“The border governorates are not necessarily the worst in terms of income levels but they are the worst when it comes to development indicators,” says Hana Ebeid, editor of Democracy, published by Al-Ahram. “Ultimately these governorates suffer from sparse population. It's one reason why successive governorates have failed to pay them sufficient attention.” Access to basic services such as education and rudimentary healthcare in areas such as Sinai, Halayeb and Shalateen and Marsa Matrouh and the oases is of particular concern, says Ebeid. “True, a deal of attention is now being paid to Sinai, the site of successive attacks on military conscripts and army and police officers. But we should also be worrying about other border areas where the development record is not much better than in Sinai and which could easily come to pose security problems.” Since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak border governorates have slowly but surely made their way to the centre of news coverage. Sinai has led the pack, with terrorist attacks, drug smuggling and human trafficking. Mohamed Morsi is thought to have allowed – or turned a blind eye to – the infiltration of the peninsula by radical militants from adjacent Gaza. Now President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi is said to be applying an iron-fist policy against Sinai residents with Islamist affiliations, adding to the agony of the northern part of the peninsula which, unlike the south, reaped no benefits from the growth of tourism under Mubarak. Halayeb and Shalateen followed Sinai into the limelight. Long the focus of a dispute between Cairo and Khartoum, Egypt and Sudan recently engaged in a spate of statements and counter statements. Then reports began to appear that the southern border was being used to smuggle in arms, militants, drugs and trafficked people who eventually found their way to Sinai. The western borders came next. As the collapse of Libya gathered pace so Egypt's western approaches became a conduit for arms and militants, again heading for Sinai. Ebeid refuses to consider recent developments in isolation. They are, she argues, the product of decades of mismanagement, itself the result of the over-centralisation of power encouraged by successive regimes. She will, however, concede that things got worse “in the second half of the 1980s” as the Mubarak regime began to chart a “neo-liberal path”. “The economic focus was on quick and high returns. It favoured the centre at the expense of the periphery, the urban over the rural. What attention was paid to border areas was restricted to a few sites deemed to have tourism potential.” Yet even then, say the residents of border areas, they were looked on with suspicion by the security apparatus. “We were viewed as if we were enemies,” says one resident of Sinai. The security forces, says an inhabitant of Dabia on the western border, “made us feel that we were not part of the country”. Anthropologists have long complained of unnecessarily aggressive security measures that violated the cultural norms of border communities. While rural areas in Upper Egypt might be in a worse development situation – government statistics consistently designate rural Assiut in Middle Egypt and rural Qena in Upper Egypt as the worst off areas in terms of economy and development — “the governorate borders,” says Ebeid, “are in fact more isolated, even more alienated”. There is a clear link, Ebeid argues, between militant radicalisation, deprivation and “low development expectations”. Ebeid is one of many commentators who, in the wake of each terror attack in Sinai, has underlined that successfully combatting the spread of terror cells will take more than security measures, and that an iron fisted, culturally insensitive security approach — sources in Sinai speak of the forced eviction of families, divisions of tribal zones and the deliberate destruction of wells — is likely to be counter productive. “Whatever hampers development hampers stability. It feeds anger, with all anger's violent consequences,” she says. Calls from some security quarters for the forced eviction of Sinai residents living in areas known to be the base of terror cells are, she says, unhelpful. In “extreme cases one could understand that, for the safety of the locals there might be, with their consent, the provision of safer shelters on a temporary basis but this is a far cry from the evictions some are proposing”. “A more constructive way of dealing with the problem would be to expand the population in border governorates by fostering economic opportunities compatible with the local cultures”. The failure of successive governments to populate border governorates, says Ebeid, has left a vacuum that terrorists networks, drug and people traffickers and criminal gangs have found it easy to fill. “We constantly speak about over population in the Nile Valley and at same time ignore the fact that border governorates accounts for close to 70 per cent of Egypt's land mass. We need to fix this imbalance, and fix it soon.” According to government sources border governorates are to be subdivided into smaller units which will allow for greater coordination between the multiple bodies, such as the Sinai Development, responsible for their development. Ebeid is “not particularly convinced that this will do”. “It is not a question of having more government officials in charge but of having more efficient policies that are consistently and coherently implemented,” she says. “It is important to include local residents in formulating the policies that will be applied. They must see that the political will is in place to implement policies that can end the disconnection between the centre and periphery. This doesn't just apply to border governorates but to large swathes of Upper Egypt.” Ebeid agrees with those sociologists and anthropologists who argue that the lack of knowledge about border communities is a major obstacle to development. According to one prominent anthropologist whole communities are “cordoned off by security bodies which do not allow any serious scientific research to be conducted under the pretext that it helps national security to isolate these societies”. Opening up and reaching out is central, Ebeid argues, to sustainable development. “When human development reports conducted by government bodies at a national level fail to address border governorates the worry is that what might be thought of as an oversight is in fact a policy,” she says. “People in the far remote areas should have the same access to education, communication and health care services as residents of the Nile Valley” and the easiest and most efficient way to ensure this happens is to facilitate, rather than complicate, communication between the centre and the borders. “The results will not be short term. In the long run it will pay off to create solid engagement with an eye on the wishes of local communities to preserve their norms and values,” argues Ebeid. What she most fears, however, is that the attention paid to border areas will be temporary, fading away “under pressing economic and political challenges” only to be resuscitated when new security hazards emerge. And it is more likely that they will, she says, as long as “the huge gap in development chances and expectations” remains.
