The flipside of Alam al-Roum: Semella farmers face eviction to make way for Qatari deal

“They’re going to be demolished anyway.”

So said a security official to several residents of the Matrouh village of Semella last week, stressing that their homes would inevitably be cleared to make way for the new Qatari investment project the government signed off earlier this month, a resident told Mada Masr.

Residents of the area, whom Mada Masr met in the village last week, said that security visits have taken place almost daily over the past month. Each time, officials tried to convince people to vacate the area and promised them compensation.

These visits overlapped with efforts over the past two months by employees of the New Urban Communities Authority (NUCA) to survey the village homes, and, last week, a demolition team accompanied by a police unit came to knock down a building, with one of the officers telling villagers that a complete ban now prohibits new construction in the area.

Residents tried to stop the demolition on Wednesday, an attempt that left one of them injured. They are also blocking NUCA surveys, refusing to allow employees to measure their properties until a fair compensation rate is agreed upon — one that they say must include alternative land suitable for their way of life.

In early November, the government held a signing ceremony with Qatari Diyar — a real estate arm of Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund — granting it development rights to the Alam al-Roum area: over 20 square kilometers in Egypt’s northwestern governorate of Matrouh, including a 7.2-kilometer stretch of beachfront.

The deal shows the government doubling down on a policy of expelling existing residents to lease out state-owned land to foreign developers, a strategy it launched in the northwest coast last year with the inaugural and unprecedented Ras al-Hekma deal, an agreement that will see the United Arab Emirates build a huge urban and touristic area across swathes of land near Egypt’s border with Libya.

Unlike the Ras al-Hekma signing ceremony, the official Alam al-Roum contract-signing made no mention of the state’s plan for the area’s current residents, who are now scrambling to organize discussions with officials to ensure they don’t lose their livelihoods.

Semella is a sprawling village within Alam al-Roum, at the eastern entrance of Marsa Matrouh City. Overlooking the Mediterranean, its scattered Bedouin homes are all single-storey structures surrounded by groves of olive and fig trees. A minority of property owners in Semella are outsiders who bought small individual plots where they bought or built holiday homes years ago.

The village is bordered by the International Coastal Road and linked to the city center by the Alam al-Roum Road, which the state began resurfacing several months ago, according to residents.

Many North Coast residents have historically held their land through informal, customary possession rather than registered contracts. Now, even if they want to, residents of Semella and other parts of the North Coast would be unable to go through the bureaucratic process to gain legal title to customarily owned land because of a series of technical decrees issued over the past five years. A November publication by the Justice Ministry, which Mada Masr reviewed, prohibited registering or taking legal action regarding land plots west of Ras al-Hekma.

Next to the village lies land that the Saudi investment company Dallah Albaraka bought from residents in the 1980s but has never developed. According to press reports last year, NUCA reached a deal with Dallah Albaraka to exchange the reclaimed land for another plot east of Cairo, while the state announced in October that the land had been allocated to NUCA.

Residents watched NUCA employees survey the Dallah Albaraka land using drones.

But when teams began to photograph, take measurements and mark the boundary points of land in the village in recent months, residents blocked them, demanding clarity on their fate first. They also stopped repeated attempts to measure houses and the land on which they are built.

The holiday home owners are less concerned. One of them, a Cairo-based employee who owns a small property in the village, spoke to Mada Masr last week while waiting for NUCA representatives to visit. They said they had travelled to Semella specifically to have their property measured, saying, “As soon as I heard about the deal, I came straight here to get the house surveyed.” They said that other vacation house owners share this readiness to swap their houses for cash.

“You know you’re harming us,” one Semella villager told the Cairene visitor, indicating the community’s joint refusal to allow surveys before the establishment of compensation and relocation guarantees.

The visitor responded, “Personally, I’m not harmed by it. I know the state is going to demolish the area anyway, and there’s nothing we can do.”

Though they are resisting the surveys, Semella residents say they are not opposed to leaving the village. Every resident who spoke to Mada Masr agreed that their priority is to preserve their housing style and agricultural way of life.

“I need something that will feed the kids — or do you want us to turn into criminals? We are Arab [Bedouin] people, our job is the farm,” says Sheikh Abdallah, a father and grandfather to 58 children and grandchildren. The community relies on cultivating figs and olives, along with barley and wheat, though the latter have become less dependable amid rising temperatures and declining rainfall.

