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Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English. I'm Alistair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about a people who are not officially citizens of anywhere, the Bedouin of Kuwait.

In this episode, we'll learn who the Badoon are, why they are considered stateless, what life is like if you are stateless and ask ourselves whether there is any end in sight.

But, before we get right into today's episode, I want to remind you that you can become a member of Leonardo English and follow along with the interactive transcript and subtitles over on the website, which is leonardoenglish.com. Membership of Leonardo English gives you access to more than double the number of episodes, plus all of our learning materials, including instant translations in 12 languages, study packs, and much, much more.

So, if you are ready to take the next step on your English learning journey, the place to go is leonardoenglish.com. Okay then, let's get started and learn about the plight of the Badoon. 2019 was a busy year for the Irish Embassy in London. It was flooded with requests for new passports and ended up issuing 120,000 passports.

double the amount it was used to issuing a few years before. Why, you might be thinking. Well, the UK had voted for Brexit in 2016 and it would officially leave the European Union on January 31st of 2020.

This surge of new Irish passport applications was from people who had never previously had an Irish passport, but were scrambling to get one before Brexit officially took place. The Republic of Ireland, as you may know, is still part of the European Union, so any Irish citizen can enjoy the same privileges as any other EU citizen when it comes to things like freedom of movement.

Of course, Ireland wasn't handing out citizenship and passports to anyone who asked. You had to have a legitimate claim to be Irish, which typically means either being born in Ireland or having an Irish-born parent or grandparent.

It didn't matter if you weren't born in Ireland. In some cases, it didn't even matter if your parents weren't born in Ireland. If you had an acceptable link, lucky you, Irish citizenship was yours. On the other side of the world, however, there are people who are not quite so lucky, as they live in a country that is not quite so accommodating when it comes to handing out citizenship.

In Kuwait, there are people who might never have left the country, whose parents, grandparents, and all known relatives might never have left the country. People who might have no links to any other country, nor have the citizenship of another country, yet are not granted citizenship of Kuwait. They are citizens of nowhere. These are the Bedouin, a people without a state to call their own.

Not only can they not officially leave the country because they have no passport, but more importantly, they are completely locked out from accessing public services because they have no government ID, no national identity. Before we get into the question of how and why, we first need a brief geographical and historical refresher. Kuwait is a country at the mouth of the Persian Gulf.

It's small, at just under 18,000 square kilometres. To give you a reference point, that makes it smaller than the metropolitan area of Paris. To the south is Saudi Arabia, to the north and east is Iraq, and just past Iraq, only 45 kilometres away, is Iran.

This geographical position, sandwiched between three large countries, has always made the small country highly sensitive to external influences, which partly explains its cautious stance on citizenship, which is what we'll be talking about today.

Now, there is evidence of people living in the area for thousands of years, both nomadic people who would travel from place to place, and people who settled in villages and towns. And for most of its history, the area now known as Kuwait was a collection of small settlements. But in 1752, Kuwait became an independent country for the first time.

under the rule of a man named Sabah ibn Jabbar, a man whose descendants still rule the country today. Between its founding as an independent nation and today, however, the country has gone through several iterations. Under increasing threat from the Ottomans, it struck a deal with Britain and became a British protectorate in 1899.

Importantly, this didn't make Kuwait a British colony, and it wasn't captured by Britain, but it did effectively outsource all diplomatic relations to Britain, and meant that Kuwait wasn't really an independent country. It was a poor country, with most people in the country living a subsistence lifestyle. But in 1937, a discovery was made that would change everything. Oil.

Despite its miniature size, Kuwait has approximately 8% of the world's oil reserves. It started to export its oil in 1946, and by 1952 it was the largest oil exporter in the region. It declared full independence from Britain in 1961, and since then it has gone from one of the poorest countries in the world to one of the richest.

With the Declaration of Independence in 1961, and with full responsibility over its own administration and security, Kuwait needed to fully figure out and document its citizens. So it encouraged all eligible Kuwaitis to come forward and claim citizenship, to make themselves official in the eyes of the Kuwaiti government.

There was already legislation in place that outlined who did and didn't qualify for Kuwaiti citizenship. But this was updated in 1959 with the Nationality Law, which clarified the conditions to qualify for citizenship. Like most laws, it is long and complicated, but there are a few key points to mention.

Firstly, anyone who could prove that they or their ancestors had settled in Kuwait before the year 1920 would automatically qualify for Kuwaiti citizenship. The relevance of 1920, by the way, is because it was the year of a key battle between Saudi-backed militants and Kuwait.

The Kuwaitis won, and so this 1920 date was taken as being that anyone who was there at the time of this key military victory, by default, deserved citizenship. Secondly, for those who didn't have or couldn't prove Kuwaiti roots going back to 1920, there were paths to naturalisation. There were other ways in which you could obtain citizenship.

