Quoting security sources who wished to remain anonymous, Al-Rai reported that the activists arrested along with others on Saturday staged demonstrations against a new colortagged ID system adopted recently by the Central Agency for Stateless Residents, and expressed their opposition to the selection of Saleh Al- Fadhalah to head the agency.
Their demands also included naturalizing stateless residents who possess documents for the 1985 census. The Cabinet, during its weekly meeting a fortnight ago, approved a new form of security IDs given to stateless residents and used as their main form of identification.
The new cards contain colored tags referring to the category under which a holder is recognized in state records, including those eligible for naturalization and others about whom the government claims to have proof that they belong to other countries.
Of those arrested, 18 Bedouins were remanded for ten days on Sunday as per orders of General Director of the Criminal Investigations General Department, Lt Gen Yousuf Al-Saudi, Al-Qabas reported yesterday.
Sources quoted in the report indicated that 23 people were arrested till Sunday on charges that included calling for an illegal demonstration and assaulting police officers on duty.
One of the accused was also charged with raising a Nazi banner. Meanwhile, Jahra detectives were trying to arrest ten others identified as having been involved in the assault on policemen and breach of security.
In the meantime, the detainees denied during interrogation that they had any links with instigators outside Kuwait, notably an Iraqi citizen named Mohammad Wally who resides in London and has been regularly exhorting the Bedouins in Kuwait to demonstrate, Al-Rai reported.
The Kuwaiti government established the Central Agency for Illegal Residents about two years ago with the goal of classifying the members of the stateless residents’ community and identifying those who meet conditions of naturalization, including residents whose Bedouin ancestors failed to register for citizenship following Kuwait’s independence more than fifty years ago.
Last year, the agency adopted measures to grant the Bedouins several rights that included obtaining marriage, birth and death certificates.
The agency was given a five-year ultimatum to resolve the decades-old issue. Kuwait has a large community of stateless residents who demand citizenship as well as civil and social rights that they are deprived of, given their illegal residence status.
The government in the meantime argues that some of them are Arabs or descendents of Arab people who deliberately disposed of their original passports after coming to Kuwait and seek citizenship in the oil-rich country.
The term ‘Bedouin’ is Arabic for ‘without’, and is used as a loose reference to the fact that stateless residents live without a nationality since birth.
