Kuwaiti activists seek action to solve bidoon issue

The problem of the people with no legal documents in Kuwait has surfaced once again.

The Cabinet recently approved Kuwaiti citizenship for 429 people with no legal documents (bidoon).

According to official statistics, there were 123,295 stateless people and 36,000 were granted Kuwaiti citizenship after showing their real nationality documents, while 87,295 remain without legal documents.

"This problem was created as the result of some laws of immigration and citizenship issued in Kuwait," Abdullatif Al Sagar, secretary of the Kuwaiti Society for Human Rights, told Gulf News.

Attorney Mubarak Al Shimmari, chairman of the human rights committee affiliated to the Kuwait Lawyers Association, agrees with Sagar and says the government has not taken any serious decision to solve the problem.

"The Kuwaiti government cannot take these people to the borders and order them to leave the country," says attorney Khalid Al Awadi, a leading Kuwaiti lawyer.

"In late 1985, the government decided to drive the bidoon out of the country. In 1987, a ministry of interior resolution prevented them from renewing driving licences or car registrations unless they show their real nationalities," says Al Sagar, who is also assistant secretary-general of parliament committees' affairs department.

"Their children were deprived of free education, and the private schools were instructed not to accept students without residence permits," says Al Sagar.

"In 1988, they were not allowed to join Kuwait University," he adds.

"When the Kuwaiti citizenship law was issued in 1959, the tribesmen from Najd and Iraq, who had come and settled in Kuwait, were not treated as foreigners," says Al Shimmari.

"The problem came to the fore when the government started to appoint non-Kuwaitis in the ministries of defence, interior and oil," says Al Shimmari.

"This made a lot of people hide their real citizenship papers pretending to be bidoon to benefit from such benefits," he adds.

Al Shimmari points out the problem worsened when some Iraqi, Syrian, Saudi and Iranian people got into Kuwait illegally and claimed to be bidoon.

He says after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, some of them contacted the Iraqi embassy saying they were Iraqis and joined the Iraqi forces in Kuwait.

"However, most of them migrated to Canada, Australia and other countries," he said.

The writer is a journalist based in Kuwait