Under the War on Terror Pretext, Egypt is Ethnically Cleansing the Sinai Bedouin
- Sinai is being cleared for the coming of the Palestinians, most of them are REAL Jews, IMO. Emphasis mine:
– - Under the War on Terror Pretext, Egypt is Ethnically Cleansing the Sinai Bedouin
by Amelia Smith, https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/
Last month the Egyptian government demolished Bedouin-owned houses in Tarabin village in South Sinai on the grounds that they were not “legally” owned. Tarabin is located in Nuweiba, along the northwest bank of the Gulf of Aqaba, where the dramatic mountain range and ramshackle huts on the water’s edge have long drawn travellers.
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Beyond the camps that dot the coastline and pull the crowds, Sinai has an underbelly well-known to the local population but perhaps not to these tourists. Ongoing, but heightened since the 2013 coup and Al-Sisi’s rise to power, is the systematic repression of the Bedouin.
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Egyptian law imposes tight restrictions on property ownership in Sinai and the government has asked residents and companies in the peninsula to prove they own houses by September, a loose deadline subject to change, or else they will be considered to be illegally occupying state-owned land.
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In North Sinai alone around 40,000 pieces of land have been inherited through the wad al-yad practice, meaning houses, farmlands and businesses have been passed through the generations without official documents which prove ownership.
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READ: Egypt begins demolition 2km either side of Sinai roads
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Only Egyptians born to Egyptian parents can own land, but proving where your great-grandparents are from is not easy given that Bedouins generally don’t have birth certificates or ID cards. Even if they can, registering their land is a costly process and this is before you have paid for a lawyer, travel expenses and official fees.
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For those that can’t meet the requirements, their property meets the same fate as the buildings in Tarabin – decades of family history, crushed to the ground in a matter of hours.
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READ: Security presence in Al-Arish worse than height of Operation Sinai
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The destruction of houses in Sinai has been largely focused in the north, home to the bigger tribes of Sawarka, Remikat and Taraben, who have long asked the central government to respect their rights, says the journalist Massaad Abu Fajr, who is from North Sinai and whose house has been destroyed by the Egyptian government. To this end in 2007 residents founded the Wedna Neaish (We want to live) movement, but instead of respecting their demands authorities arrested several of their prominent members.
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The government’s official line is that it is fighting a war on terror, but given that a 2018 Tahrir Institute report estimated that there were 1,000 militants in Sinai at any given time, the fact that 100,000 people have already been displaced indicates that the security campaign is completely disproportionate to the threat that is posed.
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Locals believe it is actually a war on civilians and that these punitive measures are designed to force the Bedouin in Sinai to emigrate. It’s ethnic cleansing, says Fajr. Historically, the Egyptian state has always doubted the loyalty of the Bedouin. Well-known Egyptian journalist Muhammad Hassanein Heikal warned his friend Gamal Abdul Nasser that the Sinai tribes are a problem. Since then, discrimination has been handed down through successive governments.
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Under the terms of the 1979 peace treaty with Israel, Sinai was actually a demilitarised zone and armed forces were strictly limited. Now the Egyptian army is everywhere. Checkpoints have popped up along the coast and prevent residents from getting onto the beach, unless they have a permit that states they have a business there.
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The government has now decided to implement a 2016 presidential decree to transfer two kilometres on either side of certain roads in North Sinai to the Defence Ministry, which will displace more than 80 per cent of the population of Al-Arish.
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Fajr’s family house once stood in Rafah, a now-bulldozed city along the eastern border of the besieged Gaza Strip. In the first three month of Al-Sisi’s “Operation Sinai”, 3,000 houses were razed here to create a buffer zone along the border.
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The flattened territory is a casualty of Egypt’s hopes and aspirations to find a way into a part of the country which has long been off bounds to its tanks. They offered to help Israel protect its border and in exchange Israel allowed soldiers access and has carried out its own covert air campaign in Sinai.
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