Le trafic de drogue dans le Sinaï, qui existe depuis l’ère Moubarak et que Morsi avait eu le malheur d’essayer de juguler, est assuré par le pléthorique corps des forces de sécurité égyptiennes, les « respectables » militaires recevant leur part des bénéfices au passage.
... while American journalists may be confused about what’s happening in the Sinai, a handful of senior officers in the U.S. military have been monitoring the trouble closely. One of them, who serves as an intelligence officer in the Pentagon, told me last week that Sinai troubles are fueled not only by disaffected “Bedouin tribes” but also by “Sinai CSF [Central Security Forces] commanders” intent on guarding the drug and smuggling routes that they continue to control nearly 30 years after Rushdie’s attempted crackdown. “What’s happening in Sinai is serious, and it’s convenient to call it terrorism,” this senior officer says. “But the reality is that’s there’s a little bit more to it. What Sinai shows is that the so-called deep state might not be as deep as we think.”
Now, nearly two months after the coup that unseated President Mohamed Morsy, the power of Egypt’s “deep state” — the intricate web of entrenched business interests, high-profile plutocratic families, and a nearly immovable bureaucracy — is more in evidence than ever. At the heart of this deep state is the Egyptian military, as well as the estimated 350,000 -member CSF, a paramilitary organization established in 1969 to provide domestic security — and crush anti-government dissent. Recruited from Egypt’s large underclass of impoverished and illiterate youths, the CSF is the source of tens of millions of dollars in off-the-record profits from the sale of drugs and guns, a percentage of which it shares with its allies in the more staid, and respected, Egyptian military.
“None of this is all that shocking to me, or to most Egyptians,” says Robert Springborg, an Egypt expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. “I’ve heard stories about the CSF all the way back into the 1970s. Do they control the drug trade? It’s almost a rhetorical question — it’s a veritable tradition with them.” Nor, Springborg says, is it a surprise that the security services control the smuggling routes into and out of Sinai: “This is their turf, it’s where they operate. Smuggling is a big business for them.”
The same testimony was given in a report to European Union officials by a U.S.-based private intelligence company with ties to the Egyptian military, but with this caveat: “The Israelis have to take some responsibility for this,” one of the firm’s senior consultants said. “The Sinai is flooded with contraband, with a lot of it hooked into the trade with Israeli mafia families. And a lot of that comes right out of CSF pipelines.”
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(...) After an August 2012 attack that left 16 Egyptian soldiers dead, Morsy did just that: He replaced Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim (a holdover from the Mubarak days), sacked his military-approved chief of staff, appointed a new head of the military’s elite Republican Guard, forced the retirement of Egypt’s intelligence czar, dismissed the governor of North Sinai, secured Israel’s approval to deploy thousands of Egyptian soldiers to the Sinai border area, and launched air raids on “suspected terrorist strongholds” in the region.
Israel responded positively to Morsy’s moves: (...) Morsy also insisted that the leadership of Hamas more capably patrol its side of the border area separating Egypt from Gaza, bring smuggling under control, and move against Gaza’s network of criminal gangs.
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“I look at what has happened in Egypt over the last two months,” the senior security executive from the U.S. political intelligence firm concludes, “and I see a tragedy. I think that Morsy really tried to change things, really tried to reform the system, to overhaul it. That included the deeply entrenched CSF.” The official pauses for only a moment. “Maybe that was the problem ,” he says.
Back in Cairo , meanwhile, Ibrahim has pledged that he will restore the kind of security seen in the days of Mubarak. That’s bad news for Morsy’s supporters, but it’s probably good news for Cairo drug kingpins, who now have an opportunity to name the CSF-supplied hashish “Bye Bye Morsy.”
