Few images can serve as an icon for the entire Middle East. Of those that can,
none are as evocative as the Bedouin. Since time immemorial, romantic notions of
the desert wanderer-warriors, whose traditional lands stretch from eastern North
Africa to the eastern-most edges of Saudi Arabia, have captured the imaginations
of more sedentary people from East and West alike.
That fascination has continued unabated into the twenty-first century. Although
there are only an estimated 500,000 Bedouin living among Egypt’s population of
over 72 million, you would be hard-pressed to find a collection of photographs
or a countrywide tourist brochure in which they are not prominently featured.
Like any romantic notion, the mystique of the Bedouin is much more fiction than
fact. The harsh existence they eke out and the ever-present threat of starvation
rarely enter the storybooks.
Nor do the conflicts between the Bedouin and those who often romanticize them.
Problems between nomads and town-dwellers are recorded in the earliest written
languages. Even today, the war in Darfur could, in a limited sense, be called a
fight between farmers and Bedouin grazers over land and limited water resources.
In Egypt, urban expansion onto traditional grazing lands and drought conditions
caused by erratic weather patterns in recent decades have led to the loss of
much of the Bedouin’s livestock and, in some cases, entire tribal herds. The
manner in which land on the Sinai was carved up by the Tourism Development
Authority (TDA) in the 1990s has essentially locked the Bedouin out of the
economic boom enjoyed by the peninsula. Unemployment rates among the Bedouin are
extremely high. Few Bedu have the skills to start small businesses catering to
tourists, and extremists among their own ranks have been implicated in the
string of terror attacks that have hit the peninsula in the past 20 months.
Shootouts between Egyptian security forces and renegade Bedouin playing
hide-and-seek along the border with Israel have become common in recent years,
alienating mainstream Bedouin from Cairo’s efforts to settle the tribes in
more permanent communities.
Security concerns about Bedouin involvement in terrorism were raised to new
levels last month after Interior Ministry investigators said Al-Tawhid Wa
Al-Jihad, the group that claimed responsibility for this spring’s Dahab
bombings, had been communicating with Palestinian militants. In a statement
released to reporters, the ministry said that at least two of the Egyptian
militants had been to Gaza, where one of them received training in how to use
explosives. Three of the four men that investigators believe carried out the
attacks were Sinai Bedouin; at least one of them received training in Palestine.
Several hundred Bedouin have been rounded up for questioning
since the Dahab blasts. With distrust running high between the tribes and El-Wadi
(The Valley), as Bedu call the rest of Egypt, it is highly unlikely that either
side will look deeper into recent scientific research that bodes poorly for the
future of Egypt’s wanderers.
Inbreeding within the desert tribes, scientists say, is prompting the emergence
of new diseases and birth defects that could ultimately herald their extinction
as a distinct ethnic group.
Bedouin of the Sinai
Although it is impossible to get an accurate population count on a largely
nomadic people, it is estimated that there are half a million Bedouin living in
Egypt. The Sinai has by far the largest population; nearly 20 of Egypt’s 35
tribes live on the peninsula, with an estimated population of 30-35,000 in the
Taba area alone. Despite being lumped together under one name and sharing a
common language, the tribes often have wildly different backgrounds.
Hameed Al-Mezeina, a Bedouin from the Mezeina tribe, the largest and most
prosperous one on the Sinai, says, “The Bedouin here in Sinai are from
everywhere. Some came from Nuba, in the north there are tribes from Turkey. The
tribe around St. Catherine’s Monastery is not even from the Middle East —
they originally came from Greece.” (Genetic research first reported in Egypt
Today in 2003 actually suggests the St. Catherine’s tribe is descended from
Macedonians imported as religious mercenaries to protect the site.)
The Mezeina tribe, whose area includes the major resort towns of Dahab and Sharm
El-Sheikh, rely heavily on the tourist industry for income. Other tribes have
not been so lucky, and the loss of herds has pushed some into extreme poverty.
The problem can be traced back to the early 1990s. In 2003, Mostafa Saleh,
vice-president of Environmental Quality International that works extensively
with Bedouin, explained to another Egypt Today reporter: “We did not consider
the impact of tourism on the indigenous populations when the TDA divided up the
land and sold it to investors in the early-to-mid-1990s. They did so as if it
were unoccupied, and the unsuspecting new owners of these plots of land would
come to Sinai with a piece of paper in their hands and find a Bedouin settlement
smack-dab in the middle of their property. They would do one of two things: call
the national guard to come round them up or, in a best-case scenario, they would
try to settle the dispute in an amicable manner by paying compensation.”
