Sharm el-Sheikh: what the Egyptian tourist city that hosts COP27 is like

It’s Sharm, for the intimates.

The Egyptian city of Sharm el-Sheikh, which from Sunday (6th) will host the COP27 global climate meeting, is one of the favorite destinations for Egyptians and foreigners in the country. So much so that they usually address it by its first name, which in Arabic means “bay” or “gulf”. It’s pronounced the same way it’s written.

Despite so much affection, the city also has its drawbacks — including its isolation from the rest of the country, which helps the authoritarian regime to control access and monitor the population.

It takes more than six hours by bus from Cairo. It’s another world. The capital’s buildings and viaducts are left behind. Also left behind are the majestic but polluted Nile River and the slums built inside cemeteries. The crystal clear water, the palm tree and the parasol appear.

Unlike other tourist destinations in Egypt, Sharm is a fairly recent city. It doesn’t have the historical baggage of places like Luxor or Aswan, with their pharaonic past. Sharm was almost uninhabitable, due to the heat and the aridity. It ended up gaining importance only in the 20th century, as it was located at the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba, allowing — or preventing — the passage of ships.

With the creation of Israel in 1948, Egypt fortified Sharm as a way of blocking the transit of ships heading to Eilat, the only Israeli port on the gulf. Israel took the city in 1956 during the Suez Canal dispute. With the crisis resolved, the UN kept emergency forces in place until 1967. But with the outbreak of the Six Day War in 1967, Israel retook the city.

It was partly under Israeli occupation that Sharm developed as a tourist destination. The country built hotels and developed hotel infrastructure. The city returned to Egyptian control in 1982, as part of the peace accords between the countries – and continued to consolidate itself as a holiday destination.

One of its biggest attractions is the crystal clear water and the reefs. As Sharm is also a relatively cheap option, given the exchange rate that favors those who spend in dollars or euros, the city ends up attracting divers and diving students interested in obtaining a certificate. The problem is the sharks, which sometimes appear there.

In parallel with its tourist development, the Egyptian government also tried to promote Sharm as a diplomatic outpost — hence the nickname “city of peace”, which never really caught on. The justification is the number of conferences organized there. For example, there were summits in 1999, 2000, 2005 and 2007.

Interestingly, there is also a rumor circulating that former dictator Hosni Mubarak fled to Sharm in 2011 in the face of popular protests that forced his resignation.

The Sharm that visitors will discover has undergone a recent — and intense — renovation process. Like cosmetic surgery. The government widened roads, renewed the bus fleet, built malls and erected billboards. Given the climate message that the country wants to convey, solar panels were also installed, which should be operational until the start of the summit.

Despite all that sunshine, Sharm also has stormy days. In 2005, terrorist attacks left 88 dead in the coastal city. It was one of the deadliest attacks in Egyptian history. In 2015, a plane that had taken off from Sharm airport exploded in midair, leaving 224 dead; the attack was later claimed by the Islamic State terrorist organization.

This recent past explains, in part, the restrictions that visitors will experience during the COP27 climate summit — including inspections in taxis and also at the entrance of hotels.

But the state of alert is also an expression of a dictatorial regime, which restricts the freedom of its citizens. Sharm’s propaganda as a paradise bay serves, after all, to hide the country’s reality. Egypt came to overthrow its dictatorship in 2011, in the so-called Arab Spring, only to have an authoritarian government again in 2013 under President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

To disguise its repressive nature, the regime has built a specific area where protesters will be able to gather to protest. It is far from the city, next to a highway. A hoax, say human rights activists, normally banned from public speaking in Egypt.

The Egyptian regime also installed security cameras. To the British newspaper Guardian, Hussein Baoumi, from Amnesty International, described COP27 as the most watched edition in the history of the climate event. The idea of ​​registering to participate in a protest in an isolated location guarded by a regime that arrests and tortures dissidents is unlikely to convince many in the country.

The fact that Egypt hosted COP27 in Sharm, so far from the capital, is not accidental. The government knows that it will be much easier to control the population in the resort than in the metropolis. Not to mention the difficulty activists will have to travel through security checkpoints.

For all its glamour, Sharm is after all a destination built to escape, and also to exclude.

_{The Planeta em Transe project is supported by the Open Society Foundations.}