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Subject:
Sinai: Terrorism is just another business.
Shirrush
5/6/2006 6:06:41 PM
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I thought that posting this would contribute greatly to the understanding of how things really work in the Malthusian disaster otherwise known as the Middle-East, and why there is such a short supply of hope around here.
What follows is an unusually candid view of the Sinai terror attacks, by a very unusual Palestinian journalist.
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The Sinai: tourist destination, arms bazaar and battlefield (info # 010605/6 EV) [analysis]
By Sami El Soudi © Metula News Agency
Translated from the French by Sandra Kaufman and Llewellyn Brown
?The Egyptian security forces number millions of useless members," added the sheik, "instead of playing a security role, they fulfill a political function: they are, together with their families, live ramparts for president Mubarak and his rotting regime."
We all have our faults and nobody could accuse me of seeking to hide ours. But Westerners have a habit whose logic escapes to me: when they strive to understand a situation that does not correspond to their standards, they transpose it into familiar terms, even if most of the time the meaning gets lost in the process. However the Middle East is neither Europe nor the United States. It is high time that they understood this, and that they stop seeing the world in a Manichean way, in terms of nice guys who resemble them and diabolical bad guys.
They know nothing about the Sinai, where three attacks took place yesterday. It is not a desert, it is a jungle of sand, an extremely vast territory where everything is negotiated, bought and sold. And it is not enough to have spent one week scuba diving at Sharm-el-Sheik to seriously claim one knows the entire peninsula.
This desert belongs to the Bedouins, or more precisely to ten tribes of these nomads, who persist in crisscrossing the desert, establishing their encampments according to opportunity. Like sand running between one?s fingers, these men are slippery both literally and figuratively. First figuratively, their social life is governed by ancestral laws that flout the laws of the states that successively dominate the Sinai. The occupants and their rules pass while the Bedouins remain with their traditions. And even if these often seem to us unfathomable and useless, they have proved to be well adapted to the conditions of this very special environment.
In the literal sense, the Sinai Bedouin is a wild beast that cannot be domesticated. He likes whom he pleases and he hates whoever bothers him or defaces his living space, while not giving a hoot about political borders. After the 1967 war when the Israelis drove Nasser?s army out of the peninsula, some Jewish reservists, before returning home, rigged up for the Bedouins some hydraulic pumps with the engines of vehicles the Egyptians had abandoned in their flight. It was the first time since Lawrence that somebody had taken some sort of interest in their well being, and this disinterested act on the part of a few soldiers of the Hebrew State helped seal an enduring friendship.
But to tell the truth, the Bedouins do not have friends ? they count only on themselves and the knowledge they have of their environment. And this independence, this ability to disappear into the horizon when someone bothers them, irritates all the governments around them. Starting with the people of Cairo, whom these Gypsies of the sands reproach for having tried to ?Egyptize? the Sinai. It is true that since the Israeli withdrawal the authorities across the Suez Canal have developed the seaside resorts of Sharm, Dahab and that of Taba, bordering on Eilat. There they have built numerous imposing hotels, imported their own employees and brought tourists in droves, which only moderately pleases the Bedouins. And then, they have filled the peninsula with their soldiers, their police officers, their secret agents, as well as their innumerable security services, as numerous as they are incompetent. The Bedouins have the unpleasant feeling that the Egyptians are trampling their turf and that they are being forced to play the leftover roles of nice savages for the holiday charters.
Since the preferred business of these peddlers is the smuggling of anything of value, when it?s a question of making the tourists scram and seriously hurting the Egyptian economy, they will make you a generous deal! Yesterday?s collective assassination ? whose semi-official toll is about thirty dead and more than 150 wounded ? is the third in a murderous series. The Dahab one apparently planted the last nail in the coffin in the country of the Pharaohs? tourism industry. In 2004, 34 people had already lost their lives in the explosions of Taba and Ras an, near the Israeli border; last July, the Islamist attackers assassinated 64 people at Sharm-el-Sheik, most of them tourists.
Those who know the Sinai a little know that these terrorist acts could certainly not have occurred without the remunerated assistance of the nomads. This assistance consisted at least in the supplying of vehicles, transporting the killers and the methods for bribing the Egyptian civil servants deployed very impressively at all the access points to the Sinai starting from the metropolis. Moreover, many roadblocks impose severe checks all over the peninsula.
