Christopher Davidson - After the Sheikhs - The Coming Collapse of the Gulf Monarchies

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] 126. The National , 26 September 2008. 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] 127. The National , 7 September 2008. 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] 128. The National , 26 September 2008.

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] 129. Arabian Business , 13 July 2009. 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] 130. Human Rights Watch, 16 December 2011. 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] 131. Al-Jazeera English , 22 September 2010. Referring to Ayatollah Hussein Mirza Najati. 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 14 thprovince, 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] 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.), Power and Politics in the Persian Gulf Monarchies (London: Hurst, 2011). 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] 133. See Kinninmont (2011). 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] 134. The Baharna. or ethnically Persian Arabs who had long been settled on the island. [596] 135. The Ajam. 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.

In 2006 details of the policy unexpectedly came into the public domain following the publication of a lengthy report by Salah Al-Bandar — a British citizen of Sudanese origin who had been working for Bahrain’s Ministry for Cabinet Affairs. The report — now dubbed Bandargate — claimed to have uncovered a secret plot by a group within the government to ‘deprive an essential part of the population [the Shia] of their rights’. [597] 136. International Herald Tribune , 2 October 2006. Moreover, it inferred that the group was trying to turn the Shia into a minority within just a few years and was busy working on ways to gerrymander electoral constituencies so as to reduce the clout of Shia members of parliament. Although Al-Bandar was promptly deported and the state-backed media was banned from reporting on the story, a protest was held demanding a thorough investigation. [598] 137. International Herald Tribune , 17 November 2006. In 2008, following the publication of official figures indicating that Bahrain’s total population had increased by more than 40 per cent between 2002 and 2007, tensions increased further, as it was deemed unlikely that all of the increase was due to expatriates or the naturalisation of stateless persons. Analysts have claimed that the natural rate of growth for the national population would have only yielded an increase of 47,000 persons, thus more than 72,000 were probably granted citizenship during this period. [599] 138. See Kinninmont (2011). Indeed, in summer 2010 opposition groups in Bahrain estimated that between 65,000 and 100,000 Sunni nationals have been added to the country’s voter rolls in the last decade. Most of the newcomers [600] 139. Many Bahrainis have observed an influx of new citizens from Pakistan, Yemen, and Baluchistan. See Kinninmont (2012), p. 18. seem to be housed in brand new villages in Bahrain’s hinterland, suitably distanced from the older, predominantly Shia villagers. Many seem to work for the state security services, the police, or the royal court, likely due to their unswerving loyalty to the Sunni elites. Interviewed by the New York Times in summer 2010, a resident of one such village — a settlement specifically for Sunnis employed in the security sector — stated that he and his two brothers worked for the police and that ‘…if the Shia took control of the country, they would pop out one eye of every Sunni in the country’. [601] 140. New York Times , 26 August 2010.