Western leaders have disregarded Libya for years – these peace talks are too little, too late

After all but ignoring the war unfolding in Libya for nine months, suddenly world powers are paying attention to the North African country.

Boris Johnson, the UK prime minister, Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president, as well as representatives and leaders of several other European and Arab states, are heading to Berlin on Sunday to take part in long-delayed peace talks hosted by Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor.

Even Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state, is taking time out of his busy schedule of trashing Iran on Twitter to attend.

Many are relieved that such important figures are finally coming together to help resolve a years-long conflict that in its latest phase has cost 2,000 lives, displaced tens of thousands, and engulfed yet another Arab capital in war.

The suffering and misery of Libyans has worsened since the 2011 Nato-backed armed uprising against long-time dictator Muammar Gaddafi, whose toppling inaugurated a new era of chaos and civil war in the country. Aid workers and the United Nations say it’s crucial to halt a conflict before it devastates Tripoli, the country’s most densely populated area.

“The violence in Libya has to stop,” Thomas Garofalo, the International Rescue Committee’s Libya director, said in a statement, noting that his organisation has had to suspend some of its aid work in the country because of the conflict. “The Libyan people live in constant fear the situation can deteriorate again at any time.”

But the events leading up to the Berlin conference suggest it will fail.

Egged on by France, western leaders have for months been ignoring calls to intervene in Libya, where renegade warlord Khalifa Haftar, backed by the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, has been waging a war against the United Nations-brokered authority in Tripoli to win full control of the country.

Haftar has insisted that those who run Tripoli are “terrorists”, which experts consider an odd accusation to make against Fayez Serraj, prime minister of the government of National Accord, and the mild-mannered scion of an elite Libyan family.

The collection of western Libyan armed groups that support the Tripoli government are generally thuggish and a few elements lean toward Islamist extremes. But they are no more radical and conservative than the Saudi-backed Salafi militias that do Haftar’s bidding, and certainly just as brutal.

Haftar would likely not have got as far as he has except for two pillars of international support.

One is the steady military support of the United Arab Emirates, which sees in the government of Tripoli unacceptable elements of the Muslim Brotherhood, and has been violating an arms embargo by sending drones and helping to finance Sudanese and perhaps Russian mercenaries to support Haftar.

The other has been UN Security Council member France, which has been actively running diplomatic interference for Haftar against the very government and peace process ostensibly supported by its own foreign ministry.

Over the last few months, France repeatedly watered down UN Security Council resolutions and European Union statements on Libya, often to the bafflement of other nations.

While Macron’s motives remain unclear, more likely than not, he’s doing so in part because of the west’s affinity for Arab tyrants of the Haftar mold, but mostly because that is what the Emirati and Egyptian rulers who buy a lot of French weapons want him to do.

Macron even convinced Italy, which had been backing the government in Tripoli to keep migrants at bay, to ease up on its support, and appeared to do everything in his power to prevent Haftar from feeling heat after bombings of civilian targets, including dozens of innocent migrants his forces allgedly killed.

For nine months they failed to confront Haftar or call him out for backing out of the peace talks and launching war last year, for violations of human rights in areas under his control, including the disappearance of activist and lawmaker Siham Sergewa, or for his continued attacks on civilian sites in and around Tripoli.

But the insouciance of western leaders created a vacuum that Turkey, among the few international backers of the UN government in Tripoli, forcefully filled.

Erdogan in recent weeks has unveiled plans to bolster the forces defending Tripoli with troops, Syrian fighters and sophisticated equipment. It was a bold gambit meant to shore up his allies in Tripoli and build Turkish influence across the Mediterranean.

France, Egypt, Greece, the Emirates, and Cyprus protested, accusing Turkey of violating an arms embargo that Haftar’s side had been violating for years, and making a grab for vast gas deposits beneath the Mediterranean Sea. The EU weighted in, critical of Turkey.

Still, there was no talk of a Libya peace summit.

Then on 13 January, Putin and Erdogan stunned the west by bringing Serraj and Haftar to Moscow for peace talks, days after getting both sides to agree to a truce.

The talks achieved nothing after Haftar left in a huff. But they dislodged the notion that the west could accomplish any of its murky goals in Libya by delegating its decision to Mohamed bin Zayed, the ambitious crown prince of Abu Dhabi and architect of the Emirates’ foreign policy.

Not only had the policy drift created an opening for Turkey to cement a maritime deal with Libya that it has long sought for its own commercial and strategic goals, it gave an opening for the west’s arch-nemesis Putin to become kingmaker in yet another important Arab country, after it managed to supplant the west in Syria.

The UN’s Libya envoy Ghassan Salame and his deputies had been begging western leaders for months to change course on Libya, issuing dire warnings at the Security Council about the humanitarian disaster unfolding and the possibility of a now-subdued Isis reemerging in the chaos.

But only after the Moscow meeting did Merkel and Macron suddenly rush forward the peace conference in Berlin.

As the talks get under way, many Libyans have grown pessimistic that any of the international players have their interests in mind, and have become convinced that their country has become no more than a playing piece in the geopolitical games of world powers.