The Ras Jedir border crossing lies at the Northern tip of the border between Tunisia and Libya, and 20 miles from the Tunisian town of Ben Guerdane. The vast majority of informal cross-border trade operates through the Ras Jedir border crossing, and has done so for the last three decades. A wide variety of internationally produced consumer goods are shipped to the ports of Western Libya, packed on smaller cars, and brought into Tunisia through the border crossing. At the crossing, the goods are either completely undeclared, mis-declared or under-declared, with the avoidance of the full legal import tariff making up a significant section of the profit margins of local traders. The trade is highly routinized and can be observed in broad daylight. Hundreds of young men from Ben Guerdane earn their livings as drivers carrying smuggled goods between Western Libya and Southern Tunisia. As this usually occurs alongside a payment to the customs agents at the border, media reporting on the border crossing typically connects the procedure to the issue of corruption, and frames Ben Guerdane as a “lawless, Wild-West-like town” (Prentis 2018).
However, upon closer examination, fundamental regularities appear in the procedures at Ras Jedir. For decades, informal trade at the border crossing has been regulated through an informal agreement between local traders, customs officers, and the Tunisian and Libyan state apparatus. This agreement regulates the types of goods that may pass informally through the crossing, their quantity, the means of transport, and the cost of this informal trade – meaning both the practice of under-reporting and the side payments made to border agents. This agreement has not stayed fixed – many of
101 its terms have varied over recent years, based on a set of negotiations that will be discussed in later chapters. However, its claim over the regulation of these features of the trade, has, with the exception of a few months after the 2011 revolution, remained constant.
In order to illustrate, this is the agreement as it existed in April of 2017:
- Traders who were transporting goods with a value of less than 2000 Libyan Dinar (GBP 1097)28 plus 150 litres of Libyan gasoline were not required to pay anything at the border crossing, neither the official tariff nor any standardised bribe or other informal fee.29
- Traders who were transporting goods with a value of over 2000 Libyan Dinar (GBP 1097) would pay 1500 Libyan Dinar (GBP 822) to an
intermediary on the Libyan side, while 300 Tunisian Dinar (GBP 76) would be paid to the Tunisian customs officials.30
- While the money on the Libyan side would be divided between multiple groups that exercised some claims over the border crossing, including the nearby Libyan municipality of Zuwara, the money on the Tunisian side would partly go towards the tariff income of the state, while some would go directly to the private income of the customs agents.
- Weapons and narcotics were excluded from the deal, and not allowed to be imported through the border crossing. Medicine is only allowed to be imported informally if paperwork by a doctor can be provided. All goods that were brought through had to pass through a scanner at the border crossing to ensure that they are in accordance with this rule.31
28 Conversions to British Pound Sterling (GBP) is based on 2019 official exchange rates, and throughout this book has been included for the convenience of the reader only. It is not meant to indicate the availability of GBP locally at this rate and at the time at which the respective institution was in force. It is also important to highlight that there are significant differences between the black-market rate and the official exchange rate for the Libyan Dinar.
29 As mentioned earlier, ‘irregular’ bribes occasionally occurred, for example if customs agents purposefully caused a traffic jam and then charged cars a fee to bypass it.
30 While this might appear like very high, it’s worth noting that many traders import goods with values significantly beyond 2000 Libyan Dinar.
31 Triangulated through multiple interviews with different traders as well as informants involved in negotiating this agreement
102 The procedures and payments outlined in this agreement are – as is generally readily admitted by all actors involved – entirely in contradiction with Tunisia’s laws on customs and tariffs.32 Formally, the trade conducted here is illegal. Tunisia’s tariff system does not mirror the ‘minimum threshold’ included in the agreement33, it specifies different tariff rates for different goods, it employs tariffs as percentages of the good’s value, not a lump sum as in the agreement here, and naturally does not contain a split of the tariff incomes between state accounts and the personal income of customs agents.
