Libyan prime minister-designate under a proposed National Unity government Fayez Seraj attends a joint news conference with European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini in Tunis, Tunisia January 8. Photo: Zoubeir Souissi/Reuters

January 17 will mark the international community’s day of infamy, when it tried to push through a new Libyan government elected by nobody and answerable to nobody.

Though it failed on the agreed date to do so, it succeeded in part on January 19 by getting their designated prime minister to include everyone, and I mean everyone, much in the same way as pemiers Al Kieb and Zeidan did. Proposing over a hundred ministers and deputy ministers, paying off militias and making a deal that keeps Hafter and Jidran in place. It’s not democracy but a temporary band-aid as the future will prove.

The United Nations has heralded the new government it basically chose as a unifying force, capable of ending Libya’s civil war and persuading the violent militias to come together and crush Isis. So runs the fantasy. Yes, maybe, but it’s still a band-aid solution.

The grandly named Government of National Accord (GNA) is nothing of the sort. It is a coup, by the United Nations. Peter Oborne of Britain’s Spectator magazine wrote after a recent visit to the country: “As far as I can discover, this is the first time that the UN have sanctioned a coup d’etat against a democratically elected government.”

It’s not democracy but a temporary band-aid as the future will prove

He is right. In the summer of 2014 the United Nations supervised, paid for, and approved elections for Libya’s parliament, the House of Representatives.

Hardly was the ink dry on the election results than Libya Dawn, an alliance of Islamists and Misratans, having lost the argument in the ballot box, rebelled and captured Tripoli, forcing the elected government to flee for Tobruk.

You would expect the UN, having given official recognition to the parliament, to back it up, and you would be wrong. Instead, the international community has spent the past year putting pressure on the elected parliament to share power with the militias of Libya Dawn.

The parliament had refused, sensibly saying that peace in Libya can come only from the ballot box, not the gun. In December, the UN, pushed by the US and Britain, turned its back on the elected government and conjured a brand-new government to take its place.

In fact, this GNA is a farce. It is composed of a nine-strong presidency, headed by a prime minister, Fayez Seraj, all men picked by the UN itself. Seraj made a brief visit to Libya earlier this month, just long enough to come under fire in Misrata and then be expelled by Libya Dawn from Tripoli back to his base in Tunis.

All these machinations have been conducted in Tunis.

Now on the morning of January 19 they submitted this enormous list of cabinet members with everyone’s cousin in it for the House of Representatives to approve by January 29. Band aid that it is.

The one huge carrot the UN has to offer is international recognition - because this status means that, at the stroke of a pen, the GNA’s nine people will control Libya’s $109 billion in foreign reserves. This also makes the GNA utterly beholden to the UN, and to the Western nations behind it who conjured it into existence.

UN envoy Martin Kobler told the BBC last week he hoped that the elected parliament in Tobruk will agree to the GNA taking all this money and control. It may well be approved so that almost all will financially benefit. Notable exceptions will be the President of the GNC, Nouri Abu Sahmain and former LIFG fighter, Abdul Hakim Belhadj. It’s going to be interesting how they manage these two and others of a similar ilk.

While this farce is playing out, Libya’s internal fighting is going to get worse after a brief artificial euphoria. Isis will seize upon these divisions in the medium and long-term. In the short-term, all willlook well.

In Tripoli, Libya Dawn militias are fighting each other anyway. If of course they get paid off, they’ll stop; that’s also a short-term fix.

In eastern Libya, things are different. Tobruk had begun making moves to take control of oil production. While western fields are out of use, and Isis has captured the Sirte Basin fields in central Libya, the eastern fields at Sarir are still producing, giving Libya almost its only income. Khalifa Haftar, the armed forces commander of the elected government, last week secured them, and the precious pipeline north to the coast, by moving army units south to block any advance on them by Isis.

This is because Tobruk knows it holds all the cards: it has the democratic legitimacy, and with oil production, it has the income. UN officials insist that giving international recognition to the GNA means they will control oil sales.

The international community, meanwhile, insists it is ready to pour in aid and help. EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini has pledged €100 million to the new government - although with its $109 billion, the one thing the GNA will not be short of, if the UN gets its way, is money for the poker game it will need to play with all the many Libyan actors, especially the cash-hungry militias.

What it is short of is loyal troops. It has none. The only way it can get into Tripoli, let alone govern, is if Britain and Italy make good on promises in December to send several thousand troops to the capital. But this month, Isis detonated a truck bomb to devastate Zliten police college, one of only three in the country, killing 65 and injuring up to 200. London and Rome won’t say it, but they know that any future deployment by them will run the huge risk of more truck bombs, and body bags.

With no foreign troops likely to give this UN-regime teeth, the GNA’s long term prospects of success are zero.

Such an outcome was predicted by Mahmoud Jibril, leader of the National Forces Alliance, Libya’s largest political party which has twice trumped the Muslim Brotherhood when Libyan voters were asked to make a choice. His conviction is that Libya’s problems cannot be solved by outside intervention, and the farce of the GNA will inadvertently and eventually prove him right. Like Hiftar, Jibril is ignored by the international community. Yet both men’s singular vision, one from a military perspective, the other political, of a country run by Libyans for Libyans, is likely to be around long after this GNA fiasco is forgotten.

The international community had yet another ‘important’ conference roadshow in Rome about Libya which was expected to produce nothing that the Libyan people have asked for but only what the international community want to see happen. And we in the West call this democracy.

Richard Galustian is a security analyst.