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KUWAIT CITY, May 16 (AFP)-Kuwait's parliament voted Tuesday to ease the emirate's rigid nationality law to make it easier for tens of thousands of stateless Arabs resident in the country to apply for citizenship. Members of parliament (MPs) voted by 44 to six, with five abstentions, to amend the 1959 law to allow stateless people, or bidoon, resident in Kuwait since 1965 to apply for citizenship. Under the old nationality law, only those Arabs who had lived in Kuwait since 1945 and foreigners who had been resident since 1930 were eligible to apply for citizenship. MPs slammed the government treatment of the bidoon, meaning 'without' in Arabic, as "inhumane and oppressive." "Bidoons are deprived of education, free medication, jobs, travel and above all getting married. This is against the rules of Islam and international law," liberal MP Abdulmohsen Jamal charged. "Bidoons are humiliated by the officials in the Interior Ministry. Who gave the right to those officials to abuse the bidoons?" demanded the black-turbaned Shiite MP Hussein al-Qallaf. Interior Minister Sheikh Mohammad Khaled al-Sabah told parliament that some 36,700 bidoon would qualify to apply under the amended law, out of more than 100,000 stateless people living in Kuwait. The government has previously warned the bidoon that they have only until June 27 to legalize their status or face legal action. The parliament is scheduled to debate another bill to double to 2,000 the number of Kuwaiti citizenships that can be granted to foreigners annually. The bidoon currently number some 112,000, down from 225,000 prior to the Iraqi invasion in August 1990. After the 1991 Gulf War a large number of bidoon suspected to be Iraqis resettled in Iraq. Some bidoon are from families based without official status in Kuwait for several generations, while others are mostly Arab economic migrants attracted by the oil boom of the 1950s. The Kuwaiti government has long claimed that many bidoon, who can only work unofficially, are hiding their original nationality in a bid to obtain citizenship to enjoy the state's generous cradle-to-grave welfare system. |
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