Either way, the Bedu were locked out of the development boom that followed.
Northern Sinai’s Melahy tribe, the poorest one in Sinai, has suffered the
most. Those Melahy who can find work have been reduced to farming other
people’s land or hiring themselves out as shepherds. Today, they’re so
impoverished that their name is used as a slur by other tribes.
It is members of Al-Melahy that State Security investigators have accused of all
the recent terror attacks on the peninsula.
Hameed knows the area where the Melahy live and is acquainted with several
members of the tribe. “Some people come to Dahab for vacation,” he explains,
using his home town as a reference. “Me, I go to the small villages around El-Arish.”
He’s not sure the Melahy are responsible.
“The lack of regard for government authority and borders means that, by
nature, they are engaged in activity that most governments consider criminal.
Even if they’re not moving contraband like narcotics or weapons, they still
move goods, especially livestock with the risk of animal-borne disease, across
borders without any kind of customs oversight,” he continues.
Although he admits that it’s likely, perhaps even common, for the Bedouin to
become scapegoats for smuggling operations they had nothing to do with, the
diplomat says he knows of several cases in which Bedouin complicity has been
proven beyond a doubt.
“In Saudi Arabia during the late 1980s, there were smugglers bringing trucks
loaded with whiskey across the border from Jordan or Iraq. They would give the
trucks to a Bedouin tribe from the Najd to deliver to Riyadh. If they made it,
the Bedouin got to keep the truck. They finally caught enough of these guys to
establish the pattern and traced them all back to the same tribe. At the same
time, there was another tribe that was caught smuggling weapons into the Kingdom
from Yemen. The Bedouin never even bothered to deny any of this.”
The uneasy relationship between the government of Egypt and the Bedouin of the
Sinai is nothing new. In Pharaonic times, expeditions were sent to the Sinai in
search of turquoise and other precious stones. Bedouin attacks on mining
caravans were so uncontrollable that the leaders of the then-greatest power on
Earth, who believed themselves to be gods, had to pay a tribute to the Bedouin
to stop the raids.
The relationship has improved little over the centuries. Ibrahim Pasha, while
invading Palestine in the 1830s, stopped on the Sinai to break the power of the
tribes there. His forces completely destroyed the two largest tribes on the
Sinai and gave their lands to mercenaries as payment.
Modernity has had remarkably little impact on the relationship. One of the most
recent examples of this is the proposed wall around Sharm El-Sheikh. The wall is
planned to be less than two meters high, a small obstacle for a man, but too
high for a camel. It was never meant to be terrorist-proof; the wall is supposed
to be Bedouin-proof.
Relations between the Bedouin and the government have been severely strained
over the government’s reaction to the bombings on the Sinai. Four months after
the attack in Taba, Human Rights Watch reported that the government was still
holding 2,400 people in detention. The Egyptian Organization for Human Rights
made similar allegations. Both allege Bedouin were subject to torture.
Last month in El-Arish, a local man told reporters why he felt people from his
area would be involved in terrorist acts: “We now feel like the Egyptian
government is an occupation government. It is hard to look at this and accept it
as our national government.”
One of the main problems in El-Arish is unemployment. Local studies have found
that less than 10 percent of the male population between the ages of 20 and 30
is employed full-time; the rest subsist on low-paying seasonal jobs.
Hameed Al-Mezeina doesn’t completely agree with the notion of
“occupation,” but he understands where it comes from.
“It can be difficult,” he says. “The Bedouin can feel disconnected from
the rest of the country; we don’t even really speak the same language. Some
Bedouin have trouble understanding the Egyptian dialect,” he offers as proof
of the difference. The Bedouin dialect, he explains, is Fusha, the Arabic of the
Holy Qur’an. Many Bedouin also feel as if their culture is under attack.
The Egyptian government’s preferred solution to the Bedouin ‘problem’ has
been to dramatically alter their lifestyle. To exert more control over the
tribes, State Security has begun playing a role in how tribal sheikhs are
chosen; traditionally, a sheikh was chosen by tribal consensus.
