When Faisal checked in at Kuwait’s international airport late last year, he was a jet-setting young businessman with one of the Arab world’s strongest passports. But he never got on the plane, and when he left the airport, he was no longer Kuwaiti.
Faisal said he was temporarily detained before boarding and had his passport taken, becoming one of about 42,000 Kuwaitis to be stripped of their citizenship in just over six months.
The move to make thousands of citizens stateless is the latest in a series of backsliding moves that has jeopardised Kuwait’s claim to be the only state with a semblance of democracy in the Gulf, a region of autocracies. Authorities say it is aimed at people who got their passports fraudulently, but opponents have called it a campaign to scapegoat naturalised citizens.
“They made me stateless overnight,” said Faisal, not his real name. “Now all I think about is leaving and setting up in Dubai,” he added. “I want to escape here because it’s starting to feel like a dictatorship.”
The monarch, Emir Sheikh Mishal Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, said last year he would not allow democracy to “be exploited to destroy the state”, as he suspended the country’s raucous elected parliament and some articles of its constitution for four years. Student elections and votes for co-operative councils have also since been halted.
The suspension of democracy has met with little resistance at home or abroad, marking a shift for Kuwait, which has no political parties but does have deeply embedded democratic practices.
“Previously Kuwaitis mobilised to defend their democratic institutions, and outside powers intervened to support them,” said Kristin Smith Diwan, senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. “Today, Kuwaitis are intimidated by the citizenship revocations, and the United States is silent.”
Yet while having a nationality is a fundamental human right, Smith Diwan said there did not seem to be an “international appetite” for challenging Kuwait.
The campaign claimed to be targeting foreign criminals who fraudulently obtained the large social welfare payments given to citizens. It initially received similar levels of public support to that enjoyed by anti-immigration politicians in parts of the west.
But sentiment quickly shifted on the nation’s rowdy social media as it emerged that about two-thirds of those made stateless were women who gave up their previous citizenships to naturalise, a decade after legally marrying Kuwaiti citizens, although an unknown number may have unlawfully retained their original passports.
“You crossed a line [when] you entered all the houses in Kuwait,” one lawmaker told the Financial Times, addressing the government.
Every week for months, the government published vast lists of newly stateless people, which Kuwaitis feverishly scanned for their own names, or those of friends and family. The state also set up a hotline for reporting allegedly fraudulent Kuwaiti passport holders.
Others to lose their citizenship had been given Kuwaiti nationality for their services to the country, including famous actor Daoud Hussein and popular singer Nawal al-Kuwaitia, whose name means Nawal “the Kuwaiti”.
In a country with just 1.5mn citizens, the revocations affected nearly 3 per cent of the entire population, meaning most Kuwaitis knew a family that was affected. It has left some questioning their country’s identity as a mercantile, outward-looking trading city.
Social cohesion “has come under strain in the past few months,” said Bader al-Saif, assistant professor at Kuwait University. “Our legacy as a country has been about welcoming people.”
But the government has defended the policy. Interior minister Sheikh Fahad al-Yousef, the architect of the citizenship revocation campaign, argued on a talk show last week that previous attempts to tackle the issue had been blocked by the now-suspended assembly.
“We have reached a stage where we had no choice but to take a swift and decisive measure in the citizenship file,” he said. “Only God knows where Kuwait would be if we waited any longer.”
Some of the other democratic rollbacks have found supporters. Frustrated that the oil-rich nation has stagnated while its neighbours have pushed ahead with ambitious development plans, many Kuwaitis blame the fragmented parliament for having stymied much-needed reforms.
Kuwait is not the only Gulf state to curtail its democratic projects. Nearby Saudi Arabia and Qatar have in recent years also rolled back their own much more limited experiments in free elections. The region’s monarchies have chequered histories of being accused of human rights abuses.
“Our big thing is democracy and freedom of expression,” said one young Kuwaiti financier. “Are we losing that now to clean the country?”
Naturalised citizens are an easy target in Kuwait. Since gaining independence in 1961, the monarchy has struggled to reconcile who should and should not be part of the state, meaning tens of thousands of nomadic tribespeople who live within its borders are stateless.
One local joke encourages US President Donald Trump, who has pledged to expel millions of undocumented migrants, to come to Kuwait and learn from its success in getting rid of non-nationals.
The scapegoating of naturalised Kuwaitis is “the same sort of argument you hear in Europe”, said a former government official. “Except they’re your actual citizens, not refugees.”
A tally by Kuwaiti daily Al Jarida this year put the total nationality withdrawals at 32,715, a figure the FT confirmed through state news articles. A further 9,464 people have subsequently been added to the tally, Al Jarida reported.
The government’s critics say it is fanning nationalist sentiment to distract from Kuwait’s economic stagnation, which many argue has proved difficult to fix, partly because 80 per cent of the state budget goes to social welfare and the public sector. That leaves little to invest in infrastructure or major projects.
Following the dismayed public reaction, the government in December reassured those legally naturalised by marriage that their pensions and other benefits would be restored. The state then issued them with civil IDs that read “to be treated as Kuwaiti” in the nationality section. The cabinet is also forming a committee to receive petitions from people who feel they were wrongly stripped of citizenship.
But the campaign has caused confusion. The non-Kuwaitis can neither own land nor be majority business owners, and their driving licences are invalidated. People who lost their nationality also told the FT that Kuwaiti banks had restricted their ability to access funds.
Isam al-Sager, chief executive of Kuwait’s largest lender, National Bank of Kuwait, denied that wives who lost their nationality were unable to access banking. But he told the FT the bank was preparing to face losses as a result of the denationalisation programme, since many of the affected had liabilities with Kuwaiti banks, although he added this would be a worse case scenario.
Sager declined to give specific figures but described it as “a big chunk” of the money NBK had set aside to cover potential failed loan repayments.
Even the children or spouses of now-stateless citizens have lost their Kuwaiti passports. This was the case for Faisal, whose father — a naturalised Kuwaiti — had his nationality withdrawn.
“We were never given a reason why,” said Faisal, adding that the strain and uncertainty had left him depressed. He is trying to obtain a residency permit, but said he was blocked from government services and therefore could not get the documents he needed for the application. “What I feel like I have to do is leave.”
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