Sinai is where Bedouin identity comes face to face with state politics. Serene Assir investigates the fault lines The air is much cooler inside the home of Um Mohamed, where she offers tea and hospitality in a barren room, sitting on a thin mattress on the stone floor. Her features are sharp, her skin and expression hardened by so many troubles. She talks of limited access to advanced healthcare and a poor education for her children. She also describes how difficult it is to deal with the state and state security, and how little hope the young men of her community have of dignified work. On the outset, her story is not dissimilar to that of any of Egypt's millions of underprivileged families. "But we the Bedouins," she says, "we're the forgotten ones. Everything is a trial." While poverty afflicts the vast majority of Egyptians, life for the inhabitants of the Sinai Peninsula, descendants of tribesmen who settled here some 800 years ago, is arguably made even more difficult by the dilemmas they are constantly facing, whether in material or political terms. "Where else in Egypt would it be impossible for me to seek treatment for my three-year-old daughter?" Um Mohamed asks rhetorically, in a plaintive tone. "Doctors here couldn't treat her, they said, because they don't have the equipment. I cannot afford to go to Suez or Cairo every time we need to see a doctor; nor can I pay to have her treated privately." Her 20-year-old son Badr is a typical case: "As long as I am unemployed, I cannot possibly think of maintaining our tradition and marrying. It's not just the lack of work that saddens me; it's the fact that I cannot look forward to the day when I start a family." The family, Badr and his mother say, own 30 feddans of land. "The Bedouin respect ownership. All the other families in the area know that this land has always been ours, for many, many generations," Badr says. "But when my father started to build a house for me on part of the land, the police came and razed it. They said the land was now state property, and that we couldn't start building on it without a permit." For years after the 1982 Israeli withdrawal from Sinai, these people were put on the state's backburner. While other, even more marginal parts of the country received government attention -- be it positive or negative -- Sinai, according to residents, officials and analysts, was institutionally more or less abandoned. "It was only just over three years ago that the government set up a police station in Nikhl," said Hamdi Al-Sharqawi, an official at Nikhl town council, North Sinai. "Up until then, there was barely any intervention by the state in the affairs of the Bedouin." A native of the Delta province of Sharqiya, Al-Sharqawi was posted to Nikhl in 1994. "In Cairo, it makes no difference whether my neighbour is from Mansoura or Aswan -- he is, to his and my mind, an Egyptian first and foremost. But here in Sinai, allegiance to the country, even in everyday discourse, is always questionable. And this is what we want to change." But it was the Taba bombings of October 2004 that made that desire apparent. Not only did Sinai become a security priority for the Egyptian authorities; the need to integrate the population of the peninsula into the political entity was manifested suddenly, with urgency. An unemployed native of Nikhl, 22-year-old Obeid is unsure of which identity to prioritise. Dressed in Western clothing, he has nevertheless retained the custom of wearing a cotton headdress -- in his case pale blue -- which he uses to cover his face when the wind kicks up the sand. "The Egyptians call us Yahood Sina (the Jews of Sinai), because of the occupation, and because they don't trust us," Obeid says. "In reality, we were the first to celebrate the liberation of our land -- there isn't a single human being on earth who wouldn't thank God for his freedom from occupation. I think what saddens my community is that in many ways the Egyptians, who are supposed to be our countrymen, have treated us with greater disdain than the Israelis ever did. Maybe it's because of this that I describe myself as Bedouin, first and foremost." A massive security crackdown followed the Taba and Sharm El-Sheikh bombings, which rocked Egypt's most thriving resort in July 2005. As Human Rights Watch and numerous local rights groups including the Hisham Mubarak Law Centre have documented, the state responded to the attacks by arbitrarily detaining thousands of Sinai residents and widely used torture. Um Mohamed's relative, Zeinab (not her real name) has lost hope the state will ever free her uncle. "He used to work as a watermelon seller. He was detained after the Taba bombing, and though there is no evidence to suggest he had anything to do with the blast, they still keep him. He has been tortured with electric rods, and when we went to visit him in prison, we could see he was a changed man. He has lost weight, and his health is suffering. They keep transferring him from Nuweiba to the Tora prison in Cairo, back and forth, without ever trying him." According to the ruling National Democratic Party's Secretary-General for North Sinai governorate Mounir El-Shorbagy, all of the current detainees were in some way involved in the attacks. "To start with, the government responded like any other government in the world would to an event of such magnitude, and widened its scope during the detention campaign. As soon as a given detainee was cleared of suspicion, he was freed, and that's all there is to it." El-Shorbagy added that, thanks to the intensity of the campaign, Sinai today is very safe. However, in retrospect, it would seem that the bombings were the tip of the iceberg of Sinai's deeply rooted problems. Inhabitants of Sinai, and specifically the Bedouins, suffer other, more subtle but no less difficult obstacles in the way of living with dignity. "Very often, one of my friends gets detained for 24 hours, for no reason," said 19-year-old Hassan from Nikhl. "Treatment from police varies from one officer to another. It's the