Many believe that the government repeated the mistake with its requirement that
all imams be government employees. The new imams are seen by many as lacking
credibility, and their influence has waned as a result.
The weakening of their existing social structure left a vacuum that many believe
was filled by extremists. Diaa Rashwan, a world-renowned expert on Islamist
groups from Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, says, “In the
absence of natural communities, there is no building of protective social walls
and internal barriers that could prevent terrorist acts or the absorption of
terrorist activists.”
Israel and the Bedouin Battalion
Israel’s occupation of the Sinai further strained the relationship between the
Bedouin and the Egyptian government. Having lived alongside the Israelis for 12
years and with family inside the Jewish State’s borders, many Bedu now feel
Egyptians look upon them with suspicion. Some allege the stigma has kept them
out of influential government positions and point out that even the majority of
local offices are filled from outside of the Sinai.
The Bedouin along the border area regularly cross back and forth and are accused
by both the governments of Egypt and Israel of smuggling everything from drugs
to weapons and even people back and forth. Those in Egypt who question the
loyalty of the Bedouin have only to look across the border to the Negev: The
Israeli Army maintains an entire battalion of local Bedouin and roughly 20
percent of eligible young men volunteer. Historically, Bedouin towns have also
voted heavily for Israeli Zionist parties, with hardliners winning up to 95
percent of the Bedouin vote in some towns as recently as the 1980s. That figure
has been declining for several elections now, but extremists still win the
majority ballots cast by Bedouin.
The Bedouin Reconnaissance Battalion is largely responsible for patrolling the
border areas. Until the unilateral Israeli disengagement from Gaza, it had a
presence along the Rafah border. Many Palestinians allege that Israel’s
Bedouin and Druze soldiers are much more aggressive and cruel than Jewish
troops.
Bedouin complaints of stigmatization by the Egyptian government were backed up
by the government itself. Shortly after the last Israeli soldier left the Sinai,
the Egyptian National Center for Social and Criminological Research went to the
Sinai to study the population. Their report, titled “The Social and
Psychological Problems and Needs of the People of the Sinai” did not bode well
for future relations.
The team decided that the primary “psychological problem” of the Bedouin was
their geographic distance from the center of Egypt, the Nile Valley. The
researchers also noted that the government repeatedly referred to the Bedouin as
a foreign entity. They were always called Bedouin, not Egyptians.
Not long after the report was issued, the Egyptian government began developing
the Sinai into a major tourist destination. Bedouin who were living on coastal
property wanted for development saw their land being sold directly to hotel
developers by the TDA. In 1999, the army bulldozed Bedouin-owned campgrounds
around Nuweiba.
According to the Tharwa Project, an independent Middle East/North Africa
advocacy group working with Bedouin, the TDA refused compensation to the locals
on the grounds that the Bedouin, many of whom can trace their ancestry on the
Sinai back to the fourteenth century, could not prove they had lived on the land
prior to 1982.
Most resort operators and developers bring in their labor from outside of Sinai.
In an area with staggering unemployment figures, these actions only further
alienate the Bedouin and cause them to see the workers from the Nile Valley as a
foreign force come to steal their jobs.
Life in the settlements vs. life in the desert
Perhaps fearing that previous policies toward the Bedouin have driven many of
them to extremism, the government has been trying new approaches to integrate
them into society. The poverty of their condition, plagued in recent years with
little or no education, malnutrition and health problems, has left many of them
eager for change.
Malnutrition among the Bedouin of the Sinai ranges as high as 40 percent. They
have become one of the poorest, most vulnerable groups in Egypt. The United
Nations’ World Food Program (WFP), along with several government ministries,
has been working for years to improve their situation.
Over the last decade, the WFP has established 65 communities across the Sinai.
Each village-centered program lasts for five years and is meant to leave behind
an established, self-reliant community. Dr. Khaled Chatila is the program
officer in charge of the settlement program.
“This program has changed a lot since I’ve been with it,” Chatila says.
“As we go along, we try to get as much community input as possible. Some
things work and some things don’t. We’ve been through a lot of trial and
error. Now we start out with two basic programs: food for asset creation and
food for work,” Chatila says. “Food for assets is where we start out.”
The most important asset for any desert community is fresh water. WFP supplies
food aid as a short-term measure so that the Bedouin can create a viable water
source, which in turn will mean long-term food security. Distribution of the
food aid is carried out in installments.
