How fuel smuggling keeps Gaddafi machine running - Montreal Gazette

ZOKRA – Yacine, a 24-year-old Tunisian in jeans and an oil-stained red T-shirt, has been busy since war broke out next door in Libya.

Yacine is the owner of a corrugated iron shack on the side of the road that cuts through the desert from the Tunisian town of Ben Gardane to the border with Libya.

Every day, hundreds of Libyan vehicles come to the shack, and a dozen others like it clustered in the tiny village of Zokra. There, they fill up with gasoline from jerry-cans Yacine has lined up on the roadside, then head to the Ras Jdir border crossing.

Once on the other side, they are in territory firmly under the control of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. A short distance from the crossing, the cars stop on the side of the road at informal collection points. Using lengths of tubing, they siphon the fuel out of their tanks and into blue and green jerry-cans.

Then, according to a Reuters reporter who witnessed the operation, they head back into Tunisia to collect another tank of gasoline.

"Business is good," said Yacine, who declined to give his family name because his business operates without a licence. Asked where the fuel comes from, he replied: "The gasoline is Algerian, and it's available now."

This is the lifeline that is helping Muammar Gaddafi cling to power in spite of a 5-month-old rebellion against his rule, a NATO bombing campaign, and international sanctions.

The areas of Libya under Gaddafi's control are suffering a shortage of fuel. Sanctions make it difficult to import fuel legally and Libya's own refining capacity has been severely curtailed by the conflict.

If supplies get tighter, most analysts say, Gaddafi will no longer be able to hold on. His troops will struggle to travel to the front line to take on the rebels, and the economy will grind to a halt.

But smuggling by networks like the one operated by Yacine and his colleagues bypasses the sanctions and – combined with fuel from the one operational refinery under Gaddafi's control – helps keep his government ticking over.

That's a problem for Western powers as they try to tighten the noose around Gaddafi. While they can make it extremely difficult for ships to dock in Libyan ports with cargoes of gasoline, they cannot staunch the flow of smuggled fuel.

For that, they need to rely on Tunisia and Algeria, its oil-producing neighbour to the west and source of much of the gasoline smuggled into Libya.

Governments in Tunisia and Algeria say they are not supplying fuel to Libya, and that they are implementing United Nations sanctions.

"We are rigorously enforcing the ... (UN resolutions). We have submitted a report on that to the United Nations and we invited the UN to monitor our implementation," Algerian Deputy Foreign Minister Abdelkader Messahel told Reuters.

"For us it's food products and pharmaceutical products (which are exported to Libya). All other products we consider are under embargo," he said, including motor fuel.

There is evidence that Algeria is taking a firm line on supplies to Libya. Last week, Algeria's government turned away a Libyan-flagged ship that tried to unload a cargo of gasoline in an Algerian port, probably for trucking overland to Libya, according to a Western diplomat.