The southern border city of Ben Guerdan, which had been attacked last month by ISIS militants, receives scarce rainfall, depriving it of access to major bodies of water.  Scarce natural resources, according to political history professor Abdulatif Henashi, have deepened its economic marginalization and disrupted development and employment projects.

The southern border city of Ben Guerdan, which had been attacked last month by ISIS militants, receives scarce rainfall, depriving it of access to major bodies of water.  Scarce natural resources, according to political history professor Abdulatif Henashi, have deepened its economic marginalization and disrupted development and employment projects.

In this geographical and economic desert, the only businesses that have flourished in Ben Guerdan have been currency exchange and smuggling of goods from Libya.

According to the World Bank, around 4,000 of the area’s population (young people between 20-35 years) work in the smuggling and currency exchange in the black market.

The people of Ben Guerdan started bringing goods from Libya at the end of the 1990s after the political crisis between Tunisia and Libya was resolved. The relationship between the two countries was intense under the late President Habib Boureguiba and led to closing of the border many times.

Hussein Nasri, a 47-year-old trader in the Moroccan Market, said work in the illegal trade in the city started in 2000 in a semi-organized way through the official crossing points, before the emergence of smuggling networks.

He said that the parallel trade was more prosperous under Ben Ali as some of his relatives were involved in smuggling different kinds of goods.

“The involvement of Ben Ali’s family in this business contributed to the development of this trade as they supervised smuggling in tons of electronic devices and cars’ spare part, which created job opportunities for different categories of people,” he added.  

A number of this market’s traders does not deny that their children dropped out of school early because of the high sums of money they were able to earn smuggling goods from Libya and currency exchange. 

Damaging the interest of these traders and smugglers is a red line for the people of Ben Guerdan who accepted working in the parallel trade as compensation for the absence of development projects in their areas.

Ben Guerdan experienced some tensions when the Libyan regime imposed taxes on traders which amounted to almost US $1000 for importing goods from Libya, a move which Ben Guerdan’s people did not accept. Therefore, they cut the roads leading to the Ras Jdeir Crossing in Ben Guerdan.

“Our area witnessed violent clashes between the police and the residents after we cut the main roads to force the government to intervene and convince Gaddafi’s regime to revoke the taxes imposed on traders,” Nasri said.

However, the major transformation in Ben Guerdan happened after the revolution and soon moved to Libya and ousted Gaddafi, completely opening the borders between the two countries.   

Henashi said smuggling after the revolution was no longer limited to exporting Tunisian food products to Libya or importing Asian products to the Tunisian markets. “Ben Guerdan became a main crossing to smuggle people, drugs and arms into Tunisia and then to Algeria,” he said. Eventually, this situation was contained after the Tunisian authorities tightened its control over its borders.

These tightened measures were taken after the increased level of smuggling and the sneaking of terrorists across the borders between the two countries, having a negative impacts on the parallel trade in Ben Guerdan.

However, Ben Guerdan remains a thriving city due to the currency exchange business which is illegal and only allowed for licensed banks.

Currency traders in the city have been exploiting the collapse of the Libyan dinar for months to buy billions of dinars and storing them in their houses and shops to pump them into the market when the Libyan dinar reaches an equivalent value of the Tunisian one. A trader said this will enable them to make huge profits which exceed the transactions of a bank branch.

The so-called ‘al-Sarf Street’ is considered the destination of hundreds of people seeking to buy foreign currencies including euros and US dollars. These places enable them to buy any amount of foreign currencies, unlike in Tunisia, whose laws only allow those who are planning to travel abroad to transfer 6,000 Tunisian dinars ($ 3,000) through their passports.

The ‘exchange’ spots in this streets are not subject to any kind of governmental control despite the fact that the capital of such outlets reach (annually) 8 to 10 million dinars ($ 4-5 million), according to the traders’ estimates. 

These shops also work in financial brokerage between the traders of the Maghreb’s countries. The Algerian and Moroccan traders use these shops to transfer significant sums of money to their Libyan partners to buy goods without resorting to the bank transfers which make them subject to the monitoring authorities in their countries.

Some local officials in Ben Guerdan admit that the city has become a ‘state within a state’ as it hosts illegal activities which the Tunisian authorities are not prepared to tackle right now fearing that the area’s people might protest. 

Although a number of the area’s youth are members of Jihadi groups, the majority of Ben Guerdan’s people have supported the state and its security and military apparatuses to thwart ISIS.