registry.10 A comprehensive review of the law is beyond this report’s scope and has been well covered by others.11 However, several components are crucial to understand subsequent conflict over land. Prior to the 1998 land law, there was great confusion about rural land ownership rights. From 1935 to 1998, land transactions based on custom had no legal authority, as the law required people to register their land through land titles and to involve a notary in land transactions.12 Yet this formal system ignored a reality in which “the management of 98 percent of rural land is customary, with only one or two per cent of land held under title deed.”13 The various laws and decrees leading up to the 1998 land law were therefore never implemented or enforced, including in western Côte d’Ivoire. Custom in Côte d’Ivoire makes “a clear distinction between the ownership of the soil— which belongs to the community (family, lineage or village) and cannot be sold under any circumstances—and the right of use of the soil, which may be transferred or sold.”14 Ownership of the soil under this custom generally belongs to those who first arrived to the area; in western Côte d’Ivoire, this often means the families that founded a village.15 These families almost never obtained land titles, as village and individual family boundaries remained governed by custom. Under custom, these guardians of the land, or tuteurs, could not sell “ownership of the soil,” but they could cede or sell rights of use in the land.16 When virgin forest was plentiful in western Côte d’Ivoire in the 1960s and 10 Loi nº 98-750 du 23 décembre 1998 modifiée par la loi du 28 juillet 2004 (Rural Land Law, amended), http://www.droitafrique.com/images/textes/Cote_Ivoire/RCI%20-%20Domaine%20foncier%20rural.pdf (accessed August 28, 2013). 11 See IDMC and NRC, “Whose land is this?” October 2009; ONUCI Rule of Law, Le Domaine Foncier Rural et la Loi nº 98750 du 23 décembre 1998 (internal UN report obtained by Human Rights Watch); Jean-Pierre Chauveau, “Question foncière et construction nationale en Côte d’Ivoire. Les enjeux silencieux d’un coup d’État,” Politique africaine, 17 (2000), pp. 94-125; Institut Africain pour le Développement Économique et Social (INADES), Regards sur … Le Foncier Rural en Côte d’Ivoire (Abidjan: Les Éditions du CERAP, 2003); United States Agency for International Development (USAID), “Côte d’Ivoire: Property Rights and Resource Governance,” May 2013, http://usaidlandtenure.net/sites/default/files/countryprofiles/full-reports/USAID_Land_Tenure_Cote_d%27Ivoire_Profile.pdf (accessed August 28, 2013). 12 IDMC and NRC, “Whose land is this?” October 2009, pp. 13, 16. 13 Ibid., p. 13. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 For a discussion of the institution of land guardianship, or tutorat , see Chauveau and Richards, “West African Insurgencies in Agrarian Perspective,” Journal of Agrarian Change , p. 525 (“The tutorat , commonly found in rural societies in West Africa, is an agrarian institutional device for regulating first comer-late comer relations…. A key point to underline is that land transfers and the socio-political dimensions of the tutorat are intimately entangled; as a social institution, the tutorat regulates both the transfer of land rights and the incorporation of the ‘strangers’ in the local community.”); and Jean-Pierre Chauveau, “How Does an Institution Evolve? Land, Politics, Intergenerational Relations and the Institution of the Tutorat between Autochthons and Migrant Farmers in the Gban “THAT LAND IS MY FAMILY’S WEALTH” 16