Although having received far less attention than in Kuwait, the bidoon issue is becoming increasingly significant in the UAE, where there are believed to be between 10,000 and 100,000 stateless persons, with some even living in the wealthier emirates of Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Much like in Kuwait, they have been unable to obtain key documentation or access most benefits of the welfare state. In particular they lack the vital ‘family card’ or khulsat al-qaid, which is required to prove one’s lineage. At best they have only been able to receive temporary passports — thus excluding them from employment in the public sector. Moreover, they are often publicly discriminated against and — to a great extent — stigmatised by the government. In April 2011, when — as described later — six pro-democracy activists were arrested, the UAE’s state-backed news agency kept referring in all press releases to one of their number as being a ‘person without valid documentation’. This gave the impression that he was somehow of dubious character in addition to not being a bona fide UAE national.
In an extensive report by the UAE-based Arabian Business magazine in 2009 a number of UAE bidoon were interviewed — a rare occurrence and a voice not usually heard in the country. One female interviewee claimed that she was just one of thousands living in difficult conditions, explaining that ‘when you are a bidoon you cannot do so many things. You are not expatriate or a local; you are in-between’. Although she admitted that her family were originally from Iran, she explained that they had arrived in the country — then the Trucial States — back in 1953 and had received Sharjah passports. However, after the UAE’s independence in 1971 they were only given temporary passports which were renewed every six months until 1982 when their application was denied. Many other UAE bidoon claim descent from local tribes and can trace their lineage back several generations. Indeed, the report claimed that ‘according to anecdotal evidence, nearly 50 per cent of the [UAE] bidoon’s fathers were born in the Gulf monarchies while around 30 per cent of their grandfathers were born in the region… [but] today they find themselves in no man’s land’. Speaking of this diversity, a spokesperson for Refugees International explained that ‘[a UAE bidoon] could be someone who finds themselves in that situation for a number of reasons; their family may have lived historically in the country, but for some reason was not documented or chose not to be documented at the time; it could be someone who entered the country seeking asylum… there is no one stereotypical situation; it really is a diversified community of individuals’.[584] Recent research has also demonstrated that some of the UAE bidoon often move back and forth between being citizens or not, with temporary passports seemingly being dispensed and then revoked at whim. Described as a ‘liminal population’ that is politically managed depending on the government’s priorities of the day, these more fortunate bidoon are still left unable to plan for any kind of future.[585] Nevertheless, regardless of their precise backgrounds or their exact passport status, all of the UAE’s current bidoon firmly claim to be Emirati, with most alluding to the fact that they, their parents, and their grandparents have never known life in another country. One interviewee simply stated ‘…my life is here; all of my close friends are Emiratis. I know more about the UAE than I know about Iran. It would be impossible for me to live anywhere else’.[586]
The issue seems to be being dealt with in more or less the same way as in Kuwait, with the government forming committees, but then being slow to act. In 2008, following the setting up of several bidoon registration centres, about 1300 bidoon were naturalised, but only because they were somehow able to prove their pre-1971 ancestry.[587] As reported by a state-backed newspaper, many of those queuing at the centres were in a highly emotional state, being conscious of the decades-long wait their families had suffered. As one hopeful bidoon described of the process: ‘this will change everything for us and for our children… becoming Emirati will be like being born again’.[588] Another stated that ‘I will carry the country’s emblem on my head and my love for it in my heart’. Significantly, after this small number of naturalisations the minister for the interior was quick to underline the fact that citizenship in the UAE is a privilege and a reward for loyalty and political acquiescence, rather than a right. Specifically, he warned that ‘loyalty is a condition of citizenship and new citizens are expected to embrace the values that have ensured social stability and security for all. The constitution allows for revoking citizenship from anyone who does not deserve it’. When a newly naturalised citizen was asked for his thoughts on this message, he stated simply that ‘those who drink from a well would never throw dirt in it’.[589]
Since then, there have been no tangible improvements, with government officials and other pro-government spokespersons usually highlighting the potential disloyalty and reliability of bidoon given their uncertain pasts. The director of the immigration and naturalisation department in Abu Dhabi, for example, not only claimed that the main problem was that bidoon were registering under different names because they treated citizenship as a ‘lottery’, but also echoed the arguments of Kuwaiti officials, explaining in 2009 that ‘…the vast majority of those who claim to be bidoon are in fact illegal immigrants… who have destroyed documents from their home country in a bid to be granted UAE nationality… there are some who are real bidoon, but unfortunately they get mixed up with the vast majority who claim to be bidoon’. Similarly, a UAE national academic argued that ‘…many of these people came here in the 1980s and destroyed their documents to stay in the Emirates [because] they don’t want to leave the country. They came to the country for political reasons and many came into the country illegally’.[590] Furthermore, the government remains committed to using the threat of revoking citizenship as a means to ensure acquiescence. As discussed later in this book, in December 2011 seven activists promoting an Islamist agenda were stripped of their passports and thus relegated to being bidoon.
