Sinai's Bedouins

Abu Daoud opens the back door to his Land Cruiser in the darkness of the open desert and flicks on his cigarette lighter to illuminate the large, mounted, belt-fed machine gun in the trunk. "This is for the Egyptians," he says, laughing.

Egyptian is not a label with which Abu Daoud (not his real name) identifies. Many of the Bedouin tribes who populate this mountainous desert region of the northern Sinai Peninsula, where Egypt shares a tense border with Israel and the Gaza Strip, have long been at odds with their government in Cairo.

"The government doesn't consider us Egyptians," says Abu Daoud, who has worked as a smuggler for the past half-century. "Sinai has never been Egyptian. Sinai has always belonged to the tribes."

The Bedouin are a historically nomadic people who migrated to Egypt from the Arabian Peninsula centuries ago. Locked out of development projects and tourism investment along Sinai's southern coast, the long-marginalized Bedouin have often been forced to work outside the law to make a living. But over the past two years, some of the tribesmen have prospered as a result of Israel's blockade on Gaza, which has turned smuggling into the territory's economic lifeline — and also a source of weapons for militants.

But the smuggling boom may soon be over, as Egypt constructs a subterranean steel wall along the border, designed to cut off the network of tunnels that have kept both Gaza and the Bedouin afloat — a move that will antagonize the tribes in a tinderbox region.

"[The Bedouin] have made a living out of smuggling between Sinai and Gaza," says Amr Hamzawy, an Egyptian political scientist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "Now with the wall and different steps that the government is taking to crack down on tunnels and other smuggling methods, my guess is that [the Bedouin] are going to be impacted heavily, which will mean more tensions between them and the central government."

Egyptian authorities say the smuggling is illegal, and have blamed the porous border with Gaza for instability and terrorism in Sinai. Speaking on live television on Jan. 24, President Hosni Mubarak said, "We have started construction along our borders not to appease anyone but to protect our nation from terrorist plots like the ones that took place in Taba, Sharm el-Sheikh, Dahab and Cairo."

Egypt's government may control its cities with an iron fist, but Sinai is unique. There, those who challenge Cairo's authority are armed, belligerent and, lately, flush with cash. Their history of discrimination and abuse at the hands of the security forces combined with a distinct cultural identity has produced political attitudes that even the most disgruntled Egyptian in Cairo would deem heretical.

"Tonight, we're cheering for Algeria," a smuggler announces as a dozen Bedouin men settle into an arms smuggler's desert mansion to watch Egypt's African Cup of Nations soccer showdown with its fiercest rival. "If a war ever happens between Egypt and Israel, you'll find us taking up arms against the Egyptians," adds another smuggler, Ibrahim. The others concur.

In Sinai, it may not even take a war to spark the fuse. Hamzawy says the past two years have seen a spike in social unrest in north Sinai, where a dense network of permanent police checkpoints create an atmosphere of occupation. Rights groups say Bedouin are routinely harassed and arrested at random. Torture in Egyptian prisons is rampant, and some Bedouin report stories of state security abducting their wives and children in an effort to coerce wanted men to come forward.

"People are tired of oppression here. We go into the street and get searched and arrested. There is discrimination here," says Om Ahmed, who has two adult sons in jail and two on the run. "The police don't treat our sons the way they treat the Egyptians' sons."

But current tensions are rooted in a cyclical history of mistrust. The Sinai Bedouin stand accused, in Egyptian schoolbooks and the popular imagination, of collaborating with Israel in its wars with Egypt, fueling mutual antagonism. More recently, Bedouin were implicated in a series of terrorist bombings that killed 130 people at Sinai beach resorts from 2004 to 2006. In the aftermath, some 3,000 Bedouin were arrested; up to 1,000 of them are still in detention, according to Ahmed Ragheb, director of the Hisham Mubarak Law Center. He says that about 1,000 more are in prison for smuggling and related charges. The government has denied using abusive measures in Sinai, and there are no official statistics on the number of Bedouin in detention.

The Bedouin's harsh reality produces an anomalous politics that is sympathetic to Gaza's militant Hamas government while simultaneously praising Israeli justice and the late Saddam Hussein. The Bedouin see a cultural connection with Gaza's Palestinians, many of whom share tribal lineages. But as anger toward the Mubarak regime deepens, some also express nostalgia for the Israeli occupation of Sinai, which lasted from 1967 to 1982.

"We like Israel more [than Egypt] because there's justice," says Ibrahim, a young cement smuggler. "If you are a person living inside Israel, you live better than you would in Egypt, without any smuggling," he says. "They don't let you just sit on the street ... And Israel would never arrest your wife and father if you are the one wanted by the state."

Some smugglers who have amassed wealth have become self-styled Robin Hoods of the desert, delivering food and blankets to the forgotten poor — many of whom still live without water or electricity in huts built of twigs among the dunes. "I'll bring a doctor tomorrow," promises Mohamed, one of Sinai's most powerful arms smugglers, after hearing the plea of a woman and her sick father living in a fly-infested dwelling of trash and debris, miles from any village.

But their life outside the law constantly threatens to erupt in violent conflagrations. The smugglers who run the show are gun-toting, trigger-happy cowboys of the desert, subverting police checkpoints through roadless sand dunes and hills in an army of Land Cruisers with no license plates and tinted windows. They carry Glock pistols, AK-47s and even a few M-16s. "I'm a wanted man. We're all wanted men, and we're all armed," says Abdullah, a tunnel owner who sleeps in a different place every night and says he would rather die than be captured.

And when Egypt's steel wall seals off trade with Gaza, tensions could explode in Sinai. "This is the beginning," says Abu Daoud, sipping tea next to an evening campfire. "The people are still poor, but there has to be a revolution someday. It has to happen because there is no democracy and there are no rights here."