“We have technical supervisors who set out timelines,” explains Chatila.
“Then they inspect the work and we distribute food on the basis of
completion.”
The next step is shelter. Each beneficiary is allotted two or three feddans on
which to build a house.
“People are more likely to stay if they have built their own homes rather than
being given something. We are not spoon-feeding anyone; we are simply helping
them get established.”
The village of Abu Musafir, south of El-Arish, isn’t on very many maps, mostly
because it’s only about five years old. WFP helped found the village in late
2000. Abu Musafir is now home to 65 families who have all given up their nomadic
lifestyle. One of the villagers, an older woman who introduced herself as Alia,
has been a beneficiary since the beginning.
“We were always here,” she says, sitting in a small enclosure made of brush
where she keeps her goats. “But always moving, before this we were never able
to have things. We lived outside with no kind of services.” Now, Alia says,
things are different. “I’m quite happy here. I have a stable life and assets
to protect, things are much better.”
The program sells itself, Chatila says. “When we contact the tribes about the
settlement programs, at first, many people are not sure about them. So we start
with a couple of eager families, and the others follow once they see the
benefits of the program.”
Locations for the villages are chosen on a number of factors, but chief among
them is the availability of ground water. Being near the Mediterranean coast,
Abu Musafir is lucky enough to have both ground water and steady seasonal rains.
After the completion of the first drinking wells and the first houses, the
food-for-work program began.
Villagers were given food aid to help others build their homes and reservoirs.
The reservoirs are huge underground concrete structures which are slowly filling
with rain water to safeguard their farms against years of drought. Building is
done by the community under the supervision of trained locals. Coming from the
desert with little formal and no vocational education, the first step is to
train a community construction expert.
In Abu Musafir, it was a young man named Ibrahim.
“Before, I wasn’t doing very much,” Ibrahim says. “Thanks to [the WFP],
now I am a contractor and the main builder for this entire area.” The training
he received was a little rudimentary, he explains, but more than enough for the
simple homes around Abu Musafir, and the on-the-job training has completed his
education.
Most of the community building is funded through a “generated fund.”
Beneficiaries contribute 15 percent of the local market value of their food aid
into an account. The government then matches their deposits at a ratio of
8.33:1. There are seven female-headed households in Abu Musafir, each of them at
a much higher risk of poverty. To help safeguard them, they are not required to
pay into the generated fund; they also receive their food rations for free.
As well as contributing money to the generated fund, the government is providing
the infrastructure for the project. Officials from ministries responsible for
housing and utilities built the roads that connect the village to El-Arish and
the highways, and they provided electricity and the original deep wells for
drinking water.
An extension of the food-for-work program is food for training. “The goal of
our projects is self-sustainability,” says Chatila. “We need to leave people
with the skills necessary to support themselves once the five years is up.”
Most of the training programs are aimed at the women of the settlements. The
vast majority of the men go into farming and receive both land and agriculture
training.
“All of the women receive some kind of training. We focus a lot on literacy
and basics like savings and hygiene,” Chatila begins, and then lists off some
of the others. “There are 30 women in literacy training right now. Nineteen
women went through sewing classes and we gave them sewing machines when they
finished. Twenty-four of them went to industrial food preparation [mainly food
preservation methods, such as canning], so hopefully they will be able to add
more value to the crops being grown here when they take them to market.”
Nearly half of Abu Musafir’s women have also received micro loans of LE 1,000,
the majority of which have been used to buy livestock. Salloum is a 24-year-old
woman who has done very well in the settlement. Despite her age, she is the only
female member of the steering committee, which brings community concerns to the
local government and the WFP. She has been in Abu Musafir since the beginning; a
loan that she has since paid off bought her six goats five years ago.
“Every goat has two offspring, which I sell every year,” she says.
“Before, most of the money was going to loans, but now it is all going to the
house. I keep all of their milk for my five children. My husband is also selling
his peach harvest and we’re doing pretty well. Before this, we used to have to
walk 10 kilometers every day for water and we were living on barley bread in
huts. Now we can plan ahead, my children can have a better future.”
Not everyone has shared Salloum’s experience. Fatima hasn’t seen a dramatic
change in her standard of living. She did go through the food-for-training
program and now makes clothing to sell, but things haven’t changed that much,
she says. “Before we came here, I lived in the desert with my husband. But I
am a second wife. The first wife lives in the house and I am still living in a
hut. My husband is an old man and I’ve had no children by him — I don’t
have a future to plan.”
