Bedouins are taking action against illegal organ trade.

"Hell on earth" is how the Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) describes the lives of refugees from Eritrea and Ethiopia on their way to Israel via the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula in, who become victims of severe human rights violations. Ruthless human traffickers kidnap, rape or blackmail them and forcibly remove their organs in order to make a profit. This is reported by the Egyptian human rights organization "New Generation Foundation for Human Rights" in the Sinai town of El Arish and also by Italian and Israeli human rights activists. Impoverished Bedouins are also involved in the trafficking.

Bedouins of the al-Tiyaha clan living in central Sinai have now taken action against the traffickers for the first time. Last Sunday, they were involved in a firefight with the al-Nakhalwa clan, killing one of the Bedouins whom they suspected to be participating in trafficking people or organs. They overpowered his accomplices and handed him over to the police.

Traffickers are supposed to be holding at least 200 Eritrean refugees in caves in Sinai under inhumane conditions. Their families must pay up to 20,000 € to enable them to escape to Israel. Survivors reported that women and men are kept in chains and are systematically raped. If family members don't pay the ransom, the refugees are murdered or their organs are illegally removed to sell them. These terrifying testimonies are confirmed by findings of disemboweled corpses in northern Sinai. At least 11,700 refugees fled to Israel via Sinai in 2010.

"These appalling news about crimes against defenseless refugees in Sinai must immediately be investigated," said the STP's Africa consultant, Ulrich Delius, in Göttingen on Tuesday. "To effectively fight human trafficking, a lot more must be done for the neglected Bedouins in northern Sinai. Without an economic development in the impoverished region, there will hardly be an alternative for them to the smuggling of goods and people."

Since the overthrow of the Mubarak regime in Egypt, February 2011, the Egyptian police has largely retreated from northern Sinai, so that criminal traffickers, smugglers, Bedouins and the radical Islamic Salafis were able to take control of the region. The Bedouins in northern Sinai suffered particularly under Mubarak's tyranny. Several thousand of them were arrested only because of their ethnic origin. Egypt's new interior minister is now trying to approach the Bedouins. He wants more than 1,000 indigenous people to be trained as police officers. Bedouins are now also guarding the gas pipeline to Israel. "These are the first important steps to put an end to anarchy in northern Sinai," said Delius. "But there is still more assistance needed to enable the Bedouins to live in dignity and to stop human trafficking."