Word: bedouin
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...accident. North Sinai is not a territory the Egyptians take lightly. Bordered on the west by the Suez Canal Zone and on the east by Israel and the volatile Gaza Strip, North Sinai is home to a thriving cross-border smuggling trade and a sometimes rebellious local Bedouin population. Mwafi says the skills of his previous job have come in handy in governing Egypt's wild east. "As the director of military intelligence," he explains, "I had very good relations with the director of Israeli military intelligence." He adds that representatives of the two forces meet "every six months...
Still, Qatar insists it is not trying to become the next Dubai. Emir Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, Qatar's ruler, doesn't want to make his country a global capital, so much as use his nation's gas resources to move what was once a tribal, Bedouin society into the modern world with Muslim culture and values intact. Qatar, say state officials, will never try to do the kind of high-volume business that put Dubai on the map but also made it so vulnerable to a speculative bubble. "Dubai is all about numbers and bringing in huge infrastructure...
...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...
...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...
...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. (See the top 10 pariahs...