Stateless Literature of the Gulf

Culture, Politics and the Bidun in Kuwait

Tareq Alrabei

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780755635306
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Literatura de Oriente Medio

The "Bidun" ("without nationality") are a stateless community based across the Arab Gulf. There are an estimated 100, 000 or so Bidun in Kuwait, a heterogeneous group made up of tribes people who failed to register for citizenship between 1959 and 1963, former residents of Iraq, Saudi and other Arab countries who joined the Kuwait security services in '60s and '70s and the children of Kuwaiti women and Bidun men. They are considered illegal residents by the Kuwaiti government and as such denied access to many services of the oil-rich state, often living in slums on the outskirts of Kuwait's cities. There are few existing works on the Bidun community and what little research there is is grounded in an Area Studies/Social Sciences approach. This book is the first to explore the Bidun from a literary/cultural perspective, offering both the first study of the literature of the Bidun in Kuwait, and in the process a corrective to some of the pitfalls of a descriptive, approach to research on the Bidun and the region. The author explores the historical and political context of the Bidun, their position in Kuwaiti and Arabic literary history, comparisons between the Bidun and other stateless writers and analysis of the key themes in Bidun literature and their relationship to the Bidun struggle for recognition and citizenship.

1

The ‘Bidun’

‘There is nothing stable about the Bidun issue’ (Human Rights Watch 2011:3). This instability is manifest in the very nature of the term Bidun. Since the advent of the modern Kuwaiti state in 1962, the Bidun’s legal denomination has been changed six times in response to the state’s legal necessities at different times. To begin with, Salih al-Faḍala, the current chairman of the Central Committee for Illegal Residents, claims that Bidun is a ‘false term’ (Ḥadath al-Yawm 2011). As he puts it, ‘nobody is Bidun; everyone must have a place to where he belongs. Their true officially recognized name in the state of Kuwait is “illegal residents”’ (Ḥadath al-Yawm 2011). This denomination used by al-Faḍala is the latest official administrative term adopted by the Kuwaiti government to categorize the stateless community in Kuwait.

Al-Faḍala’s use of the term is in line with the official standpoint previously articulated by government officials. The term ‘illegal resident’ was officially adopted by the state in 1993 (Human Rights Watch 1995:17). In an interview with Human Rights Watch (HRW) in 1991, the undersecretary for Foreign Affairs, at the time, Sulayman al-Shahin said that there is no such thing as people ‘Bedoon jensiya [sic] (without citizenship)’ because everybody must have come from somewhere (55). Similarly, in 1993, Saud al-Nasir al-Ṣabaḥ who was the minister of information and official spokesman for the government said in an interview:

[T]here is no such people as Bedoons [sic]. Everybody has an origin; no one comes from a vacuum. Every person has a father and a grandfather and comes from a specific family. This Bedoon [sic] phenomenon started in Kuwait many years ago when some people were smuggled here from outside. They would throw away their documents – passports and foreign identity cards and live in Kuwait, claiming that they were without any documents, or Bedoon [sic].

(55–56)

Abdulatif al-Thuwaini, who headed of the government’s central committee on the Bidun, said in 1994, ‘[T]here are no Bedoons [sic] in Kuwait, but rather thousands of people who are residing in the country illegally’ (56).

Throughout the years, the Bidun have been subject to a series of labelling acts practised by the government. They were officially labelled respectively as: Abnaʾ al-Badiya (sons of the desert), Bidun Jinsiyya (those without citizenship), Ghayr Kuwaiti (non-Kuwaitis), Ghayr Muḥaddad al-Jinsiyya (those with undetermined citizenship), Majhuli al-Hawiyya (those whose identities are unknown) and, since 1990, Muqimun bi Ṣura Ghayr Qanuniyya (illegal residents). The final denomination, ‘illegal residents’, is seen by some as a manipulative tool used by the Kuwaiti government to reduce the Bidun issue to a standard migratory issue dismissing its complex historical particularity (Beaugrand 2017).

On the other side of the spectrum, human rights’ discourse drives international agencies and activists to adopt the legal denomination ‘ʿAdimu al-Jinsiyya’ (those without citizenship or stateless) to refer to the Bidun. This adoption is a tactical necessity to recognize a legal status protected under UN conventions concerned with the stateless. It is worth noting that the government of Kuwait is not yet a signatory to the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness. Although this adoption aims to offer a legal cover, it inevitably takes away from the historical weight of the term Bidun and the very nature of its complexity.

