"Newsweek" May 25, 1998
by Mark Dennis
Opium farms hidden in a Biblical wilderness
Nasser was working scared. As the night ended, the Bedouin farmer and his four cousins raced to finish harvesting their quarter-hectare plot of opium poppies in the mountainous southern Sinai Peninsula. Egyptian commandos had swept through the area only a week earlier, forcing the farmers to flee for their lives. If the troops returned, Nasser and his kinsmen wanted to be long gone. The penalty for growing or selling drugs is death. No Bedouin has ever been executed for raising opium, but the threath remains. The risk gnaws at Nasser, 30. (He didn't want his full name used.) "This is the second year we've been hit," he complains. "The Egyptians seem to want the farming to end."
Can they stop it? No one knows how much opium and cannabis grow in the Sinai. The peninsula is still no rival to drug centers like Burma and Afghanistan. But its share of international traffic is rising. Local growers served a limited market at first, catering mostly to users in Dahab, a backpackers' haven on the peninsula's east coast. These days the Sinai is supplying opium, marijuana and hashish for users all over Egypt and Israel. One reason for the boom is the success of eradication programs in southern Egypt and in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley. Another reason: modern irrigation.
The water is a gift from Israel. After Israel captured the Sinai in the 1967 Six Day War, Jewish settlers arrived with modern irrigation technology. For the first time local farmers could tap the mountains' hidden aquifers. The knowledge and equipment stayed behind after the israelis left, in fulfillment of the 1979 Camp David accords.
The Sinai's lunar landscape hardly seems fit for growing anything. But the mountains offer one thing drug farmers cherish: concealment. Hundreds of poppy and marijuana fields, most smaller than a football pitch, dot the uplands. At the end of the November-through-April season, Nasser says, a good harvest is a grapefruit-size ball of opium. It will fetch about $10,000, to be split five ways. "We're not the ones making the big money," says Nasser. "It's the Egyptian and Israeli (middlemen) who buy from us."
It's a bad deal, but the farmers say they have to earn a living somehow. Two months ago the Interior Ministry announced a new crackdown and promised to improve social-welfare programs for the Sinai's 80,000 Bedouins (most have no part in the drug trade).
No one wants to buy trouble in the Sinai. Many of the former nomads openly say they preferred life under Israeli rule. Cairo tries not to strain their loyalty. One veteran of Egypt's national police, a former anti-drug official, tells NEWSWEEK that Cairo had a tacit agreement with bedouin leaders: cops would confine their drug raids to a few fields every year, just for show. Menawhile Israel is grateful for any friends it can find on the Egyptian side of the border. Israeli officials acknowledge widespread drug smuggling from the Sinai, but their government has yet to challenge it seiously.
Fighting the growers could be a losing war anyway. Merely to reach Nasser's field takes a three-hour off-road drive, followed by a daylong hike. Just down the valley are at least a dozen other fields. Commandos burned some last month, but missed others high up the valley walls. Hussein, 17, tends one. He says he won't stop. His father was caught two years ago and is now doing 25 years in jail. Hussein took over the chores. "I must support my family?" he says. Human nature has its own laws. And it doesn't need any police to enforce them.