For example, if you had lived in Kuwait for 15 years or more, and could prove that you were an upstanding citizen, then there were ways you could officially become a citizen of Kuwait, even if your parents didn't have official citizenship. Now, the key element with both of these conditions of the law is around proof.

Being able to prove that you were in Kuwait in 1920, or that your ancestors were. Or being able to prove that you'd been in the country for over 15 years. For some people, this was easy. Birth certificates, official documents, employment contracts, and so on. But for others, it was not. And this brings us to the Badoon.

Now, on a linguistic note, Bedoun means 'without' in Arabic, and is an abbreviation of the phrase Bedoun Jinsiyah, meaning 'without nationality'. And to clarify, Bedoun is different from Bedouin, which is the name for a larger nomadic people throughout the Arab world.

Confusingly, most Bedouin are or were Bedouins. They were nomadic. But Bedouins are not all Bedouin. And on one more administrative note, Kuwait isn't the only country with Bedouin. There are stateless Bedouin in other Gulf countries, mainly Saudi Arabia. But today we'll keep the discussion to the Kuwaiti Bedouin, as that is where their plight is most obvious.

Historically, the Bedouin was a nomadic group, a group that travelled from one place to another, never staying in one place for an extended period. The world is full of nomadic people, but the Middle East has always been home to a particularly high proportion of the world's nomadic population. It is, in some ways, obvious. The region is filled with deserts, and there is not an abundance of arable land and fresh water.

People needed to keep moving from one place to another to make sure that they and their animals had enough to eat and drink. And this nomadic lifestyle, historically at least, would completely ignore national borders. Borders were man-made creations, imaginary lines in the sand.

If you were crossing the desert on a camel and you navigated by the stars, you had little idea where one state ended and the next one started. It simply didn't matter. You lived within your nomadic community, your tribe. It was where you were born, raised and died, like your parents, their parents and their parents before them.

And for Nomadic Bedoon, in the early 1960s, when there were calls from the Kuwaiti government for every eligible person in the country to come forward and claim citizenship, many simply never got the message. They never heard about it. Many who did hear about it just didn't understand the benefit of claiming citizenship. What would it do for them?

To them, formal borders and state institutions were new, foreign concepts. They lived outside mainstream society, so why should they register to collect a piece of paper? It sounded like a lot of work, without any tangible benefit. And even for those who did try to register, there was the additional problem that most were illiterate, they couldn't read or write, making it hard to understand what they needed to do.

And even if they were able to understand what they needed to do, there was the question of documentation and proving they were who they said they were.

Their parents or grandparents might well have been in Kuwait in 1920. They might have ticked every single box when it came to the right to have Kuwaiti citizenship. They might have lived their entire life in Kuwait and never left the country. But it was hard, perhaps impossible, to prove. There were no official birth certificates, no documents to prove Kuwaiti ancestry.

Early in the citizenship process, early in Kuwait's history as an independent nation, the authorities appeared to be more understanding of this. Many Bedouin were granted Kuwaiti citizenship, they were given the same social security benefits as everyone else, and they were allowed to hold normal jobs.

And at one point, a reported 80% of the entire Kuwaiti army was made up of Bedouin. But today, the Bedouin is the most marginalized group in Kuwait. Most are stateless, invisible, and without any path to citizenship, and therefore the ability to live a normal life.

When a baby is born to a Bedouin mother, they do not receive an official birth certificate. As a Bedouin, you do not receive an official Kuwaiti identification card. You are completely shut out from Kuwaiti society. And we aren't talking about a few hundred people here. The official number from the Kuwaiti government is around 120,000. But other estimates place it at over 200,000.

And Kuwait only has 1.5 million citizens, so it is a sizeable chunk of the population. So why are they so marginalised? Is it just a question of Kuwait tightening up its bureaucracy and of the Bedouin not being able to prove that they are who they say they are? Well, Kuwaiti authorities say yes, but NGOs like Amnesty International say that it is more complicated than that.

Instead of it being a simple case of missing papers, it is a coordinated effort on the part of Kuwait to marginalise this nomadic group, especially in recent years. In other words, they have been singled out and shut out of society on purpose. And, according to NGOs in the region, there are a few reasons as to why.

The key thing is that the major change happened in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Kuwait was under increasing pressure and aggression from its northern neighbour, Iraq. During the Gulf War, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, Kuwaiti officials claimed that Badoon had collaborated with the Iraqis. Although it is debated whether this is true,

It has led to deep scepticism about the true allegiance of the Bedouin, and a sense that this entire group cannot be trusted. On a related note, the Kuwaiti government has argued that the Bedouin are full of foreign nationals, people from neighbouring countries like Iraq and Saudi Arabia, who have no right to claim that they are Kuwaiti.

They are claiming that they are Kuwaiti, so they are entitled to Kuwait's generous welfare benefits, when in reality, they are not Kuwaiti in the slightest. The Kuwaiti government fears that allowing the Bedouin citizenship would open the doors for more people to claim citizenship under the guise of being Bedouin.