The Bidun activist Abdulhakim al-Faḍli, for example, rejects internalizing the term, stating in a seminar organized by the Kuwaiti Democratic Forum in November 2014: ‘lasna ʿadimi al-jinsiyya, naḥnu sukkan aṣliyun’ (We are not stateless, we are native residents) (Abdulhalim 2014). Both the official state and human rights discourses, in effect, universalize the Bidun issue to fit their specific aims. Thus, using the term Bidun in this book is a mark of resistance to such abstraction and universalization, as it is a term that carries its untranslatable distinct historical weight both materially and imaginatively.

The term, following Beaugrand, stands as a reminder of the instability and complexity of the category:

[T]he category of Biduns has thus no coherence apart from the administrative label assigned to them. In spite of some broad attested characteristics like their overwhelming presence in the military, the situations of the Biduns in terms of socio-economic conditions, networks and rights enjoyed, are very varied. The Bidun category is far from the completely segregated group into which they have been fashioned by years of discriminatory policies.

(114)

While the term Bidun is adopted in this book as a present signifier for the stateless community in Kuwait, it is important to acknowledge its capacity to carry new meanings. In different contexts, the term implies derogatory connotations (al-Wugayyan 2009; Beaugrand 2017). It is not uncommon for local newspaper headlines, or indeed novels as will be discussed later in the book, to associate the term Bidun with crime, villainy, and lawlessness.

Yet as Mikhail Bakhtin writes ‘the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own’ (Bakhtin 1981:293). Bidun activists, for example, appropriated the term by advocating for the appellation ‘the Kuwaiti Biduns’ (al-Kuwaitiyyun al-Bidun) to counter the exclusivity of the term. Contrary to the logic of the state, the appellation affirms a double awareness of official exclusion and emotive belonging. Yet more importantly, as will be discussed in the following chapters, the book is mainly concerned with the aesthetic reworking of the term and its connotations through the literary production of the Bidun. Italicizing the term Bidun aims to materialize its tentative use and resist a sociological-anthropological imprint on the book’s literary considerations.

The dialectic of extrinsic and intrinsic powers of naming the phenomenon is one of the main challenges entailed in writing this book. In other words, how can one engage critically with the existing tools, methods and languages that restrict the understanding of the phenomenon? How can one write about ‘Bidun writers’ or stateless writers, many who reject to be identified as such? Beginning with their own radical articulations might risk alienating the reader with the lack of ready modes of reception. In view of this intrinsic challenge, the book’s main aim is to proceed in understanding the phenomenon through its own language dialogically. To do so, the chapter proceeds first in highlighting how the phenomenon has been historically conceived and linguistically formulated in different relevant discourses.

Global and local contexts

Statelessness is a phenomenon concomitant with the rise of the modern nation state. One of the reasons behind the creation of the now 12 million stateless people in the world is state succession, during which individuals fail to register for citizenship under new legislation or new administrative procedures. The more prevalent reason, however, is the arbitrary deprivation of nationality and discrimination against certain target groups based on ethnic, religious or linguistic differences (Blitz and Lynch 2011:6). Stateless populations such as the Crimean Tatar in Ukraine, or the Nubian community in Kenya, or people of Russian descent in post-independent Slovenia and Estonia, are examples of statelessness induced by ethnic differences. The Bihari Urdu-speaking stateless people in Bangladesh are often accused of maintaining an allegiance to the country adopting their mother-tongue Pakistan and are discriminated against on linguistic basis. While each stateless population has its own particular history, not belonging to the adopted conception of ‘the national’ is a major factor behind their stateless condition. Yet all three traditionally assumed factors of ethnic, religious or linguistic differences do not necessarily apply easily to the case of the Bidun in Kuwait. The Bidun are not historically conceived as belonging to a distinct ethnic, religious or linguistic minority. As described by 1995 HRW report, the Bidun are:

[A] heterogeneous group which includes a substantial number of people – perhaps the majority of the Bedoons [sic] – who were born in Kuwait and have lived there all their lives …. Sometimes they lack citizenship because a male ancestor neglected to apply for it when citizenship regulation were first introduced in 1948 and later in 1959, in anticipation of independence in 1961 …. Members of tribes whose territory once extended between Kuwait and its neighbours, and whose allegiance was traditionally to the tribe were denied citizenship and classified as Bedoons [sic], although large numbers of them have long been settled in urban areas in Kuwait.¹

(Human Rights Watch 1995:10)

Beaugrand highlights the difficulty ‘to establish a typology of Biduns’ as the reasons behind the group’s statelessness vary. One group is composed of the children of Kuwaiti mothers married to Biduns who have been denied citizenship as per the 1959 Nationality Law. Another group are who have refused second degree of nationality because they felt entitled to the first degree. Others have never registered with nationality committees while others’ files have been rejected. Another group consists of army recruits from neighbouring countries, some who may carry existing nationalities. Finally, there are those who arrived in the 1980s and who took advantage of the stalemate surrounding the issue (Beaugrand 2017:112).

