuring devices and two blood sugar meters for Benghazi’s Medical Center. Another 12 wheelchairs were provided for the Disabled Center in the Gardens District and they equipped a hall for nannies at the same center with all the needed equipment.

Still, the assistance Najm and his team provided is merely a tiny fraction of what is actually needed. According to official figures, there are 5,000 displaced people in Benghazi’s schools. Another 20,000 people were displaced to other places in city. It is difficult to specify an exact official figure due to the continuing movement inside and outside the city and the displacement of huge numbers of people to the cities of Al-Baydaa, Shhat and Tobruk to the east of Libya.

Scale of tragedy

One displaced family is an old man who receives a low pension and his wife – they have seven sons and two daughters, the eldest of whom is 16 years old.

The family, who spoke on condition of anonymity, lives in a school in the Majori District along with other 20 families. They fled their home in the burning Sabri neighborhood. Every morning, these 20 families are crowded in front of the school’s two toilets, one for the males and the other for the females.  

The mother said life for them was very difficult in the classrooms which are used for unthinkable functions.

The government and the rest of the relevant entities, added the mother, have given her family nothing. They only received aid from the Red Crescent and some other charities. The municipality council only counted the displaced in cooperation with the Libyan Commission for Relief.

No medical teams performed checkups for the displaced in the school or made sure that it could host 20 families.

Another school hosts a five-member family including a husband with kidney failure, his wife and their three children.

The family is desperate since the husband’s salary has been suspended due to what he called ‘administrative procedures.’  Their only possessions are some blankets and mattresses given to them by the Red Crescent during its single visit at the beginning of their displacement.

No governmental entity has visited the school except for some charities.

Emergency without budgets

Hani Belras Ali, former Media Officer at Benghazi’s Crisis Management Committee, also criticized the government’s failure to manage Benghazi’s crisis. “The committee asked the government to provide an emergency budget, but there was no response,” he said.

Ali often complained about the government’s performance and not allocating a budget for the committee which was commissioned by the prime ministry’s bureau and composed of most of the city’s general sector heads.

Ali, who used to accompany the committee in its daily tours in the city during the winter, reported the complaints of the heads of the general sectors and institutions about the lack of budgets. However, the government did nothing to support them.

For example, the General Services Company whose job is to clean and remove the garbage, he explained, has not received any funds for seven months and the director of Benghazi’s Branch of the Electricity Institution said he is working without pay in light of continuous power cuts.

Prejudice

The Ministry of Local Government, in a statement in March, strongly condemned the unjustified attack of some officials at Benghazi’s Crisis Management Committee. It criticized some media channels because they “discarded its right to respond and show the other side of the story,” he said.  “(It has been) an attack and prejudice fueled by election propaganda in which the pains and needs of Benghazi’s people are exploited and scores are settled.”

The Ministry, whose headquarters is in Shahat in eastern Libya, justified its negligence only by saying, “It has nothing to do with the delay in liquidating the needed funds. The delay was due to the financial procedures followed by the relevant entities.”

Additional reporting was contributed by Jamila Adbel Rahman