It's also believed that most Bedouin are Shia, they are Shia Muslims, and the majority of Kuwait, including its ruling family, is Sunni. And without getting too deep into the history of Islam and the theological reasons behind it, as I'm sure you will know, Shia and Sunni Muslims have had their fair share of differences and distrust of one another, to put it mildly.

And finally, there is the argument that it is actually quite convenient for the state of Kuwait to have its own mass of second-class citizens. We'll come to this in greater detail in a minute. But being shut out of mainstream society forces people to turn to casual, informal, and typically poorly paid work.

So, this undocumented mass of the population is, sadly, a convenient underclass of the Kuwaiti state. In other words, they do the poorly paid and unpleasant work that Kuwaiti citizens simply don't want to do. And in terms of what life is like for the Bedouin, and how being stateless affects your day-to-day life, as you might imagine, it makes life difficult and pretty miserable.

Without citizenship, they are cut off from all government services, healthcare, education, bank accounts, practically every form of bureaucracy. Children born to stateless Bedouin parents cannot attend free government school, and the only option for an education is to be sent to private schools, which are lower quality

and expensive. So many Bedouin children simply do not go to school, further damaging their already dismal employment prospects. And in terms of employment, again, the Bedouin typically have to work in the shadows, working informally in low-paying and insecure jobs with no legal protection. And in a wealthy country like Kuwait, this makes the Bedouin stand out even more.

In Kuwait, there is already a large gulf between the citizens of Kuwait, who only make up just over 30% of the population, and the foreign workers, who make up the majority of the population, but can't access the extremely generous welfare system enjoyed by Kuwaiti citizens.

Kuwait's huge oil reserves allow it to offer its citizens free education, healthcare, subsidised housing and well-paid and secure public sector jobs. But foreigners, who have been imported to fill labour-intensive, often low-paid jobs, have to turn to the expensive and typically lower-quality private sector for all of this.

And the contrast between the relative luxury and comfort afforded to the average Kuwaiti citizen and the conditions under which the Bedouin have to live is particularly jarring. Another layer of complexity behind all of this is the gender bias in Kuwait's nationality law.

Like in many Gulf countries, in Kuwait, citizenship is passed through the father, not the mother, meaning that children born to Kuwaiti mothers and Bedouin or foreign fathers do not automatically receive Kuwaiti citizenship. This leaves many Bedouin children stateless and without access to the benefits of Kuwaiti nationality, even if their mother has Kuwaiti citizenship.

For Bedoun families, this makes the cycle of statelessness even harder to break, further marginalising them in Kuwaiti society. Sadly, there seems to be little opportunity for this to change. Kuwait says it needs to see proof, official documents, before it hands out prized Kuwaiti citizenship. The Bedoun cannot provide this proof because they never had it in the first place.

And it is not like there is any other country that can or should take them. Kuwait has argued in the past that Iraq and Saudi Arabia should give citizenship to qualifying Bedouin. But Iraq and Saudi Arabia have generally rejected this, on the grounds that the Bedouin are more Kuwaiti than they are Iraqi or Saudi. They are Kuwait's issue to resolve. They are nobody else's problem.

So there they are, stuck in this diplomatic limbo, stateless, citizens of nowhere, living in a country that they call home, but that refuses to recognise them.

Now, to end things on a slightly positive note, there are some signs of hope for the Badoon. There is increasing international pressure on Kuwait from NGOs to solve the issue of the Badoon citizenship, and some signs that this is an issue Kuwait cannot ignore forever. After all, Kuwait is a signatory to several important international agreements

binding it to give legal rights and citizenship to stateless people. But, as you've heard, despite having signed these conventions, Kuwait seems to have no qualms about continuing to violate them. In 2014, a United Nations initiative was launched to end statelessness within a decade. So, by the year 2024.

That has not happened. But while change is slow, international pressure is mounting, and the Badoon issue is gaining more attention on the world stage. Now, the Badoon only make up a fraction of the world's stateless population, but their case is particularly interesting.

They are not stateless because of a war or redrawing of national borders. They are stateless because their parents and grandparents never claimed a state when they could have. Sixty years later, the Badoon of today are paying the price. They have slipped through all of the bureaucratic cracks and exist, invisible, in the shadows of one of the richest countries in the world.

Okay then, that is it for today's episode on the Bedouin, the stateless citizens, or rather, non-citizens of Kuwait. As always, I would love to know what you thought of this episode. Are you from Kuwait, or from the Gulf region? If so, what do you think is the answer to the question of the Bedouin? Are there stateless people in your country? And what paths exist, if any, to giving them citizenship?

I would love to know, so let's get this discussion started. For the members among you, you can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com, and get chatting away to other curious minds. And as a final reminder, if you enjoyed this episode, and you're wondering how to more than double the number of episodes you can get, plus learn with our interactive transcripts, subtitles, and key vocabulary, then the place to go for that is leonardoenglish.com,

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You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English. I'm Alistair Bouch. You stay safe and I'll catch you in the next episode.