It is also worth noting that this agreement as outlined here represented one of the more
‘deregulated’ versions of this institution. Its immediate predecessor, in effect from January until April 2017, had set an upper limit per car of goods with the total value of 4000 Libyan Dinar (GBP 2187) plus 150 litres of gasoline34, and a later iteration again introduced a maximum limit of 5000 Libyan Dinar (GBP 2733).35 While this agreement only prohibited the informal import of illicit products alongside medicine, agreements that had been in place before 2011 placed additional restrictions on the types of goods that could be brought through the crossing without paying the formal tariffs, mainly to protect goods that politically connected businessmen in Tunis had an interest in protecting from competition through informal trade. This included, amongst others, almonds, pistachios, very high-value electronics, and bananas (T68), which famously had been a crucial part of the business empire of the recently arrested Chafiq Jerraya (Ghorbal 2017).
Earlier agreements, including between 2012 and 2016, had also included specific restrictions as to the type of cars that could be used for informal trade through the border crossing. As local traders pointed out, this boiled down to a prohibition against the use of large transport vehicles, as the use of smaller cars combined with the traffic jams at the border crossings that would commonly surpass 4 or 5 hours, made the trade
32 Given this section’s focus on Tunisia, and the complexity of Libya’s competing legal structures in 2014, I focus on Tunisia here.
33 There are legal exemptions for the important and export of some goods, but these are usually specified for personal consumption and set a lower threshold, such as 200 cigarettes or 250ml of perfume.
34 Memorandum of Understanding, signed in Zuwara on the first Sunday of January 2017. Full text in Appendix 2.
35 This was confirmed to me by one of its negotiators (T102). (Throughout this dissertation, interviews are cited by a code assigned to each interview. The full list of interviews can be found in Appendix 1).
103 substantially more labour intensive. Negotiators for the agreement that I spoke to highlighted that this had been negotiated in the knowledge that it would both help to employ young men from the region and make the practice less accessible for traders based in Tunis (T40, T96). In addition, smaller cars were easier to search, facilitating the enforcement on the ban of smuggling weapons through the border crossing.
This agreement, as described above, is unwritten, but knowledge of it and its details is widespread among traders in the area. A wide variety of traders in different locations and networks were able to recite its precise details to me. However, an earlier version of this agreement was even written down – against the expectation of common characterisations of informal institutions as inherently unwritten (North 1990; M.
Khan 2010), as will be discussed in more detail below. Between January and April 2017, a written text existed, a “Memorandum of Understanding”, that had been produced by an earlier round of negotiations between local actors around the status of the border crossing. A photocopy, as well as a full translation of the agreement, can be found in Appendix 2.
Apart from listing the goods and quantities that are allowed to be brought through the border crossing informally, and at which cost, the agreement included sections that justify its purpose, affirming “the spirit of cooperation and brotherhood between the Libyan and Tunisian peoples”36, and “foster cooperation through it, without proceeding to hurt the national sovereignty of both countries”37. It also contains a list of demands towards both the Tunisian and Libyan governments, reflecting common frustrations of the traders, such as long lines at the border crossing, the absence of a special passageway for humanitarian emergencies38 and families, and even increased security cooperation between the two governments.
The agreement states that it was signed in the Libyan city of Zawya, and includes the signatures of members of the Libyan High Council of Reconciliation and the Committee of Comprehensive Agreement39, alongside two Tunisian signatures:
36 Memorandum of Understanding, signed in Zuwara on the first Sunday of January 2017. Full text in Appendix 2.
37 Ibid.
38 Many Libyans, both civilians and soldiers, travel to Tunisia for medical services, commonly crossing through the Ras Jedir crossing. Many health centres in Southern Tunisia, especially Djerba and Sfax, routinely cater to Libyan medical tourists.