Chatila knows the problems, but offers no immediate solutions.
“If we give second wives the loans, we are afraid it will encourage people to
take more wives. Family planning is a big part of poverty alleviation. We are
really trying to discourage people from taking multiple wives. Unfortunately,
some people are going to be hurt by this.”
The main concern voiced by most of the villagers is that the five years are up
and the WFP is moving along.
“We know five years isn’t really enough, but it’s the best we can do,”
says Chatila. “The funding for our end of this program is tenuous. It’s not
as if we’re just going to leave and not look back. Our focus will change to
more of a community enrichment program, things like the micro loans. We will
still have some physical assets, but we are going to work more developing human
assets, things like training programs. Also, the German NGO GTZ is going to be
getting involved.”
The WFP has recently begun working with several communities in the southern
Sinai.
Salem Ahmed is on the steering committee along with Salloum. He is also worried
about the future without the WFP. “We still have a lot of problems here,”
Ahmed says. “The nearest clinic is 10 kilometers away. My daughter is sick in
my house, but I don’t have a car to take her there or even money to pay if I
could get there.”
Chatila acknowledges that this is a big issue for the settlements. “We know
that there are still health problems. The resources we have went mainly to
securing food sources.”
Schooling is another issue. “The nearest school is more than two kilometers
away,” Salloum says. “And it only goes up to primary.”
Ahmed attended university and could teach in Abu Musafir, but he can’t do it
alone. “We need much more than one teacher, there are many children here,”
he explains. Money for supplies is another issue. “Our money comes only from
the harvest. My fields are growing, but we’re still very rain-dependant. The
farmers here are averaging LE 1,000 a year, most of which is going to pay back
loans.”
While there may be shortcomings in the project, Chatila points at the limited
time and the amount they’ve accomplished so far. “There was nothing here, we
started from scratch. Five years isn’t enough time to see the full impact, but
this community will keep growing.”
As for the Bedouin who have given up their traditional lifestyle to come live in
Abu Musafir, the end-all question is whether life here is better. If not,
they’re heading back to the desert.
“Is life better?” Ahmed repeats the question, then lifts his hands skyward
and simply replies, “Allah akbar.” He knows there are still many problems in
Abu Musafir, but he couldn’t imagine leaving. “We want to expand this
project, it has raised us up. We are grateful for this project. The next
generation, they will be very grateful for this project.”
Genetics
Another threat to the continuation of the Bedouin comes from their own
traditions. Living in small, isolated communities has led to a high rate of
intermarriage within families. Marriage has also been a political tool among the
Bedouin, and betrothals between cousins helped strengthen bonds in extended
families. Israel is the only country to comprehensively survey their Bedouin
population; officials there have found that 65 percent of the tribesmen in the
Negev marry first or second cousins.
Studies are being performed at two genetics labs in southern Israel. One at the
Soroka Medical Center and at the Morris Kahn Human Molecular Genetics Lab at the
Ben Gurion University of the Negev. Morris (Kahn was a philanthropist who funded
the lab specifically for research into genetic diseases among the Bedouin.).
Over the last 10 years, hundreds of children have been born with debilitating
diseases out of an estimated population of less than 150,000 — the number of
Bedouin in the Negev. Doctors at the Soroka Medical Center are dealing with
diseases so rare that some of them don’t even have names.
Although the research teams include Israeli Jews, Israeli Arabs, Palestinians
and Bedouins, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia have refused to allow the teams to
expand their research activities to Bedu tribes in those nations.
Of all the factors threatening the sustainability of the Bedouin lifestyle, the
greatest danger comes from the land with which they are synonymous: The years of
drought and competition with urban development for the limited water resources
have led to severe overgrazing of the remaining pasture land. The loss of their
herds, the traditional measure of the Bedouin’s wealth, has resulted in
large-scale voluntary settling of the tribes.
The Bedouin have no common ethnic identity. Without their herds, they are simply
victims of poverty whose ancestors came from the Arabian Peninsula, Turkey,
Africa or even Europe. Without the nomadic lifestyle, there is nothing to set
them apart from the rest of society.
Once settled, they cease to be Bedouin. The question is whether they’re
settling for more, or less.
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