The ‘Bidoon’ and the Kuwaiti Conscience - Bidoon Suicides Raise Alarm in Kuwait
Analysis by Naif Al Rogi, Featured Writer
June 2nd, 2021
On the morning of March 27, a young man, aged 26, hanged himself from a makeshift tent pole; his brother would discover and report the scene to police. The man was reportedly a vegetable seller. He was also a member of a class of people in Kuwait, and the Gulf more broadly, commonly referred to as the ‘Bidoon’—those ‘without’, literally—i.e. stateless.
A month before, a 12-year-old boy, Ali al-Shammari, took his own life, out of shame, his father would tell the local press. Speaking the day after, Ali’s bereaved father told Kuwaiti daily Al Rai the boy had asked him for 12 Dinar (40 U.S. Dollars). “I told him if I had any I would give him”, the money Ali needed to get his games console from the repair shop, “and he replied, ‘dad, I know you work and tire for me and my brothers, and you always say that it breaks your back, but God willing I won’t let you be in need of anyone’, and he got up to kiss my forehead”. That was the last time Khalid al-Shammari, Ali’s father, would see his son alive; another son would wake him up early in the morning, screaming that “my brother Ali died!”.
Members of Kuwait’s elected parliament, by far the most powerful and vocal in the Gulf, were quick to decry this tragedy, pointing to the unfortunate spate of suicides over the past few years among the country’s deprived Bidoon as another pandemic aside covid-19. Yet, with the virus and economic woes taking up headlines and energy, and with Kuwait’s fraught domestic political situation rendering its National Assembly in a comatic state, the plight of some half a million Bidoon goes on much as it always has, the state malignantly indifferent.
Officially speaking, the government of Kuwait recognizes no ‘Bidoon’, only knowing “illegal residents”. According to the government, the ‘Bidoon’ descend from nationals of other states in the region, who illegally domiciled in Kuwait beginning in the first oil boom of the 1950s and 60s, around the time the country gained its independence from Great Britain. These ‘illegal residents’ and their descendants would make up the bulk of the soldiers in Kuwait’s new army, most of them Bedouin Arabs in no way dissimilar from the average Kuwaiti national. Indeed, there is an arbitrariness to the distribution of citizenship, accentuated by the number of ‘Bidoon’ who did manage to acquire it through different means over the years; it is not too unusual to find siblings and cousins from the same family split between nationals and ‘Bidoon’. Kuwaiti citizenship is an entry ticket to the substantial benefits endowed by the rentier state, a cradle-to-grave social safety net propped up by oil profits. But as those profits have taken dramatic slumps since 2014, and government expenditure only continuing to rise, Kuwait is facing a grave fiscal crisis.
Maintaining the comfortable living standards Kuwaiti citizens have come to expect has caused their government to deliberate drastic measures, like raiding the sovereign wealth fund to plug in an increasingly deeper deficit. Extending the plush welfare regime to cover another half million, many Kuwaiti nationals rationalize, would cause the whole system to collapse. Such fears are sometimes publicly expressed, as when athlete and social media influencer Balsam al-Ayoub called the Bidoon “bacteria that multiply (exponentially)”, language scarily reminiscent of that employed by genocidaires throughout history. Revealing the lowly position in society that Bidoon have been forced into, al-Ayoub suffered no damage to her career, welcoming Britian’s Prince William to Kuwait in late 2019 as part of an official reception and photoshoot. Kuwaiti society generally has been content with having Bidoon peddle by curbsides or work mall security, ostracized by the larger society, living on the fringes of legality.
Bidoon are not a phenomenon unique to Kuwait; there are significant populations of stateless people in all the Gulf monarchies. It is Kuwait, however, that has become the nation synonymous with the word ‘Bidoon’. This is primarily due to two factors: the great proportion of stateless people to nationals, and the relative degree of freedom enjoyed by the local press and civil society. The Bidoon suicides—as far as can be made out—started in late 2017. when a young man set himself on fire in front of a police station. Officers were able to put out the flames before it killed him, but the act seemingly ignited a series; in early 2018, a Bidoon committed self-immolation, this time in front of a court house, and another in December of last year. In mid-2019, speaker of the National Assembly Marzouq Al-Ghanim, empowered by the then Emir Sabah, announced his own initiative to ‘resolve the Bidoon file’ once and for all. Reactions to this were mixed, and details were sparse, and at any rate his efforts have since stalled in the face of covid-19 and a parliamentary election.
Al-Ghanim’s insistence that there are “Bidoon pretenders”, that the math does not add up when comparing their recorded population across the years, has engendered real worries among Kuwait’s stateless. For all his claims of wanting to resolve the issue humanely, Al-Ghanim would have government committees divide the stateless population between those whose cases are deserving, and those whose cases are not. A favorite ploy of Kuwaiti officials has been to warn that naturalizing the Bidoon wholesale would risk altering the country’s national character; an odd claim, especially when considering that most Kuwaiti citizens only need to go back three or four generations at most to some foreign land. Not endearing him any further to the Bidoon is Al-Ghanim’s aloofness towards their suffering, confidently saying last December ahead of parliamentary elections that “to be a Bidoon in Kuwait is better than being a citizen of any other country in the world”.