Sinai Bedouins - Beyond the prejudice

Sinai Bedouins - Beyond the prejudice

Before I start this article, please get rid of the idea in your head that anyone who wears the shmagh (the head dress) and the jalabeya (the robe) is a Bedouin. Walk around Naama Bay in Sharm El-Sheikh for 2 minutes and you will see people dressed like this who come from all over Egypt, but they do it to look "authentic" to Sinai.

Anyway, in what follows, I will provide you with a brief history, the situation today, and what should/could happen in the future.

Since February 2011, it seems to be that almost on a daily basis we see something negative about the Bedouins in Sinai; kidnapping tourists, blocking roads, shootings here and there, etc. What I have also noticed was that we haven't heard in the media any of those so-called Bedouins talk about these incidents. What I am seeing here are two things, both of them are rather dangerous as well as annoying, to say the least. This whole view of Bedouins increases the prejudice against them, and it pushes them to one corner, marginalising them even more than they already are.

Background

Sinai Bedouins are nomadic people who, throughout history, have made use of the surrounding natural resources available to them, namely natural springs and the Red Sea. In the mountains and desert of Sinai, they Have been herding sheep and goats, while those living by the sea have been fishing for a living. In parts of Northern Sinai, where the land is more flat, some Bedouins have taken agriculture to be their main source of living.


History

Until the early 1980s, the Sinai peninsula has been occupied by Israel. This has gone on and off since 1956, but was permanently occupied between 1967 and 1982. So, for many decades, people in the Valley (the name Bedouins call other Egyptians who don't live in Sinai, referring to the Nile Valley) haven't really known the Sinai Bedouins, nor have they understood their culture.

During the Israeli occupation of Sinai, Israelis did try to integrate the Bedouins into the Israeli life, even though they were still regarded as second class citizens. Israel gave them the right to live their normal lives, and gave them certain guarantees of keeping their land, buying their produce, and providing those in agriculture with modern tools.

Fast forward to 1982, when the last part of Sinai has been handed back over to Egypt. The main generals from the Valley moved to Sinai to try and secure it first, then to try and develop it. Decades of separation between the Bedouins and the people of the Valley have made those generals sceptical as to whom the Bedouins might be loyal to. The first main decision the government made was to deny Sinai Bedouins admission into the police or military academies, considering them a security threat to Egypt, forgetting that it was the Bedouins who were their main sources of information during the war.

The second main decision, or lack thereof, was not to have the Bedouins participate in any discussions or decisions regarding the development of Sinai.

Third decision was to try and register all Sinai Bedouins, which was for two main reasons, one being accounting for everyone for security purposes, and the other was to try and avoid tax evasion.

In the deal with the hand over of Sinai from Israel to Egypt, Egypt was to pay Israel for the infrastructure put in place by Israel, which was a good network of paved roads, power generation stations, water and sewage network, few hotels, and a few residential buildings. The government created a company to buy the hotels, this company still exists until today owning those same hotels, government officials who moved to Sinai got given some of the residential units, and the main infrastructure was left alone to be used by the public.

The decade of the 1980s didn't see a lot of development in Sinai as a whole. In North Sinai, where most Bedouins worked in agriculture and trade, no support from the government was given, and their main source of income turned to almost be purely dependant on trade with their contacts in Gaza, where the Bedouins sold Egyptian products to Gazans, while they bought from them Israeli products that they got used to during the decades of occupation.

In South Sinai, Bedouins were still fishing and herding sheep, making use of the increasing numbers of tourists and people from the Valley moving to their neck of the woods. Then came the issue of land. The fishing communities lived near the sea for centuries, and all of a sudden the government decided that the land they lived on belonged to the government and that the Bedouins were there illegally. The government made plans to sell the land without consultation with the locals, and started giving it away for touristic projects. Some of the people who bought the land through the government already understood that this land belonged to the Bedouins, and settled with them in private deals.

