LIBYAN dictator Muammar Gaddafi once had a bathroom lined with Disney character tiles.

I know this because I saw them the day I accompanied rebel fighters into his fortified Bab al-Aziziya compound back in August 2011, when Gaddafi was overthrown during the Arab Spring uprisings.

I have no idea why that particular bathroom was decorated this way, perhaps it was for Gaddafi’s young children, but those images, especially of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, still stick incongruously in my mind’s eye, as does the book on witchcraft that lay on a table in an adjacent room.

It was an aptly surreal encounter with the trappings of a strange real time character who brought so much suffering and terror to his people before his own brutal demise some months later in the Libyan city of Sirte.

I mention this bizarre flashback because in the course of clearing out my study the other day, I came across a fragment from one of those tiles along with a pennant from the headquarters of the Libyan Army’s 32nd, or “Khamis”, Brigade that bears the name of Gaddafi’s youngest son and was the nation’s most feared military unit.

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I’ve never been one for trophy taking in war zones but these mementos found lying on the floor of both regime buildings in Tripoli, I kept as stark reminders of what I witnessed back then along with the hope that Libya was heading for a better future.

Sadly, this was not to be. Indeed, as I write, Libya and its people sit on the edge of a precipice. As a new year dawns it’s always dangerous to make predictions as to the global stories that will dominate the headlines and find their way into my “window on the world” columns here in The National. But mark my words when I say that Libya is poised to become the major international crisis of 2020.

There are other crises worth keeping an eye on too, of course, and many of the global conflicts of previous years remain concerns for 2020.

In Syria the war rumbles on with the likelihood that a further escalation in violence will take place between Turkey and various Kurdish armed groups. In Afghanistan meanwhile more people are being killed as a result of fighting than in any other current conflict in the world. The only glimmer of hope here is that talks with the Taliban continue just as they do between warring factions in Yemen, a conflict at risk of slipping back out of international consciousness.

Elsewhere just beneath the radar, other places also simmer and threaten to boil over. A flare-up between India and Pakistan in 2019 over the disputed region of Kashmir brought the crisis there back into sharp focus and has yet to settle.

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Countries and regions like Venezuela and eastern Ukraine likewise remain tinderboxes, while new flashpoints in Africa such as Ethiopia, where ethnic strife is surging, and Burkina Faso, plagued by an Islamist inspired insurgency, will also make for uneasy news this year.

But it is Libya by far I believe most of us will be hearing and reading about in the months ahead.

It was earlier last year that a renegade former Gaddafi general and CIA asset named Khalifa Haftar launched an attack on the internationally recognised and UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli.

In doing so Haftar effectively scuppered a UN-brokered peace process that seemed to be on the brink of success. Right now the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, France and Russia are supporting Haftar. So are Russian mercenaries from the likes of the Kremlin linked Wagner Group and African mercenaries from Sudan and Chad.

Meanwhile Turkey, Qatar, Italy and other European countries are supporting the GNA. In theory the US back the government as well but as is usual these days, the Trump administration is diplomatically running with the hare and hunting with the hounds, keeping continued contacts with Haftar, a dual Libyan-US citizen who lived for years in northern Virginia not far from the CIA headquarters at Langley.

Libya has of course long been an arena for outside competition, but this is now one almighty mess with a proxy war already underway on a par with that in Syria.

Be in no doubt that this is a conflict being fuelled by outside powers, from the drones that kill civilians to the ammunition, weapons and manpower supplied by the likes of Russia and Turkey. Sure, access to oil reserves is a factor in this an OPEC country, but what’s happening is also a wider damning reflection of how geopolitics is increasingly done these days. More than ever such proxy wars are becoming prevalent in their prosecution and harder to control.

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It might sound a cliche, but there is no military solution to what is happening in Libya any more than there is one in Syria, despite what supporters of President Bashar al- Assad might claim. In Libya right now the violence has displaced thousands of people and trapped hundreds of migrants and refugees in detention centres run by militias or human traffickers.

Years of political and diplomatic dialogue are being squandered at the expense of military muscle flexing that has become the new norm among major powers. As my colleague Mary Fitzgerald, formerly a foreign correspondent with the Irish Times and now a specialist researcher on Libya, has rightly pointed out, so many countries to date have internationally been paying lip service to the elected government while hedging their bets in Libya. And as the West has remained at best ambivalent or silent, the country has tipped toward the abyss.

It’s been said that jaw-jaw is better than war-war, but that’s not the way General Khalifa Haftar or his numerous backers see it. When diplomacy becomes confrontational, confrontations follow, as do wars. The situation in Libya now is perilous and make no mistake about it, many nations, including Western ones, are to blame.

Back in 2011, as I watched Gaddafi’s regime being overthrown, there seemed a moment of hope and a chance to make wrongs right. As a new decade dawns, I really fear for Libya once again.