From following Tunisian media and politicians in the past decade, one could get the impression that the country’s smugglers must be incredibly busy people. They have been connected to such a huge number of conspiracy theories and plots, to supporting so many different parties (impressively across the entire political spectrum), to funding so many different politicians, protesters, businessmen and terrorists, and undermining the country in so many ways that one wonders how they still have time to eat and sleep.
In a way, smugglers make the perfect opponent for populist politicians. Referencing them conveniently frames anything connected to them as foreign, backed by outside forces, and undermining the honest and law-abiding nation. It positions politicians and security forces as holding the line between the rule of law and chaos, and makes it easy to fundraise from donors and international partners worried about regional instability. With smugglers and states framed as the principal opponents in a global battle for order, it is no accident that borders and their fortification have had such a powerful resurgence in recent years: across the globe, their number has almost quadrupled since the early 2000s.
The political power of these arguments relies on that twilight zone where know enough to be worried about something, to see it a real threat, but not enough to question how the origin and nature of that threat is being presented. And in the case of smuggling in Tunisia, this is where it gets odd. Because while there are plenty of open questions about smuggling in Tunisia and some things which remain shrouded in secrecy, there is in fact plenty we do know. I may be tempted to mention my own book on the topic which builds on extensive interviews with smugglers and border communities in Tunisia and Morocco, but the truth is that over the past decade, there has been a whole tonnage of excellent research, scholarship, activism, reports upon reports, economic assessments, and different forms of journalism on smuggling in Tunisia. Even more importantly, much of what we know directly contradicts and complicates the public narrative about smuggling. It suggests that we have been asking the wrong questions entirely and are looking in the wrong places for solutions. It suggests that smuggling is much more widespread than commonly thought, much more central to the country’s political economy – but also not always subversive, and not typically “under the radar” of the state. So let’s start with some facts about smuggling in Tunisia: about its economic and political role, and about the crisis that it is currently in, and see what that suggests for what may happen next, and the solutions that are available.
The Economic Power of Smuggling
The first thing we know about smuggling in Tunisia is that it has been a central part of the economic model of many of its border regions for a long time. Much of the public attention on smuggling is on the smuggling of illicit goods, on guns and drugs in particular. Both exist, but both make up only a tiny fraction of the types of goods that are smuggled across Tunisia’s border, and employ an even smaller fraction of the country’s smugglers. The vast majority of goods that are moved illegally across Tunisia’s borders or through its border crossings have long been consumer goods – microwaves and carpets, Hello Kitty Backpacks and tea, construction materials and tires, the list goes on. Many are not from Libya or Algeria originally, but produced in East Asia or Turkey, shipped into the port of Tripoli and then moved through open borderlands or the Ras Jedir border crossing, often by making some kind of payment, but not the full taxes and tariffs. These goods quickly make it from the borderlands to markets across the country. This is well known – it would be difficult to find a Tunisian who has not purchased goods on these markets, which have become an integral part of the country’s economy.
For much of the past few decades, nothing has been smuggled more than gasoline. Making use of substantial price differences, gasoline smuggling from Algeria and Libya has at times covered up to 25% of total gasoline consumption in Tunisia – substantially lowering transport and energy costs throughout the country and employing thousands of people. The spread of informal roadside gasoline stations – jerry cans piled on the side of the road, next to a filter, a funnel and a hose – from the borderlands into the suburbs of the Tunisian centre, and then their pushing back out to the periphery has provided a visual illustration of the ebbing and flowing availability and toleration of smuggled gasoline especially after 2011.
All of this has fundamentally shaped the economies of Tunisia’s borderlands. One of the least discussed facts about the way in which smuggling has long been organised in Tunisia is that it is highly labour intensive. When gasoline or carpets are officially imported into the country (though that term ‘official’ may also at times hide some tariff evasion as well), they are brought, bought and moved in large tanks or containers. When they are informally brought through Ras Jedir or through the country’s borderlands, however, they are typically brought in through smaller cars and 4x4s, then moved on to wholesalers, other transporters or smaller distributors. As a consequence, smuggling has played a huge role in employing a large number of Tunisians in regions which have traditionally been neglected by formal state projects and investments.
None of this is entirely new. The nature of the goods has changed with global economic trends, but the reliance of Tunisian borderlands on trade long predates the country’s borders. In fact, the construction of these borders and many of the region’s border towns is intimately tied to desires by national and colonial actors to access and control trade routes. Similarly, the fact that not all that comes through these borders and their border crossings passes through legally and with full tax and tariff rates has been clearly understood by everyone involved for decades. This already hints at another important aspect.
Smuggling on the Radar
The second central fact about smuggling in Tunisia is that the role of the Tunisian state largely has not been to fight it, but to manage it. From Tunisia’s independence to today, authorities from the local to the national level have understood the economic reliance of their borderlands on smuggling. While they have sought to crack down on the smuggling of some items, most notably some drugs and arms, they have contributed to creating structured rules and arrangements for how many other goods can be brought across and distributed throughout the country. Some of these include explicit agreements on what types of goods can be brought through, where, in what quantities and at what exact costs, others include tacit toleration by wholesale or distribution units, or the limitation of enforcement to certain areas.
