When Faisal registered at Kuwait International Airport at the end of last year, he was a young jet businessman with one of the strongest passports in the Arab world. But he never got on the plane, and when he left the airport, he was no longer Kuwaitian.
Faisal said he was temporarily detained before boarding and that his passport was taken, becoming one of the 42,000 Kuwaitis to be stripped of their citizenship in just over six months.
The decision to make thousands of citizens without a state is the last of a series of declines that has endangered Kuwait to be the only state to have a semblance of democracy in the Gulf, a region of autocracies. The authorities claim that this is for people who obtained their fraudulently passports, but the opponents called it a campaign for citizens in scapegoats.
“They made me stateless overnight,” said Faisal, not his real name. “Now, everything I think is to go and settle in Dubai,” he added. “I want to escape here because it starts to feel like a dictatorship.”
The monarch, the emir Sheikh Mishal al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah, said that last year, it would not allow democracy “to be exploited to destroy the state”, as he suspended The raucous elected parliament of the country and some articles of its constitution for four years. Student elections and votes for cooperative advice were also interrupted.
The suspension of democracy has encountered little resistance to the country or abroad, marking a change for Kuwait, which has no political parties but has deeply anchored democratic practices.
“Previously, the Kuwaitis mobilized to defend their democratic institutions, and the external powers intervened to support them,” said Kristin Smith Diwan, resident researcher of the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. “Today, the Kuwaitis are intimidated by the revocations of citizenship, and the United States are silent.”
However, although having a nationality is a fundamental human right, Smith Diwan said that there did not seem to be an “international appetite” for challenging Kuwait.
The campaign said targeting foreign criminals that have fraudulently obtained major social protection payments given to citizens. He initially received similar levels of public support to that which benefit from anti-immigration politicians in certain parts of the West.
But the feeling quickly moved to the noise social media of the country because it appeared that around two thirds of those who were stateless were women who abandoned their previous citizenship to naturalize, a decade after having legally married the Kuwaitian citizens, although an unknown number may have kept their original passports illegally.
“You have crossed a line [when] You have entered all the houses of Kuwait, “said legislator to the Financial Times, addressing the government.
Each week for months, the government has published large lists of people without state, which the Kuwaitis have scanned feverishly for their own name, or those of friends and family. The state has also set up a hotline to report allegedly fraudulent Kuwaiti passport holders.
Others to lose their citizenship had received Kuwaiti nationality for their services in the country, notably the famous actor Daoud Hussein and the popular singer Nawal al-Kuwaitia, whose name means Nawal “Kuwaiti”.
In a country with only 1.5 million citizens, revocations affected almost 3% of the entire population, which means that most Kuwaitis experienced an affected family. This has left the identity of their country in question as a mercantile commercial city and external appearance.
Social cohesion “has been under pressure in recent months,” said Bader al-Saif, assistant professor at the University of Kuwait. “Our heritage as a country has been to welcome people.”
But the government defended politics. Interior Minister Sheikh Fahad Al-Yousef, the architect of the citizenship revocation campaign, argued on a talk show last week that previous attempts to solve the problem had been blocked by the assembly now suspended.
“We have reached a stadium where we had no choice but to take a quick and decisive measure in the file of citizenship,” he said. “Only God knows where Kuwait would be if we were waiting for longer.”
Some of the other democratic declines have found supporters. Frustrated that the nation rich in oil has stagnated while its neighbors have advanced with ambitious development plans, many Kuwaits blame the fragmented parliament for having hindered essential reforms.
Kuwait is not the only state of the Gulf to reduce its democratic projects. Saudi Arabia nearby and Qatar have also made their own experiences a lot more limited during free elections. The monarchies of the region have control of the history of being accused of human rights violations.
“Our great thing is democracy and freedom of expression,” said a young Kuwïdian financier. “Do we lose now to clean the country?”
Naturalized citizens are an easy target in Kuwait. Since it was independence in 1961, the monarchy has had trouble reconciling which should and should not be part of the state, which means that tens of thousands of nomadic tribes who live within its borders are stateative.
A local joke encourages US President Donald Trump, who is committed to expelling millions of undocumented migrants, coming to Kuwait and learning from his success to get rid of non-nationals.
The scapegoat of naturalized Kuwaitis is “the same type of argument you hear in Europe,” said a former government official. “Except that these are your citizens, not your refugees.”
A count of the Kuwaiti Daily Al Jarida this year put the total total of nationality at 32,715, a figure that the FT confirmed by the press articles of the State. 9,464 other people were subsequently added to the count, Al Jarida reported.
Government criticisms say it is a nationalist feeling of distracting the economic stagnation of Kuwait, that many claim to be difficult to repair, partly because 80% of the state budget goes to social protection and the public sector. This can invest in major infrastructure or projects.
After the dismayed public reaction, the government reassured people legally naturalized by marriage that their pensions and other advantages would be restored. The state then delivered them civil parts which read “to treat as Kuwaiti” in the nationality section. The cabinet also trains a committee to receive petitions from people who believe that they were wrongly citizenship.
But the campaign caused confusion. Non-Koweïtis can neither have land nor be owners of majority companies, and their driving license are invalidated. People who have lost their nationality also told the FT that the Kuwaitian banks had restricted their ability to access the funds.
Isam Al-Sager, director general of the largest lender in Kuwait, National Bank of Kuwait, denied that women who have lost their nationality were unable to access banking services. But he told the FT that the bank was preparing to face losses following the denationalization program, because many of the responsibilities concerned with the Kuwaitian banks, although he added that it would be a worse case scenario.
Sager refused to give specific figures but described it as “a large part” of the money that NBK had put aside to cover the potential loan reimbursements.
Even children or spouses of citizens who are now without a state have lost their Kuwaiti passports. This was the case for Faisal, whose father – a naturalized Kuwaiti – found himself in his nationality.
“We have never been given a reason,” said Faisal, adding that tension and uncertainty had left it depressed. He tries to obtain a residence permit, but said he was blocked from government services and could not obtain the documents he needed for the request. “What I feel like I have to do is leave.”