Saeed, one of Semella’s youth, acknowledges that the investment project could bring some economic opportunities, with locals often hired as subcontractors or construction materials suppliers, as has happened elsewhere. But, he says, “that doesn’t stand in for our land.” Such jobs offer a one-off payment that cannot replace the long-term livelihood that comes from farming and herding, nor compensate for the loss of their traditional way of life.

Residents are blocking the surveys since the compensation package they have been offered — through NUCA — is much too low, according to four Semella residents who spoke to Mada Masr.

They said NUCA representatives met with dozens of residents on two occasions over the past month to present the state’s offer: LE10,000 per square meter for buildings, LE300,000 per feddan of land and LE1,000 per olive tree.

Residents made a counter-demand for the values to be raised to LE30,000 per square meter of buildings, LE1.2 million per feddan and LE10,000 per tree, says Saeed, who attended one of the meetings.

The state’s proposal also includes alternative land for residents. The NUCA representatives said during the meetings that compensation and replacement land would be given to everyone in the area, regardless of whether they hold officially registered ownership documents. “They told us in the meeting, ‘The contracts don’t concern us. Everyone will get the same, those with a blue [registered] contract and those without,” Sheikh Abdallah says.

Under the state’s proposal for alternative land allocations south of the coastal road, in an area known as Al-Ghaba al-Shagariya, each family would receive up to 1,000 square meters of registered land.

They would need to pay a fee of LE200 per square meter, however. “They’re taking LE200 because they’re giving us registered land,” Sheikh Abdallah says. “They’ll give me a meter of empty land for LE200. So how much is a feddan? LE840,000 — while they’re taking my land for LE300,000! Who would accept that? I told him that day, ‘Where am I supposed to get the money? I don’t have it.’ [The representative] said, ‘Alright, we’ll give it to you in installments, we’ll throw that in for you.’ So are we expected to go build, or sleep in the street?” Sheikh Abdallah asks.

The state is also promising that the new area will include schools, a hospital and full utilities. But residents doubt this will be the case, Saeed says, pointing to the experience of the Ras al-Hekma community, with whom he says Semella shares strong familial and tribal ties.

“They went to the new land and found none of what they were promised — no schools, no hospitals — and by then, they had already left their land. What was done was done.”

Nearly two years after the announcement of the Emirati project in Ras al-Hekma, the Housing Ministry said in October that electricity and lighting works had just been completed in Shams al-Hekma, the designated relocation site for Ras al-Hekma’s residents. Meanwhile, work on the remaining infrastructure — including a school — is still ongoing, with the minister urging its rapid completion.

Semella residents have put together a committee of 15 people to represent them in negotiations with the state, Saeed says. The committee is currently drafting their full list of demands.

Another, broader committee of 45 members — proposed by MPs — has also been formed more recently to ensure wider consultations and represent all tribes and clans. The idea for the 45-member committee emerged during a meeting held after the announcement of the Alam al-Roum deal, during which current MPs, along with a candidate running in the ongoing elections, pledged to present the residents’ demands to the president once the parliamentary elections are over, Saeed said.

The demands include that a fully serviced new village be built before Semella residents are relocated. The new area, they say, must include a hospital and schools for all educational stages, along with guarantees that they will not be displaced again.

Semella currently lacks any state-provided health services and has a single primary school.

They also plan to draft a demand that each family’s plot in the new area should be no smaller than six feddans — enough to accommodate an extended family rather than a single nuclear household, something they say is an important part of preserving their way of life. “Me, my four brothers and their children all live in one house, and the rest of my siblings are in homes next to us. We want to stay like that,” says Saeed, who is part of the 15-member committee. He explains that the demand for larger plots is tied to their agricultural livelihood. “If I take the compensation and build with it, then end up living on a small piece of land not even a quarter of a feddan, where am I supposed to farm? How will I support my family?”

A visit to the village makes clear the stark contrast between agricultural landholding patterns here and in the Delta, where high population density has fragmented plots into ever smaller areas of land. In Semella — and across much of the North Coast and Matrouh Governorate — landholdings are comparatively large.

The 15-member committee is also discussing what will happen to the area’s cemeteries — an issue the state has not addressed, says Shaaban, another committee member. The village has five cemeteries, each containing no fewer than 500 bodies. The committee thinks the state should construct new cemeteries at the relocation site and bear the expense of transferring those already interred there.

They also plan to discuss compensation for wells — a valuation residents have yet to agree on and for which the state has yet to offer a proposal, Saeed says. The same issue applies to sheep stables, which herders rely on for their income.

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*All names mentioned have been changed, in agreement with the sources, for their safety.