Egypt’s New Flash Point: Bedouins Take Over a Sinai Resort
thedailybeast.com Sheet
Last week a group of armed Bedouin men showed up at the Aqua-Sun resort on the Sinai Peninsula’s east coast. The Bedouins—hailing from the Tarabeen tribe, which extends from northern Sinai into Israel and the occupied territories—claimed an ancestral stake to the land where the destination was built and demanded compensation.
They took over the resort, insisting on the astronomical sum of 4 million Egyptian pounds ($660,000).
The standoff, which threatened to further damage Egypt’s fragile tourism sector, was to be expected, says Sherif El-Gharbawy, the owner of a successful eco-lodge down the road from Aqua-Sun. “The Bedouins were neglected the whole last three decades, and now they are being ignored again,” El-Gharbawy says. “They don’t have any income. They don’t have any education. They don’t see any hope of buying their land.”
Egypt has long had difficulties controlling the Sinai Peninsula and its restive and disenfranchised Bedouin population of about 200,000. The country wrested the area back from Israel after the Yom Kippur war in 1973; Sinai’s northern border abuts the Gaza Strip. The area—which one international report describes as “a semidetached region”—has always been seen, first and foremost, as a security buffer, says Human Rights Watch researcher Heba Morayef. “It’s been dominated by the intelligence services and the army,” says Morayef. “The consistent approach to Sinai has been from a security perspective—a zero-tolerance one.” After several terrorist attacks there in 2004, the security forces carried out a vicious crackdown that included mass arrests, torture, and holding women and children hostage to get Bedouin men to turn themselves in. Since then, says Morayef, “there has been a complete breakdown of relations between the police and the Bedouins,” with locals frequently attacking police stations to free their relatives or retaliate for police abuse.
Since last January’s uprising, the central government’s hold on the large desert peninsula has become even more tenuous. According to the International Crisis Group and Human Rights Watch, among others, Sinai is home to criminal networks whose activities include drugs and weapons smuggling, human trafficking, and terrorism. All of this threatens the future of the peninsula’s emerging tourism sector.