CAIRO: The Egyptian government, in an effort to appease and integrate its Bedouin population in the Sinai Peninsula, announced that it expects to finish 17 new village projects by the end of the year. It aims to ease the tension between Bedouin and the government, after the two groups have often clashed in recent years. According to the North Sinai government, the villages are the first of 82 planned in northern and central Sinai, an area near the sensitive Israeli border home to 12 Bedouin tribes. Murad Muwafi, the new governor of North Sinai, told Reuters news agency on Thursday that the government projects will assist Bedouin nomadic tribes to integrate into Egyptian society and be a catalyst in ending the smuggling trade across the border. “The villages projects are designed to settle the Bedouin into developed areas, to give them steady livelihoods and help them live within integrated communities,” Muwafi said. Bedouin in Sinai have often complained of a lack of rights. They say many jobs in the country's massive tourism industry are not going to their community and that poverty and neglect on the government's part has seen many younger Bedouin resort to trafficking across the border into Israel. “This will will help end the smuggling of goods through tunnels to Gaza such as food and petrol and the smuggling of migrants across the border,” Muwafi said in the interview last week. Analysts say urbanizing the Bedouin, who live in scattered pockets, may prove to be a major challenge. The developments, they have argued, could end up attracting Egyptians from outside the Sinai who would provide a counterweight to Bedouin influence in the area. BM