The Bidun in Kuwait consist of de jure stateless individuals who have never obtained citizenship from any other country and de facto stateless individuals, who may have once been citizens of neighbouring countries but are now are effectively stateless. After being treated as quasi-nationals until 1986 and under the prospects of future naturalization through service in the army, many have cut off any links or affiliations elsewhere and have lost the claim for citizenship for their children (al-Anezi 1994:1). In addition, stateless people who once resided in Kuwait include many of the Gazan Palestians who hold Egyptian documents, but are not considered as part of the Bidun category (8).

In anthropological approaches to the issue, some argue that even though the Bidun are historically not a marked ethnic collectivity, they have been effectively ‘ethnicized’ as a result of social and economic discrimination (al-Najjar 2001; al-Wuqayyan 2009; Beaugrand 2010). Socially, the Bidun are viewed by a large part of Kuwaiti society as described by the 1995 HRW report as ‘latecomers’, ‘coming to milk’ the newly established welfare state (Human Rights Watch 1995:56). This depiction has been advanced by official state discourse. In 1993, Saud al-Nasir al-Ṣabaḥ, who was the spokesman of the Kuwaiti government at the time, said: ‘[I]f they had to pay income taxes and if there was no free medical care or education in Kuwaiti there would be no more Bedoon [sic]’ (Human Rights Watch 1995:56). Years of denial of citizenship rights have also further ‘ethnicized’ the Bidun into a social underclass because of the economic consequences of lacking citizenship rights.

Beaugrand argues that contending understandings of pre-state sovereignty, territoriality and loyalty is the main reasons behind the continual denial of the Bidun from citizenship rights. This impasse preventing the Bidun from gaining citizenship rights is due to ‘the confusion in the understanding of transnationalism that needs to be better historicized’ (Beaugrand 2010:29). While the lack of historicizing transnationalism is one of the main reason behind the impasse, the term ‘confusion’ implicitly assumes a naïve lack of awareness on the part of the state and of its own history. The lack of historicization perhaps is a more calculated attempt to monopolize the dominant historical representations of the Bidun issue on the part of official state discourse. The contention between the transnational and the national understandings of the history of the region and the formation of concepts of belonging has been mainly understood through the dominant dichotomy of Badu/Ḥaḍar present in studies on the Kuwaiti social construct. Badu is the term commonly used to denote Kuwaiti citizens from Bedouin origins mostly living outside the 1920 town wall, and Ḥaḍar denotes the townspeople residing within the wall

The Badu/Ḥaḍar² discourse has been a dominant paradigm in understanding the prevailing sentiments depicting the Bidun as ethnic outsiders undeserving of citizenship rights. In Anh Nga Longva’s analysis of this dichotomy, the benefits of the welfare state become a deciding factor in rejecting ‘newcomers’ from naturalization. Ḥadari discourse depicts the Badu as newcomers wanting to reap the benefits of the newly established welfare state, where education, healthcare and housing are practically free. The Badu are also viewed as people who will not assimilate to ‘Kuwaiti Culture’ by holding on to their tribal traditions (Longva 2006:172). Thus, naturalization of many of the Badu was considered as a ‘widening of the nation’, in terms of the community of citizens, which ‘means – at least in the people’s imagination – a reduction or even the end of the welfare state’ (183). This view in turn ‘sets in motion the process of ethnicization’ of the Badu community, ‘whereby differences between host population and newcomers are systematically emphasized, even invented when need be’ (172).

This ‘ethnicization’ is understood as a result of the government’s direct measures relating to housing policies that have kept Badu and Ḥaḍar segregated; ‘fixing them as socio-spatially distinct categories’ as argued by Farah al-Nakib (al-Nakib 2014:15). Three-housing schemes were implemented by the government to house its population as decisions were made to demolish the old town quarters and develop a new housing strategy. The first scheme pertained to the Ḥaḍar (townspeople), whose homes were relocated from the old town quarters to newly developed manaṭiq namudhajiyya (model areas) not far from the old town. Relocation was made possible through the government’s land acquisition scheme, whereby land was appraised and purchased by the government at inflated rates (15). The second scheme applied to residents of peripheral villages such as Salmiyya, al-Jahra and Farwaniyya. Their properties were similarly acquired by the government and were given new housing in their respective areas. The third housing scheme was concerned with the Badu who had started to settle in what is commonly referred to as ʿAshish, or ad hoc shanty dwellings originally established around oil company work sites that offered jobs for many Badu (al-Moosa 1976:3). Because of their lack of land o...