Al-Fadala, Brotherhood, bedoun

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In its relatively short history, Kuwait has not faced a security, social, political and humanitarian problem, other than the treacherous invasion of the country by the despicable Saddam, an issue of the size and complexity of the issue of bedoun.

No one, when addressing this issue, has succeeded in gaining everyone’s approval. If a bedoun demands that he be given citizenship and close the file, some will oppose and if a bedoun demands that he be deprived of all the advantages until they reveal the truth of their origins, others will also oppose him.

It was said in the past that whoever judges between two strangers will win the friendship of one of them, and whoever judges between two friends will eventually lose one of them. This is what I know very well, but the truth is first to be followed.

We must first admit that the issue of bedoun is a creation of our successive governments, and the interior ministers deliberately left it to time, and it has worsened and become a security, political and social threat that we see.

The problem began when the state, in the first years of independence, hired non-Kuwaitis in the police and army corps because of the citizen’s reluctance to work in these institutions although the material advantages of the two jobs were high compared to other jobs and professions.

No one possessed a document confirming his Kuwaiti nationality at the end of the fifties, and the country’s preparation for its independence from Britain, and it was necessary to determine this, so the Nationality Law of 1959 was issued, and committees were formed in each region, and the naturalization process began, depending on the rule of those who had been in Kuwait forty years before that, i.e. 1920 and earlier, and he has proof of this, such as a document of real estate ownership, or known witnesses, who became Kuwaitis by origin.

It was not difficult for the naturalization committees to determine who was a Kuwaiti, but there remained some who could not prove their presence in 1920, or did not obtain from the committees the degree of nationality that they thought they deserved it, so they refused the offer of a second-class nationality, and these situations were settled for a majority of them and the bedoun remained and their numbers increased either through natural reproduction, or others claimed to be bedoun by  destroying or hiding their passports and with time we are now facing the current unfortunate situation.

I would not have wanted to go into this subject, which I have already touched upon once years ago, had a friend not sent me the text of an interview in which a member of the Muslim Brotherhood stated that he had mediated with the respectable brother Saleh Al-Fadala, head of Central Agency for Remedying the Illegal Residents’ Status (CARIRS) to grant someone citizenship, and how the latter refused his request on the pretext that he does not deserve it, despite all the documents that prove the correctness of his words.

The member of the Brotherhood demanded that the viewers of the program contact Brother Al-Fadala and ask him about the authenticity of the incident, and this is what I did, and he denied the incident, and refuted the claims of the member of the Brotherhood.

It became clear to me from the above incident that the demands of that Brotherhood member and some of the defenders of the Bedoun cause do not proceed from purely humanitarian grounds and their demands were never set out to grant citizenship, for example, to the most deserving of them, but to the most close and beneficial to them on tribal, sectarian and political grounds.

As for those who demand granting citizenship to all bedoun are often unaware of the consequences of their demands nor the danger they pose to a people whose number does not reach even one and a half million. If this happens, it makes me feel indescribable horror, and a very dangerous demographic, political and social eruption will occur.

Depriving those who are proven by CARIRS to be entitled to citizenship is injustice, therefore the rest of the bedoun, and this is their right, either to return to the countries from which they previously came, or to stay in the country like more than three million residents, while providing them with all decent living conditions, and to stay among us as they want.

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By Ahmad alsarraf

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