Some of the private settlements with the Bedouins included unsaid and unwritten agreements of employing people from the tribes, regular payments, buying the tribe's produce, etc. Both sides were ok with this to some extent, and life seemed to move on. The local Bedouins in the South started to discover new ways of making a living, some of them working as drivers, some of them guiding tourists into the desert, some cleaning their fishing boats to be used by scuba divers, some selling handicrafts of their mothers and wives, and the list goes on, and for a decade, the local community seemed to be living in relative harmony.

In the North, the situation was becoming harder, since people from the Valley took over main towns, completely marginalising the local Bedouins, and the local trade started to suffer due to more strict rules as to what was passing through the borders with Gaza.

Another development in the South, along the Gulf of Suez, and somewhat in the North along the Suez Canal, oil exploration meant the development of oil pipelines, the tribes living along these lines got another chance to help oil companies in different ways, mainly with choosing the best terrain for pipe laying and securing the pipelines.

The picture started to change in the 1990s, where large scale hotels started to arrive in the South. It was no longer people who already lived among the Bedouins who were buying the land, but business people who never talked to the locals, Bedouins or otherwise, and they made their plans on paper, looking at maps, doing site visits to decide on the best locations, and so on. The land issue became more of a problem, and the government started to look into compensating the Bedouins by offing them other plots far from the tourist centres. Although the situation was not ideal, where a fisherman had to take land that was 10 miles away from the sea, they still agreed to it. Whether they had a choice in the matter is a whole discussion, but the fact remained that they did take the land they were offered. After all, they still had jobs and they were able to support their families.

The main changing factor in the 1990s was the large scale resorts taking over. Two problems came with these. First, the buying was all centralised in their main offices, located in Cairo, Alexandria, or elsewhere, and they did not use local suppliers for their meat, fish and vegetables. Most of the meat came from Australia, seafood from Asia, and fruit and vegetables came from the Valley. Due to their large quantity buying, they started offering to sell to other smaller hotels at much lower prices than they were used to paying locally, and little by little, local fishing and meat industries started to suffer. Still not knowing where to sell any more, those who stayed in their old trades had to try and sell their catch or meat miles away, as far as Suez or Ismailia, and that is if they actually could sell amongst the existing locals.

The second problem was that the other main source of income, working for the hotels and resorts, also started to suffer. Locals who lived near the tourist centres had high cost of living, due to the higher than average prices for food and amenities, since nearly everything had to be transported from the Valley, and due to monopolistic behaviour of very few grocers and supermarkets. So, one thing that was of inconvenience to the employer was having to pay what they saw as a "high salary" (USD100 per month) compared to what people from the Valley would ask for (around USD60). The other request, which those employers saw as an inconvenience, was work conditions, including working hours and holidays. Locals asked to go home, as well as asked for one day off a week. Workers coming from the Valley, leaving their families behind, would work three weeks on, one week off, and live on premises, so they would work for around 16 hours a day compared to the local average of 10-12 hours, and the supply of such workers is almost endless.

The oil companies, having laid their pipes and having had long enough to chart the terrain, started also to opt for the cheaper and more convenient option of employees from the Valley, and mostly got rid of their local employees.

So, one can see the problems. Bedouins were fine to leave their homes when they thought they could still support their families through working alongside the tourist industry, then lost their livelihoods and their chances to find work became slim except if they were to accept much lower standard of living.

In the developed world, the welfare systems in place would mean that those in hardship and without work are provided with minimums such as shelter and food; not the case in Egypt. The welfare system is near non-existent, and public services, such as healthcare and education, are not that much more developed. Well, maybe free primary education exists in principle, and schools were built in Sinai, open for Bedouins as well as all others who moved down from the Valley.

The local, as well as the central, government's main purpose over the years seemed to have been focused on serving the interests of larger businesses. Starting with the ten year tax holiday that a new business would enjoy, down to being given all the facilities in obtaining permits and licences, as well as having infrastructure being extended to the new projects, attracted more large businesses. These big businesses tended to partly pay for the extension of infrastructure to their projects, and the government only saw that they employed thousands of people. What the government failed to hear was the voice of the locals who were denied the work, and who did not feel any of the benefits of the new infrastructure, since their remote residential areas still did not have electricity or sewage systems, and they still had to depend on old wells for their water.