"But what do you expect," a tribal chief owning an encampment and a woman on the Mediterranean coast, and the same advantages at the Red Sea, privately told me, "there are too many of them and they are too poorly paid. The Egyptian security forces number millions of useless members," added the sheik, "instead of playing a security role, they fulfill a political function: they are, together with their families, live ramparts for president Mubarak and his rotting regime. But as for effectiveness, one can do better," confided my host with a frank smile under his crafty moustache, taking me to a neatly ordered weapons and ammunitions warehouse. "All the weapons of all the Palestinian organizations come either from here, from the Sinai, or they are delivered to them by Jewish gangsters who steal them from Tsahal (he says Tsahal [Israeli Defense Forces, translator?s note]), or who buy them from unscrupulous soldiers." Then he played the salesman, with me in the role of a fictitious purchaser: "May I suggest to you anti-tank rocket launchers of excellent quality manufactured in Yugoslavia, mortars from Romanian army surpluses, with ammunitions, and basic explosives used to manufacture the famous Qassams; whatever we do not have in stock and that cannot be found in the peninsula can be delivered to you within one month... ", concluded the sheik with a great burst of laughter.
The Sinai is undoubtedly one of the places on the globe where the weapon prices are most advantageous. Last month, to check the seriousness of the searches carried out at the Rafah passage, I bought in El Arish, Egypt, fifteen real-size toy-grenades, a wood-and-metal pellet rifle, as well as 20 kilograms of iron pellets, which are useful inter alia for the manufacture of the explosive belts but that a relative had asked me to bring back for him for his very peaceful industry.
To go through by myself I would have had to take some risks. With my open-sesame Bedouin, it was child?s play. On the Egyptian side, I waited aside a little while my guide talked with an Egyptian officer. He came back to me saying: "$20; this guy gets wages equivalent to $35 monthly, how do you expect him to refuse that...? We passed right through the middle of the searchers wearing the light-beige uniform of Mubarak?s soldiers, while nobody lifted their gaze. On the Palestinian side it was even simpler, an official pulled us by the sleeve and we went behind the terminal in which the Palestinian lackeys and their European instructors pass through a fine-tooth comb the luggage of those who have nothing to hide. The official could not resist the temptation to show us through a window an Italian controller who had both arms deep in the contents of the bag of a large woman surrounded by her four children. He mumbled some disagreeable insults regarding these infidels and their endless naïveté. So there it was : 9 minutes to pass the Rafah border with my cargo of false weapons. 9 minutes and 70 dollars of commissions in all!
The real weapons get into the hands of dozens of militiamen of Gaza who prevent any evolution towards a decent life. In the sands of the Sinai, the delegates of the various Islamist movements are as free as fish in water. Dahab is not the last collective assassination to be perpetrated there, as Hosni Mubarak is absolutely unable to exert the slightest effective control over his territory.
And another thing: Al-Quaëda does not exist... It is a meaningless name used by the Western media as well as their cowering governments in order not to speak about the collective assassinations of civilians perpetrated day after day by the Islamists or Islamic organizations. Here, in the Middle East, where the risks are much higher, the Palestinian president and the king of Jordan call them by their names. Moreover, they qualify the authors of these assassinations ?terrorists? and not ?activists? [1] or ?kamikazes,? which are synonymous with factual imposture, as in France, for example.
There are dozens of Islamist groups and organizations in the world and especially in this area. Generally, they do not have the means of carrying out strategic or tactical synchronizations. Bin Laden exists, Abu Musab Al-Zarkawi too, but they do not command a homogeneous army. The unification of these fanatics is however absolutely useless in achieving the ends they pursue. All of them, like Hamas, Hezbollah and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, for example, are indeed the emulations of the congregation of the Moslem Brotherhood in Egypt ? a congregation that has laid down the objectives of the Moslems by proposing its vision of the Koran: the Islamization of the planet by all possible means, including assassination and terrorism.
Perhaps you did not hear of this elsewhere, but yesterday was also Easter for the Christians Copts of Egypt, whom the Islamists of Cairo and Alexandria tolerate less and less. And then it was Sham el-Nessim, the spring festival, which used to be celebrated in Egypt before the Hegira, in the time when the country of the Nile was one of the greatest nations of humanity.
Note:
[1] In French in the text of Sami El Soudi.
Metula News
Agency ©
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