Other significant stateless populations are believed to exist in Saudi Arabia, where there are an unknown number of bidoon. These also appear to be subjected to widespread discrimination, especially in legal cases, with frequent reports of government officials or other spokespersons claiming they have no rights. In December 2011, for example, six stateless persons who were sentenced to hand and foot amputations after having signed coerced confessions to a crime of armed robbery, were told by prison staff that as bidoon they had no rights.[591] In Bahrain there are thought to still be several thousand bidoon. Although the Bahraini government did naturalise a few thousand Iranian-origin bidoon in 2001, following on from the aforementioned national action charter, the state has, like the UAE, recently demonstrated its willingness to revoke citizenship and return residents to bidoon status if necessary. In 2010 a prominent cleric and former bidoon who has criticised the government was promptly stripped of his passport on the grounds that he and his family had ‘not obtained citizenship via legal means’ back in 2001.[592] This was a clear warning to other former bidoon.
Discrimination against Shia communities in the Gulf monarchies is now as commonplace as that against stateless persons. The worst example has always been in Bahrain, where historically the Shia have formed the majority of the indigenous population yet — in a dynamic not dissimilar from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq — for much of the modern period they have been ruled by a Sunni minority, since the described ascendancy of the Bani Utub clan and eventually the Al-Khalifa family. Sporadic protests and insurgencies by the Shia in the early and mid-twentieth century — notably a 1920 petition to Britain that they were facing mistreatment from the ruling family and a 1956 general strike — were put down with force, often on the grounds that the Shia were in effect a fifth column of the Shah’s Iran. Indeed, in 1957 Iran’s parliament had passed a bill declaring Bahrain to be Iran’s 14th province, although this claim was later dropped following a United Nations’ administered opinion poll of Bahrain’s residents in which the overwhelming majority voted to remain independent. But later in the twentieth century, especially following the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran and the Al-Khalifa’s claims in 1981 that they had uncovered a pro-Iran plot,[593] the persecution of Bahrain’s Shia increased. The resulting tensions, along with a widespread belief that Shia were being discriminated against in terms of employment opportunities and state benefits, eventually led to a full scale intifada in the 1990s which claimed the lives of over forty protestors and led to the jailing and exiling of several major opposition figures. Moreover, in 1996 the government claimed to have uncovered a fresh Shia plot, this time by an Iran-backed offshoot of Hezbollah in Bahrain.[594] By the end of the intifada and the launch of the aforementioned 2001 national action charter, approximately 70 to 75 per cent of Bahrain’s national population were still believed to be Shia — mostly indigenous Shia Arabs[595] or ethnically Persian Arabs who had long been settled on the island.[596] Since then it is believed that the proportion of Sunni Bahraini citizens has increased, mostly due to government manipulations and ‘demographic engineering’. In particular, the government is believed to have been offering citizenship to non-indigenous Sunni Arab and African families in an effort to boost the Sunni contingent of the national population and thus limit the influence of the Shia.
585
124. Presentation by Noora Lori at the Middle East Studies Association annual conference, 4 December 2011. ‘The Political Management of Rentier Transformations, Naturalization Policy, and Liminal Populations in the UAE’.
592
131.
593
132. In 1981 the government arrested seventy-three people accused of plotting a coup on behalf of a pro-Iran organisation — the Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain led by an Iraqi cleric, Hadi Modaressi. See Kinninmont, Jane. ‘Bahrain’ in Davidson, Christopher M. (ed.),