Band of outsiders (عصابة من الغرباء )Last Updated: November 07. 2008 5:53PM UAE / GMT
The nomadic Bedouin lifestyle is being quickly extinguished as their land in the Sinai is made barren by climate change and colonised for tourist developments. Jason Larkin for The National
Excluded from the rapid development of Sinai’s tourist coast and subject to a prolonged police crackdown, the Bedouins who have made the Peninsula their home for centuries now teeter on the brink of social implosion. Jack Shenker reports.On the night of April 24, 1982, Khalil Jaber Sawarka did something exceptional. Tanks were trundling through the local villages and the whirr of army helicopters filled the skies, but Khalil was oblivious to the pandemonium. He had a job to do. With his last few piastres he bought a single piece of cardboard and a cheap packet of crayons and sat up overnight painstakingly drawing the Egyptian flag. Early the next morning he and his friends took their home-made banners and lined the streets to welcome Sinai’s liberators. “At that moment,” remembers Khalil, “I saw the first Egyptian soldier I had ever seen in my life. I took out a pack of Israeli cigarettes and eagerly handed them over to him. And in return, he gave me a packet of Egyptian Cleopatras.” Israel’s occupation of the Peninsula was over and Khalil, a Bedouin native of North Sinai, was about to be ruled by his own countrymen for the first time in living memory. He was 18 years old.Twenty five years later Khalil watched his fellow Bedouins rampage through those same streets, throwing stones and dodging tear gas fired by Egyptian riot police. The protesters destroyed the police station and the council building before reaching the local offices of the ruling National Democratic Party. They tore down a picture of President Hosni Mubarak and hoisted a new banner in it place. “Sinai has not been liberated yet,” it read.
The nomadic Bedouin lifestyle is being quickly extinguished as their land in the Sinai is made barren by climate change and colonised for tourist developments. Jason Larkin for The National
Excluded from the rapid development of Sinai’s tourist coast and subject to a prolonged police crackdown, the Bedouins who have made the Peninsula their home for centuries now teeter on the brink of social implosion. Jack Shenker reports.On the night of April 24, 1982, Khalil Jaber Sawarka did something exceptional. Tanks were trundling through the local villages and the whirr of army helicopters filled the skies, but Khalil was oblivious to the pandemonium. He had a job to do. With his last few piastres he bought a single piece of cardboard and a cheap packet of crayons and sat up overnight painstakingly drawing the Egyptian flag. Early the next morning he and his friends took their home-made banners and lined the streets to welcome Sinai’s liberators. “At that moment,” remembers Khalil, “I saw the first Egyptian soldier I had ever seen in my life. I took out a pack of Israeli cigarettes and eagerly handed them over to him. And in return, he gave me a packet of Egyptian Cleopatras.” Israel’s occupation of the Peninsula was over and Khalil, a Bedouin native of North Sinai, was about to be ruled by his own countrymen for the first time in living memory. He was 18 years old.Twenty five years later Khalil watched his fellow Bedouins rampage through those same streets, throwing stones and dodging tear gas fired by Egyptian riot police. The protesters destroyed the police station and the council building before reaching the local offices of the ruling National Democratic Party. They tore down a picture of President Hosni Mubarak and hoisted a new banner in it place. “Sinai has not been liberated yet,” it read.
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