Bidoon build life of dignity in Britain
How a stateless people from the Middle East have struck roots in the UK is an incredible story of the human instinct for survival
From the fifth floor of a grey social housing block in one of London’s most deprived areas, a flash of red flaps from a window.
A squint of the eye brings into focus the word, “Kuwait,” in Arabic. A little desk research shows this to have been the country’s pre-independence emblem.
The flag is only one sign, amid the increased prevalence of a dialect, customs and cuisine in certain areas in London.
What sets these signs apart from the multimillion-dollar Gulf tourism to the UK is that these people, increasingly a fully-fledged community, are not tourists but actually stateless, known as the Bidoon.
As Britain slowly turned her back on her possessions “East of Suez,” the Gulf states were granted independence.
The establishment of the state of Kuwait in 1961, however, was by no means a complete affair.
Certain elements of the population, commonly herders of goats and sheep who had pursued a nomadic existence, did not lodge their existence, for one reason or another, with the new state and have remained since then officially stateless.
This experience was not restricted to Kuwait — similar events took place in Saudi Arabia and in Iraq.
The reality was that the Bidoon — short for bidoon jinsiya, meaning “without nationality” in Arabic — unknowingly found themselves on either side of lines in the sand drawn in London.
The Alien Residence Act of 1986 saw the status of the community change from legal residents to illegal.
However, the real watershed moment was in August 1990 as Iraqi tanks rolled into Kuwait; the effect on the country’s “stateless” was to be profound.
The Kuwaiti armed forces, facing the perennial problem of manpower that exists in all the Gulf states, conscripted heavily from among the Bidoon.
Many of them were taken to Iraq as prisoners. Their civilian counterparts and families spread through the region as Kuwait seemed destined to be annexed by Saddam Hussein.
The open borders following the invasion, recorded for posterity by satellite television, showed scenes of thousands of Kuwaiti citizens, among them many Bidoon, escaping the fires of invasion. By the time Operation Desert Storm had returned the region’s borders to their post-colonial status quo, many Bidoon had once again found themselves on the wrong side of the border with no means to prove their origin.
To any linguist coming into contact with the UK’s Bidoon, the mix of accents and dialects used by them can be puzzling.
The reasons are fascinating in themselves and illustrative of the living history and shared recent experiences of this community after the Gulf War.
Life in their host Arab countries was increasingly challenging for many. It is estimated that as much as half of the Bidoon of Kuwait were made refugees by the Iraqi invasion.
Operating in their new environments, they faced the dual challenge of being refugees as well as unidentified aliens.
Many sought employment or established small businesses, but the vast majority looked toward Europe.
Throughout the 1990s, a trickle of Bidoon took the hazardous land route from the Middle East to Europe in search of a new life. These numbers were augmented by further waves of refugees made by the US-led invasion of 2003 that overthrew Saddam.
The accounts of the new arrivals in the UK in the 1990s are fascinating. “Lived in Greece for three years, but it was like an Arab country if not worse,” recalled one Bidoon.
“Then I went by boat to Rome and then I lived in ‘Stalingrad Ghetto’ in Paris, where I learnt to speak French. But the pay was not good in France and the language is difficult so I was smuggled into the UK.”
Other members of the community narrated their own adventures in the hope of reaching the UK. One Iraqi described having claimed Rwandan origins during the 1990s, when an ill-informed UK Home Office was only too ready to grant citizenship to victims of the genocide.
The human cost of undertaking the perilous route from the Middle East to Europe was steep.
Many Bidoon become prey to Romanian and Albanian gangs, who continue to extort money from the families seeking safe passage.
Isolated by their vulnerability, they have no means of resisting.
How a community from almost 4,000 miles away has increasingly been able to seek sanctuary in the UK is an incredible story of conflict, bureaucratic red tape and survival instinct.
The UK Home Office estimates that there are roughly 5,000 Bidoon in the country. The community’s representatives estimate the number to be as high as 8,000.
If correct, it would amount to almost five percent of the entire officially recognized Bidoon population.
It is a strange twist of fate that many Bidoon have found a home in the country whose policies had inadvertently contributed to making them homeless over half a century ago.
The Bidoon community in Britain, like so many other new arrivals, is based in London, though with a growing satellite community in Manchester.
One community leader from the Aniza tribe explained: “When we first arrived, we did not think that we would be staying long.
“Many of our community sought work in the Gulf countries and others sought opportunities in Iraq after the fall of Saddam. We worked as informal Arabic teachers, as handymen and as minicab drivers.
“As our time in the UK has grown to be more permanent, members of our community have laid down roots. “We have Bidoon nurses, teachers and even Bidoon members of the British armed forces”. London — indeed all of Britain — has a knack for unleashing the innate entrepreneurial spirits of new arrivals, and the Bidoon have made especially good use of this. In recent weeks as the coronavirus panic swept through consumers and supermarkets, grocery shops managed by Bidoon entrepreneurs stayed open.
They have kept local communities well supplied with essential items and consumer goods. It is understood that many, as much as 3,000 of the community have indefinite leave to remain and others British citizenship.
So much so is their statelessness regarded as a social burden that many are selective in explaining their origins, merely stating that they are from Iraq or Jordan. In research for this piece, it came to light that the group’s Kuwaiti origins can be a huge hindrance to those seeking asylum, given the commonly held connotations of the relative wealth of the state. “Sometimes we cannot say that we are Kuwaiti,” said one. “Especially in the UK it is hard to explain how somebody from a wealthy country like Kuwait would need asylum.”
The Bidoon have been remarkably successful in coordinating their asylum applications with the UK government through their regular diwana, or coffee houses. These are organized along old tribal structures through which they identified historically.
“The Shammar, Al-Aniza, Bani Tamim and the Fthoul all have their own meetings, usually on the weekend which allow us to remain linked as a community and coordinated,” said one Bidoon.
The old pre-independence flag of Kuwait is a source of pride to the community, and the memory of a state which they strongly feel they were a part of.
Like the Jewish emigres that came before them, fleeing Russian pogroms in the late 19th century and then Nazism in the 1930s, there is no doubt that eventually the Bidoon will become an inseparable part of British society.
BIDOONFACTS
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Two citizenship categories were identified when Kuwait gained independence in 1961.
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Those who lived in Kuwait before 1920, and those who arrived between 1920 and 1948.
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The third group, Bidoon, comprising Arabs and non-Arabs, were considered potential citizens.
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They were eligible for state education and health care but without voting rights.
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Bidoon were granted cards in the 1960s identifying them as “temporarily without citizenship.”