These arrangements, though shifting over time, have structured how the country’s smuggling economy works, and how its goods are integrated into the national economy. This has also given the state a certain amount of visibility over what is going on – who is moving what, and where. These arrangements do not cover everything. Smuggling, like every business, can be highly competitive and especially larger-scale smugglers and those bringing through higher-value goods have an interest in getting an advantage, finding a different route, cutting a different deal. These dynamics, alongside the fluidity of such arrangements when there are changes among the actors along the border, have meant that smuggling has not infrequently been accompanied by lethal violence, often against transporters driving across the desert.
And sometimes, state security forces do indeed arrest groups of smugglers. But, despite appearances, the idea is often not to stop smuggling entirely, but to perform – quite literally – a certain amount of control. When speaking to me about a range of high-profile arrests in 2017, a senior official at a relevant ministry described them not as a crackdown or a security relevant measure, but as “conjunctural,” as “aiming to reinstate an equilibrium.” In general, these incidents mask the predictability, the ordinariness, of much of the smuggling throughout the past decades. Most smugglers spend most of their day not running or hiding from security services, but standing in line – at borders and checkpoints, waiting for suppliers or customers.
Who Benefits
Along the way, smugglers have not been the only ones benefiting from these arrangements. Consumers have gotten access to cheaper goods, municipalities have become increasingly reliant on the taxes from expanding city markets, and members of security forces have made substantial margins at the many roadblocks throughout the country’s borderlands. “They are not here for security, they just check your papers and ask for money,” one resident of the Tunisian borderlands aptly observed in the face of the disproportionately high number of checkpoints: “It’s a good place for them to work.”
Political networks – perhaps best documented for the Ben Ali period – were able to strategically insert themselves into some of the most lucrative smuggling trades. Corruption always plays a role in smuggling, but it is misleading to think of it as the primary reason for this toleration. While some actors – on both sides of the law – have gotten rich, it is the dominance of smuggling in border economies, their role in employing many who do not get rich, that has played a larger role in the political calculus of its toleration. Whenever smuggling economies were thrown into crises, be it as a result of border closures, conflicts or disagreements with authorities, governing the country’s borderlands became more difficult in a context of protests and high unemployment. Perhaps the best summary of this scenario came to me from a high-level municipal bureaucrat in Ben Guerdane:
“Sometimes it is the law that secures the social peace. But here, we have a special situation. Here, it has never been just the law that secured this. Here it was always Libya that provided for people. People turn to Libya first, and they only turn to the state second, if there are problems with Libya. Then they turn to the state—and here we are the state—to provide for them. And the state needs to provide, for stability.”
Smuggling in Crisis
Remembering this is particularly important today: the third key fact about smuggling is that it occurs in a state of protracted crisis—not just in Tunisia, but throughout the Maghreb. There are many reasons for this. Some are connected to the wider crises of the world economy: both Covid and the global supply chain challenges of the past years have affected smuggling as much as any other sector that is heavily reliant on international trade and retail. Some are more specific: the situation in Libya throughout the past decade has made trade through it more complicated, requiring its own kind of informal diplomacy between changing actors and interests on the other side of the border. Most importantly, however, smuggling across North Africa has been challenged by the construction of new border infrastructure, of new walls and trenches, fences and ditches, and an international concern with border porosity. This has not manifested only or even primarily at Tunisia’s borders – the same trend played out in Algeria and Morocco years earlier.
While border infrastructure is the classic ‘anti smuggling measure,’ and one that international funders have been happy to support across the globe, it is important to be precise about the effects of walls, trenches and fences. There are few indications that new border infrastructure has seriously disrupted the drugs trade in North Africa for example. The likely explanation for this is that these networks are capitalised and connected enough to operate through and around new barriers. The same is not necessarily true for the smuggling of consumer goods in smaller quantities – many of the smaller scale traders across the region have significantly felt the effects of new infrastructure, either in having their access to borders cut entirely, or become substantially more expensive. Effects have varied by region and trade, and over time, but years of uncertainty have left their marks. A look at other regions like northern Morocco, which has seen smuggling largely collapse after a long dependence on it, offer a preview of the economic effects of this crisis.
The effects are in fact both economic and political in nature. On the economic side, a crisis in smuggling most directly manifests in a decrease of income and employment opportunities in borderland communities. If there are no alternatives available, common coping strategies include domestic or international migration, but economic crises also create an easier employment market for actors on the more nefarious side of smuggling economies. Politically, crises in smuggling have manifested in demands by borderland communities to the Tunisian state. Members of border communities will highlight that smuggling has been explicitly presented to them as their only livelihood option. As one resident of Ben Guerdane told me: “The government locally exists only as police and security forces, not as investment. (…) The government has said to Ben Guerdane: ‘You have Ras Jedir, work as much as you want, but we are watching you’.” If Ras Jedir does not provide livelihoods anymore, the argument goes, the state that has long tolerated and benefitted from these activities needs to help provide alternatives.
