A decade after fierce battles reduced much of the University of Benghazi to rubble, students at Libya’s oldest and largest university are once again looking to the future with optimism.
After the 2011 uprisings that toppled and killed longtime ruler Muammar Gaddafi, the university founded in 1955, had become the stage of intense fightings between jihadist groups and forces led by military strongman Khalifa Haftar.
Its nearly 70,000 students still attend classes in temporary facilities while a brand-new vast campus is set to open in the fall.
On a recent afternoon, students gathered in the cafeteria and on shaded benches, poring over textbooks and chattering far from the violence that engulfed the university between 2014 and 2016.
“Jihadists who controlled the city had planted artisanal mines almost everywhere” on campus, university president Ezzedin Younis Eddressi said in an AFP interview in a newly completed administration building.
According to Eddressi, unique manuscripts dating back 700 years were looted — which the university later recovered — as about 90 per cent of the complex was destroyed by jihadists.
But the university still held classes for those two years, using elementary and secondary schools across the city with schoolchildren attending in the morning and university students in the afternoon, Eddressi added.
Shutting down the university was never considered, the director said. “The university is life itself” for the city of one million inhabitants. “In every household there’s a student, a professor or a university employee.”
After jihadists were defeated by Haftar’s forces, students gradually returned to campus but were studying in makeshift facilities.
Libya has struggled to recover from the chaos that followed the 2011 unrest and is divided between a UN-recognised government in the west and an eastern rival administration backed by Haftar.
Maryam Alrefadi, a 26-year-old who graduated from the university last year and who now teaches French online, recalled the difficult years.
“What we went through was not easy,” she told AFP. “We had no idea how we would make it through.”
But today, she added, “we have security” and “the possibility to do anything: to travel, start projects, create our own businesses”.
Alrefadi said Benghazi’s revival was owed to its resilience and the “sacrifices of young people and fathers”.
“It has always remained vibrant and alive despite everything it endured.”
Ayesha al-Mogassbi, a 19-year-old English student at the university, also recalled hard times.
“At some point, we had nothing,” she said. “Libya was at its lowest. We suffered a lot. We suffered bad education, no financial stability.”
“So instead of just dreaming of having electricity or drinking water or food (which) are all normal things… we’re looking for more, for better,” she said. “We know that we can give more.”
Reconstruction of the university began three years ago and has been overseen by Libya’s Reconstruction Fund, headed by Belgacem Haftar, one of the sons of Khalifa Haftar — whose portraits are displayed prominently across the campus.
The fund recently received an additional three billion dollars from Libya’s central budget, financed by the country’s oil revenues. The Haftars control areas encompassing the country’s majority of oil fields.
