1970s, migrants often had only to provide an offering of a drink or small gifts in return for receiving one or more hectares of land on which to plant cash crops and foodstuffs.17 Over time, as land became more scarce, “land transfers started to involve money, and sometimes large amounts,” creating “confus[ion] as to whether the right of use was being sold, or the ownership of the land. This confusion was knowingly upheld, both by the state—notably by way of ex-president Houphouët-Boigny’s famous slogan ‘The land belongs to those who put it to good use’ … and by certain local owners who used this notion to demand larger amounts of money.”18 On the eve of the 1998 land reform, there thus existed two deep tensions: • Between a reality dominated by customary land management, and a legal framework that gave customary rights no value; and • Between a reality in which land had been sold or ceded on a large scale, often in ways that suggested selling ownership of the soil, and a custom that forbade the sale of anything more than a right of use. On the first issue, the 1998 land law broke ground in recognizing customary rights as a basis for claiming land ownership during a transitional period.19 The law gave everyone 10 years to transform customary rights into a system of private ownership. People asserting land rights were to initiate a procedure after which, if local authorities confirmed their customary-based claims, they would obtain a state-issued land certificate (certificat foncier). People then had three additional years to register their parcel of land in the state’s land registry, or cadastre.20 In part due to the subsequent decade-long politicomilitary crisis and in part because of poor dissemination of the law, the government issued extremely few land certificates by the end of the 10 year deadline.21 On August 23, 2013, the National Assembly passed a law giving people an additional 10 years to formalize Region (Côte d’Ivoire),” in Richard Kuba and Carola Lentz, eds., Land and the Politics of Belonging in West Africa (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 213-240. 17 Human Rights Watch interviews with village elders, western Côte d’Ivoire, February and June 2013. See also IDMC and NRC, “Whose land is this?” October 2009, p. 13. 18 IDMC and NRC, “Whose land is this?” October 2009, p. 14. See also Chauveau and Richards, “West African Insurgencies in Agrarian Perspective,” Journal of Agrarian Change, p. 529 (noting that “the tendency to increase and monetize social obligations in return for access to land encouraged the idea among settlers that they had engaged in a purchase-sale transaction.”). 19 Loi nº 98-750 du 23 décembre 1998 modifiée par la loi du 28 juillet 2004, arts. 2-4, 6-8. 20 Ibid, art. 4. 21 IDMC and NRC, “Whose land is this?” October 2009, p. 6. 17 HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH | OCTOBER 2013