LUncertainty continues to weigh on the results of Cyclone Daniel which struck the coastal town of Derna in Cyrenaica, eastern Libya, on the night of September 10-11, causing the rupture of two dams and torrential flooding . Of the city’s hundred thousand inhabitants, more than thirty thousand were able to take refuge in safer areas, but remain homeless, while the number of dead, already more than three thousand, continues to rise due to the thousands of disappeared.
It is probably necessary to go back to the earthquake of 365 for Cyrenaica to have been hit by a catastrophe of such magnitude. Derna is then indicated, in the Geography of Ptolemy and under the name of Darnis, as the eastern border of Cyrenaica. And it was in 366 that local chronicles mention the appointment of a bishop to Darnis by the archbishop of Alexandria.
The founding act of the “marines”
Derna is attached to the VIIe century, to the province of Barqa, as Cyrenaica was Islamized. It is a relatively prosperous port on the caravan route between the Maghreb and Egypt. The Ottomans, who seized current Libya in 1517, decided to manage this entire immense territory from Tripoli. A local dynasty of beys, the Karamanlis, supplanted distant Constantinople in 1711 in order to establish a “regency of Tripoli”, very active in the anti-Western race. The United States, which became independent from Great Britain in 1783, therefore lost the protection of the British fleet in the Mediterranean. They fiercely negotiated with the emissaries of the Karamanli the payment of a tribute which guaranteed the release of their compatriots imprisoned by the Libyan authorities. The affair caused a stir in the United States, where it pitted John Adams, Washington’s successor at the head of the country in 1797, against Thomas Jefferson, elected president in 1801 and follower of the “strong manner” towards Libya.
In 1801, President Jefferson launched the first expedition of this group against Tripoli. “Barbaric War” (Barbary War). Combining a blockade of Tripoli, a naval battle and occasional bombardments, this expedition was no more effective than the two following ones, launched in 1803 and 1804. Jefferson then decided on a new strategy, inventing, without being aware of it, the “diet change” (regime changes), destined to become so popular among his distant successors in the White House. An expeditionary force was in fact assembled in Egypt, under the pretext of installing Hamet Karamanli, the brother of Youssouf Karamanli, the ruling bey, on the throne of Tripoli. The motley troop, made up of American soldiers, supporters of the pretender and various mercenaries, crossed the Libyan border to join, in 1805 in Derna, the units disembarked from the American ships which bombarded the city. It is the founding act of marinesas these marine infantry commandos are now designated.
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