39 My translations, the original Arabic specifications of these groups can be found in Appendix 2.
104 Ahmed Lamaari, a Tunisian member of parliament for the Medenine region, and a member of the Ennahda party, and Adel Ben Belqassem Neji, a civil society activist and informal trader from Ben Guerdane. The agreement also lists as ‘present’ a variety of other actors, including multiple military officers from a variety of armed groups in Western Libya, ranging from the ‘Situation Room of the Western Military Region’ to the ‘Brigade of the Martyr Jamal Gha’eb’40, an armed group originally founded in 2011, that has since made repeated claims to playing a role in the operation and securitisation of the border crossing. It is likely that the large number of actors involved, and conflicts and mistrust between some of the actors on the Libyan side necessitated a written form for the agreement, although this practice was disbanded briefly thereafter, and the agreement returned to being unwritten by April 2017. It is also worth noting that the member of parliament, is listed in the agreement merely as the “President of the Tunisian Delegation” not as a member of parliament, or a party that is currently in government.
Even the most formalised version of this agreement remained at its essence in clear contradiction to both Tunisian law, as it referred to import tariffs and procedures, and Tunisian state practice, as it referred to who could negotiate agreements with foreign actors. In my interviews with them, the negotiators of the “memorandum of understanding” emphasised that this is “not an official accord” (T57), that it is “not legal” (T96), and that while their negotiation of the agreement had been explicitly allowed by both the Prime Minister and the Minister of Interior, it has not been signed formally by a member of government. The agreement hence remains informal – and yet it is worth noting that its negotiation, enforcement and maintenance involves a wide variety of state actors, including regional governors, a member of parliament, police and customs officers, some, but not all of which stand to financially benefit from the agreement.
It is worth noting that while the agreement is informal, it is also impersonal. While large parts of the political economy literature on informal institutions assume that they are personalised and small-scale, being able to trade under this agreement does not depend on particular contacts, having a cousin in the customs office, or even being from Ben Guerdane. It does restrict access, but it does so impersonally, by requiring
40 My translations, the original Arabic can be found in Appendix 2.
105 all traders to have a Tunisian passport, for example. Traders commonly tell stories of some of the particularly large traders that build relationships with customs officials that may allow them to bypass these rules. However, this suggests more of an exception to the rule – or its breaking – than its personalisation. I will return to this point again at the end of this section.
While the regulation at the Ras Jedir border crossing has been the primary form of regulation of informal cross-border trade, it has frequently co-existed with a series of checkpoints on the road around the border crossing, both on the Tunisian and the Libyan side. These have allowed different groups to extract resources from the trade, particularly if they were not included in the rent generated at the Ras Jedir crossing itself, which became a controversial issue, particularly in Libya. The number of checkpoints has waxed and waned, but at its heights presents a serious drain on the time and resources of the traders. In February of 2017, traders recounted to me that in order to informally bring couscous to Libya, and returning with carpets, he would pass 4 checkpoints between Ben Guerdane and Ras Jedir, set up by the Tunisian National Guard, Police, Military and Customs Officers, and another 5 checkpoints between Ras Figure 11: Final page of the Memorandum of Understanding, with signatures.
(Full Document in Appendix 2)
106 Jedir and Zelten in Libya, set up by a variety of local authorities and armed groups (T60).
Both the creation of checkpoints and the level of bribes demanded are usually less predictable for traders than the institutionalised agreements at the border crossing.
Bribes range from nothing to their whole profit margins. Stories of violent abuse at checkpoints, especially in Libya, are available in abundance among traders, and have been a significant source of conflict in recent years. In this context, the different agreements for the procedure at Ras Jedir were hence also presented by traders as a simpler, more predictable and more desirable form of organisation. Especially after 2011, both the agreement at Ras Jedir and the existence of checkpoints represented not just a coordination between trader and elements of the Tunisian state around the regulation of informal trade, but also became a space of negotiation around rent extraction from the border crossing between different groups vying for influence in Western Libya. This will be discussed at more length in Chapter 7 and 8.