really bad ones who will detain you, maybe because you are wearing shorts, or perhaps because you're wearing traditional Bedouin clothes, or because you have a beard and strike them as an Islamist." Another major aspect of life in Sinai is the continued crackdown by the state on hashish cultivation. Egyptian law with regards to drug cultivation and use is strict by any standards; and the state has conducted a public campaign against drug cultivation in Sinai. "Let's not exaggerate, though: Sinai is not Afghanistan," Al-Shorbagy said. "We have growers, but we deal with them like we would with any other criminal." In recent months, the government has conducted air raids on sites hidden in the mountains, burning cultivated land. But the effectiveness of tactics as harsh as this has been questioned by both analysts and residents. "Hash is still very easy to come by here, and the majority smoke," said Obeid. What the campaign has achieved, however, is a constantly intense police presence on the pretext of drugs. According to a Ministry of Interior official speaking on condition of anonymity, there is no room for doubt that the peninsula is now well policed. "Just like the rest of Egypt, there is a high level of security in Sinai," he told Al-Ahram Weekly. "What we can't accept is the notion that the presence of the state should be any weaker in Sinai just because it is inhabited by Bedouins, or just because it was occupied up until 1982. The Bedouins, to me, are comparable to the Native Americans. It's all very well that they come from one tribe or another; but at the end of the day, the state needs to operate right across the country regardless." For Al-Shorbagy, the solution lies in state and non-state sponsored development: "Many efforts have already been made to improve the living conditions of the Bedouins." Among these is a state-funded and run school in Al-Arish, North Sinai, which provides meals and boarding for children whose families live in areas cut off from services and would otherwise be deprived of an education. So far, however, there is little evidence of improvement for the majority of Bedouins. Interaction between the Bedouins and mainland Egyptians in Sinai reveals a seemingly endemic mistrust, even racism, which negatively influences the advancement of the Bedouin population. For instance, though illiterate, Um Mohamed recognises the importance of education: "My son is eight years old, and he's been at school for three years. He cannot read. Can you believe that? The school teachers won't help him. They tell my son, 'you Bedouins, you will never be educated.'" Indeed, dealings between thousands of internal migrants from the mainland and the Bedouin are limited, according to Essam, a 23-year-old native of Sharqiya province who works at a Nuweiba hospital. "I have been here for three years, and in all this time I have never made a Bedouin friend. Interaction between us and them is very limited. There are big differences between our ways of life, so big that contact cannot be meaningful." In part, many of Sinai's Bedouins continue to harbour a deeply traditional allegiance to the tribe -- in effect an extended family -- above all else. "We are not like people from Cairo," said Um Mohamed. "Over here, we think of the whole tribe as our family, and we always try and help each other. Most of our time is spent on that. In my case, for instance, I will cook for a significant part of the day as guests will walk in and out all the time and it's only natural for them to be able to eat." The influence of a continuously growing yearly influx of tourists, and the presence of state security, besides, to a lesser extent, development have all had their fair share in creating new realities. Whether the Bedouin partake in these not is almost up to the individual, and it is a decision usually dictated by economics and politics as opposed to free choice. Dressed in traditional garb, Mohamed, 28, works as a tour guide organising safaris in the desert. "Before, residents of the seaside towns and villages used to concentrate on fishing, but now the port has restrictions on use," he says. "I am lucky to have a job, but it makes me sad that I am working for very little money, and that I am not doing the work my ancestors did." Although agriculture is relatively sparse, herding is less so, still arguably making up the main trade among the inhabitants of Sinai, after tourism. "I think it differs very much from one person to another, just how close or far away they are from the Egyptian state," said Mohamed. "I would say I am quite integrated, though I still feel closest to my tribe. Others, who live behind the mountain and are forced to remain there most of the time because they were never registered and were never able to take out an identity card, they only know God. They know nothing about the rest of the peninsula, never mind the country." It is intriguing, however, that as this process of integration drags on, social realities have changed for many Bedouins. "Before, when there was no police station in Nikhl, there was no crime to speak of," said El-Sharqawi. "Whenever incidents did happen, the tribal system based on custom and precedent dealt with them. Now, however, the crime rate is rising." Similarly, the community-based system was free of problems such as unemployment; presumably, everyone had something to do to help the community. It is not simply an adherence to custom that prevents integration, but rather the faults that pollute it. "It is not that we don't like Egypt; it is that our lives are being disrupted and we are being offered little in return, which makes me sad deep inside," said Hassan, who is unemployed and sits idly on a Nikhl town centre roadside day in, day out, with his friends. "For me, I see no future. Maybe, if I have children, their situation will be better; then, they will be able and proud to call themselves Egyptians. But the way things are going, I might never be able to afford to start a dignified life for my future family in the first place."
