Inside the $100 Million Scheme to Send the Middle East’s Most Unwanted People to Africa | VICE News

More on how the Gulf states use citizenship policy:

El-Baghdadi’s experience isn’t new or uncommon for Middle East’s large and rapidly growing community of exiles and refugees. Palestinians have been expelled in large numbers from both Jordan and Kuwait in the past when they’ve rubbed those countries’ rulers the wrong way.

What is new, however, is the way the Gulf States, intolerant even of critical tweets, are now punishing their own citizens by rendering them stateless. This, el-Baghdadi says, is part of a new, harsher interpretation of the social contract among the region’s oil and gas rich monarchies. “Being a citizen or a ‘local’ can potentially make you a lifelong recipient of government largess,” he says. In return for a cradle-to-grave welfare system “you just need to be completely apolitical and quiet.” Rocking the boat has become an increasingly risky business.

Since the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, three of the Gulf states have revoked the citizenships of hundreds of people, the majority of them advocates for political reform or democratization. Bahrain has revoked the citizenship of 159 people since 2012; Kuwait made about 100 of its citizens non-Kuwaitis with the stroke of a pen in 2014 and 2015. The UAE stripped seven of its citizens of their nationality in 2011; in July 2014, the regional Al Sharq newspaper claimed that hundreds more had been secretly rendered stateless. Amnesty International has independently made a similar claim — that Emerati authorities planned to revoke the citizenship of “scores” of nationals.

Abu Dhabi. (Photo via Wikimedia Commons)

In 2014, Oman passed a law allowing the government to arbitrarily revoke the citizenship of anyone working “against the interests” of the state, and Bahrain passed similar legislation allowing the state to strip the citizenship of anyone who failed “the duty of loyalty.” Saudi officials have publicly mulled following suit.

This January, Kuwaiti authorities arrested Saad al-Ajmi, the onetime director of the Kuwait office of the Saudi Arabian television channel Al-Arabiya, as he was about to board a flight to Saudi Arabia with his family. His arrest — for skipping out on a short jail sentence that he says he was not aware of — surprised many in Kuwait who knew al-Ajmi as the well-regarded spokesman for the Popular Action Bloc, a parliamentary coalition that is vocally critical of the government appointed directly by the Emir of Kuwait. Surprise turned to shock when, three months later, al-Ajmi was stripped of Kuwaiti citizenship and deported from the country.

When the head of a household loses citizenship in Bahrain, Kuwait, and the UAE, their families are often also stripped of their citizenship, creating a multiplier effect: Hundreds of people may have ultimately lost their status as Kuwaiti citizens due to the purge of 2014, according to human rights researchers tracking their cases, while more than 1,000 Bahrainis may have been plunged into the administrative void. These are people who learn that they and their loved ones have gone from being citizens of some of the world’s wealthiest countries — and most comprehensive welfare states — to being outcasts and exiles without a home.

Source: Inside the $100 Million Scheme to Send the Middle East’s Most Unwanted People to Africa | VICE News