Beyond a “Law and Order” Approach: Economic Solutions
Recognising the economic and political history of smuggling in Tunisia, and its current crisis, provides some hints at what kind of solutions are needed. It highlights that a politician or a state that just postures itself as enforcing a “law and order” approach will quite rightfully be seen as hypocritical by border communities. Decades of economic marginalisation of borderlands, the de-facto toleration of smuggling economies combined with a political discourse that questions the decency, morality and loyalty of borderland communities have left a history of mistrust. That also matters from a security perspective. The way in which state security forces have managed border security in Tunisia has also long relied on some relationships with border communities and smugglers, to provide them with information across a border that is extremely difficult to monitor. Just talking tough and cracking down risks further damaging these relationships, and further alienating Tunisia’s most important partners along its borders: its people.
This means that dealing with smuggling does not just require a security approach, it also requires a development approach for border communities. Some parts of smuggling – guns and drugs in particular – are primarily law enforcement issues. But they are a minority. If Tunisian politicians and international donors are serious about limiting the role of smuggling across Tunisia’s border, or about engaging with its ongoing crisis, what is needed is a new economic model for regions in which smuggling has been essential. There are bits of good news in that regard. One is that there is generally a larger openness within borderland communities to alternative economic models than some may expect. Some smugglers are keenly aware of the downsides of their trade, of the risks and indignities, and the volatility of their regions’ dependencies. “We don’t want to work as informal traders with Libya, but there is no other option,” one smuggler told me; “I mean, I literally brought goods over under fire. I need to do anything to put food on the table for my family.” There are widespread demand and explicit calls for other economic opportunities, not just in the street but among development actors and local civil society organisations.
From Illegal Trade to Free Trade?
But these come with substantial practical challenges. Even without considering the effect of the conflict in Libya, reversing the effects of decades of economic neglect is a substantial task. Free trade zones and special economic zones, among the most cited alternatives and which have been actively on the agenda in Tunisia, are a classic example of this. One such project in Ben Guerdane has been one of the most concrete proposals for the region, but so far has been tangled up in institutional, legal and geopolitical blockages. The idea behind this concept is simple: to provide a formal alternative to smuggling, to capitalise on the strategic location of borderlands and the international networks of its communities in order to boost formal trade.
Aside from the practicalities of setting up these zones, and the infrastructure that they need to be embedded into, the main issue here is the scope of the challenge. Replacing the sheer number of jobs that smuggling economies have provided, their labour intensity, is an incredibly high benchmark. Just on the Tunisia-Libya border, estimates of the local economic value of the trade were once in the hundreds of millions of dinars, with direct and indirect employment effects on tens of thousands of Tunisians.
The other thing that is difficult to replace is the ease of accessing the smuggling economy. While smuggling may seem like a difficult business to get into from the outside, it has actually been a relatively easy path to an income for young men in borderlands. While some of the most profitable positions in the smuggling economy require capital and connections, many of the lower-level positions do not. The key question then becomes whether people who used to benefit from this relatively easy access in order to make a living will be able to benefit from free trade zones, or if the opportunities provided by them will only benefit more educated, politically connected or capitalised actors.
The borderlands of northern Morocco provide a good example for these kinds of dynamics. Here, smuggling was similarly dominant, but much of it – especially the trade in wholesale consumer goods and gasoline – largely collapsed about a decade ago. Government attempts at providing economic alternatives have included large-scale infrastructure investments and special economic zones. But while some former smugglers have found it easy to take advantage of opportunities in the formal sector, especially those of more modest means and in more rural parts of the borderlands have often been left unconnected to these opportunities. If Tunisia replicated this pattern, it would likely further marginalise its borderlands and its populations.
If You Want to Call Them Criminals
All of this makes for difficult conversation in Tunisia today. In the context of an economic crisis, high debt and difficult economic reforms, investing in borderlands is a much more complicated suggestion than treating the latter primarily as a security problem. But there are important lessons in Tunisia’s smuggling economy for economic reform plans in the country more widely. The key lesson here is that what might at first look like, and easily be described as, a problem for Tunisia’s economy, as a kink that needs to be fixed through stringent laws and clear enforcement, is often tied to a larger history and fragile distributional dynamics. The allocation of posts in the public sector as social redistribution to specific communities or families, in that way, is rather similar to smuggling. Both plainly look inefficient and borderline corrupt at first sight, and both are clearly not ideal arrangements.
Both also require recognising that there have been a variety of ways through which people have been historically included, by different regimes and elites, into the Tunisian state and economy. Some of these ways are obvious, some are more complex, some are strictly within the letter of the law, many are not. Changing this requires more than reforms and law enforcement: it requires addressing complex legacies of how the Tunisian economy has been structured – in dialogue with those who are most affected by them. One person who understood this quite instinctively was Tunisia’s former President Moncef Marzouki. While in office, he took the rather unusual step of meeting with a committee of cross-border traders from Ben Guerdane to listen to their concerns. When I asked him why he had participated in this meeting, he replied: “Half of Tunisia’s economy is informal. If you want to call them criminals you can, but it doesn’t help. The informal economy must become part of Tunisia’s structural economy.” In many ways, it already is.
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