Joint Letter to Kuwaiti Emir on Bidun Rights

[Kuwaiti Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmed al-Sabah. Image by The White House via Wikimedia Commons] [Kuwaiti Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmed al-Sabah. Image by The White House via Wikimedia Commons]

Joint Letter to Kuwaiti Emir on Bidun Rights

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following letter was issued by Refugees International, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International on 27 September 2012.] 

His Highness Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmed al-Sabah
Al Diwan Al Amiri
Seif Palace – Building 100
State of Kuwait

Your Highness,

We write to you regarding the more than 100,000 stateless residents of your country, commonly referred to as the Bidun. The legal, social, and economic vulnerability of the Bidun has long been a source of unease to our organizations and to governments around the world.

Since the start of demonstrations in 2011, however, the Kuwaiti Government’s treatment of the Bidun has deteriorated to such an extent that it has eroded Kuwait’s ability to fulfil its international human rights commitments. 

We feel bound to convey our concerns to Your Highness directly.

In the realm of civil and political rights, the Bidun are not treated equally before the courts and continue to be denied protection conveyed through nationality and residency; and have been subjected to repeated abuse and discrimination. 

  • Instead of acting decisively to resolve claims to nationality, The Central System for Resolving Illegal Residents` Status, the “Bidun Committee,”  made matters worse in the first quarter of the year by proposing that the Bidun population be separated into four categories. Each category would have different rights based on arbitrarily-determined factors, such as whether a family participated in the 1965 census or served in the army or police. All Bidun born in Kuwait should be recognized as citizens, and those who have resided in the country for a reasonable amount of time should be eligible to apply for citizenship and acquire citizenship, if they would otherwise be stateless, following a fair and transparent process;
  • In contravention of its obligations under international human rights law, the government has significantly curtailed the rights of Bidun to free speech and expression, in particular their ability to assemble, demonstrate peacefully, and publicly criticize government policy. The government has repeatedly warned members of the Bidun community against organizing peaceful protests, claiming that only Kuwaiti citizens have the right to demonstrate. Kuwaiti security forces stand accused of using excessive force against peaceful Bidun protestors in 2011 and 2012, and detained Bidun have complained of police abuse. A promised investigation of these abuses has not happened.

Progress on securing the social and cultural rights of Bidun have also stagnated in recent months. 

The eleven benefits for Bidun that were promised by the Government in April 2011 have not been implemented, leaving many Bidun without access to employment, health care, education, and other vital public services, as well as documents such as birth certificates. Particularly egregious is the government’s exclusion of Bidun children from primary and secondary education – a problem that is exacerbated by a recent government ban on charitable contributions, including tuition, to Bidun individuals and organizations.

For decades, Kuwaiti, Arab, and international human rights activists and organizations, along with United Nations human rights bodies, have called on the government to implement policies to resolve the plight of the Bidun.

The absence of such policies, rooted in human rights standards, is a stain on the country’s international reputation. It deprives thousands of families of their basic political, economic and social rights and bars them from contributing fully to Kuwaiti society. 

We firmly believe it is in Your Highness’s interest to address this issue decisively, and we urge Your Highness to initiate five steps to:

  • enable Bidun residents to go to court to challenge decisions taken by the Bidun Committee and to make the case for their recognition as Kuwaiti nationals;
  • provide, without further delay, proof of nationality to the 34,000 individuals acknowledged to be Kuwaiti nationals by the Bidun Committee, and start a fair and transparent adjudication of the other 80,000 pending applications for nationality, including by providing the right to appeal;
  • guarantee the right to peaceful assembly to Bidun and end the use of excessive force as a response to peaceful demonstrations for Bidun rights; investigate and address allegations of police abuse; and ensure that the Bidun detained during demonstrations are freed or, if charged with a crime, afforded fair, transparent, and expeditious trials;
  • eliminate regulations that discriminate against Bidun in terms of access to employment and public services, especially with respect to education and health care;
  • revoke rules barring individuals and private organizations from donating to individual Bidun or Bidun organizations;

Sincerely,

Andrea Lari
Director of Programs
Refugees International

Phillip Luther
Director, Middle East and North Africa Program
Amnesty International

Sarah Leah Whitson
Director, Middle East and North Africa Division
Human Rights Watch 

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412