The main jobs left for Bedouins were very limited, confined to driving taxis, being desert guides and becoming boat skippers. Those who weren't doing any of these three jobs, and who were not lucky enough to have had a secure job from the 1980s, found it virtually impossible to make a living. Life was becoming more expensive, and the tourist area was being pushed back further from the sea front, that Bedouins were being moved again.

Most Bedouins, to some extent, have found support from within their own tribes. Those who were working were supporting extended families, and tried to push for the employment of their relatives. But, with every other society, and especially with high unemployment and marginalisation, emerged criminal elements. The two main areas of crime involving the rogue ones were narcotics and people smuggling. Within the depths of the mountains, some were able to have large areas of illegal drugs cultivated away from the eye of the law, while others, who knew the ins and outs of the desert, had money offered to them to drive people coming from Africa to the Israeli borders to cross into there illegally. Moreover, in the North, some have opted for smuggling more than humans across the borders...

Towards the end of the 1990s, a wave of taxi drivers started to arrive into Southern Sinai from the Valley, topped up with the government not renewing old vehicles and only allowing newer models. This was to mark the end of Bedouin taxi drivers in tourist areas almost completely.

The turn of the Millennium seemed to have marked a step up in the aggression towards the Sinai Bedouins from the Egyptian government. In the North, it started with the crack down on the tunnels to Gaza, while in the South it was to try and find perpetrators involved in some terrorist attacks against tourists. In both cases, the security forces chose to use a strategy that would infuriate the Bedouins and push them further away from feeling any loyalty towards the government. This strategy involved sweeping arrests of women from the tribes to put pressure on the men to come up with those suspected to have been involved. Mothers, sisters, wives and daughters have been jailed without charge and indefinitely, with some alleged cases of abuse.

This is the background and history...

Current situation

Over the years, the development of Sinai has been an issue discussed in the media but never came to fruition. The promise of clean drinking water being pumped from across the Suez Canal, wider road networks, large agricultural projects in the North, bigger industrial projects in the South, the human development of Bedouin communities and better development of land laws all never became more than headlines in the media.

The other current fact is that a lot of people who have moved to Sinai from the Valley, including government officials, do treat Bedouins as an inconvenience, a burden, a threat or as criminals, forgetting that they are now living on Bedouin land.

Tourism seemed to have not arrived in the North, and in the South, local Bedouins do not necessarily feel the benefits of the developed tourist industry, seeing people from the Valley and non-Egyptians reaping the benefits, being it jobs, profits, or even local infrastructure, which doesn't reach as far as the Bedouin "ghettos" where the government has pushed them into over the years.

What now?

This is not about making excuses or trying to amplify blame, but it is to clarify certain issues and try to find a way forward that will be beneficial to the country as a whole and to the locals in Sinai in particular.

I believe the first step towards resolving most of the issues I wrote about here is to make sure people from the Valley understand this background, and to accept responsibility and try to improve the situation. The government, certainly, needs to make sure the human development side of the plans have to be a top priority, with policies being implemented to protect the rights of Bedouins, both in terms of work rights and human rights.

As for people moving into Sinai, they need to make sure that racism towards the locals is dealt with seriously and strongly, while having to accept the fact that the locals have certain rights, the least of which is respecting the traditions and culture of locals.

With this as a minimum ground laying for the future, the government then has one of two choices; continue with the current businesses while making sure there is a move towards improving the locals' lives, or actually go ahead with the large scale development projects spoken about, while, again, making sure these actually benefit the locals.

In 2011, and after the start of the revolution, it was for the first time that Sinai Bedouins were allowed into the police academy. This decision, while a step in the right direction, has not reached far enough, and more far reaching steps need to be taken so that Bedouins can be treated as equals to other Egyptian citizens.

The road towards sorting out the problems of the Sinai Bedouins is very bumpy and very long, but the longer it is left until bold steps are taken towards fixing these problems, the worse they will get and anger festering in the Bedouin community will not help narrow the rift between them and people from the Valley...