The Sale of Kuwait’s Bedoon: From Deportation to Human Trafficking

By Hasnaa Al-Shammariyya

The crimes of a state are not measured only by the number of its victims, but also by the silence of the society around them. In Kuwait, it has become routine for the authorities to enforce apartheid, forced displacement, the sexual exploitation of the Bedoon, and outright human trafficking,all without anyone raising a finger.

In the districts of Taimaa and Salibiyya, where the Bedoon population is concentrated, the government is currently carrying out forced deportation campaigns against entire families, evicting us from our homes as if we were human refuse. Our tin shacks are demolished amid society’s silence, while families are cast out into the blazing summer heat under the pretext of “security” or “administrative” reasons, and no one objects. Even those who denounce the crimes of the Zionist entity, mobilizing legal, religious, political, and humanitarian platforms to show solidarity with the Palestinian people, have not lifted a finger for us.

Our forced displacement and starvation is not, as they claim, an exercise in “urban cleansing,” but rather an act of ethnic cleansing carried out by the state under the cover of law and blessed by society. What else can one call it but ethnic cleansing when we are uprooted from our homes, our identity, and our history?

Not all of the injustices inflicted upon us have been quiet or subtle. Since 2014, the Kuwaiti authorities have treated us like worn-out cargo to be shipped from one port to another,selling us to the Comoros as though we were used goods. Yes, they have openly traded us, more than once, without fear or hesitation, and their crimes have passed unnoticed by both civil society and the international community. We are reduced to nothing but numbers and files shuffled across ministers’ desks, presented in folders as bargaining chips. We are exchanged for a handful of economic concessions or reconstruction projects.

In 2014, in the very heart of the Gulf, where minarets rise and flags of sovereignty fly, the deal was announced. Major General Mazen Al-Jarrah declared that Kuwait was negotiating with the Comoros to “take in” the Bedoon and grant them Comorian citizenship in exchange for construction, education, and health projects that Kuwait would finance there.

2018: a second attempt at selling us

A double scandal

But the initial humiliation and absurdity were not enough. In 2018, a new deal was put forward. Then–Minister of Interior Khalid Al-Jarrah announced the state’s intention to issue Sudanese passports to the Bedoon. The Sudanese Minister of Interior, Hamid Al-Mir Ghani, swiftly denied any knowledge of such negotiations and confirmed that the matter had never even been raised.

The very idea of resolving an issue of such profound humanitarian and political weight by deporting the Bedoon to another country,simply to rid the state of its legal and moral responsibility,amounts to systematic forced displacement, which is itself a form of human trafficking.

Bedoon women: victims of compound injustice

What makes the wound even deeper is that Bedoon women, the most vulnerable of all, suffer double violations. They are left without legal protection, without social support, and without even the documents that would prove their right to seek justice.

In May 2023, a minor Bedoon girl was arrested after being sexually exploited by her own father and mother. Instead of prosecuting the perpetrators who raped this child, the public prosecutor charged her with “inciting debauchery.” She was stigmatized, blamed, and labeled not as a victim or survivor, but as an “instigator of immorality,” while her family, the criminals, whose crimes I do not excuse, were the ones publicly vilified. Yet the Public Prosecution ignored the policy of systematic impoverishment and ignorance imposed on the Bedoon in Kuwait, the very conditions that produced such tragedies.

What is even more painful is that segments of Kuwaiti society seemed to relish this crime, as if they had long been waiting for an opportunity to vent their hatred and racism against the Bedoon. Insults and degrading comments spread online, targeting Bedoon women with stigma and incitement. As expected, the victim was left to languish in Bin Sabbah prison without psychological support. The “Bedoon Women’s Rights” platform tried to reach her through volunteer lawyers, but to no avail.

To criminalize a victim is the height of legal collapse and patriarchal tyranny. When a minor is denied justice twice, once for being a woman and once for being Bedoon, we are not dealing with institutions of justice, but with patriarchal institutions of oppression that offer no protection.

Thus, the fate of most Bedoon women in Kuwait is suspended between burning sidewalks, where they are forced to sell whatever they can to survive while pursued by the municipality and scorned by patriarchal eyes; or between courtrooms and forced prostitution rings; or in homes that offer no refuge from social, domestic, and state violence, as was the case with Awatif Al-Dhafeeri, who fell victim to betrayal and patriarchal abuse.

2024: repeating the crime under new names

In 2024, the new Minister of Interior, Fahd Al-Youssef, recycled the same old rhetoric in more refined language. He announced that within two months a new law would be submitted to the Council of Ministers, “facilitating the acquisition of alternative nationalities” for the Bedoon, and claimed that the state had stopped issuing Article 17 passports, those granted specifically to the Bedoon, except in medical or educational cases.

This is false; it is nothing more than a political lie. Today, the Bedoon are deprived of their right to freedom of movement altogether, whether to study or to seek medical treatment.

The cruelty of this system has already cost lives. One elderly Bedoon woman, in urgent need of treatment abroad, raised money herself with the help of others. When she tried to travel, she received only this inhumane reply: “We have forwarded your file to the Ministry of Health, and we will see if you are eligible to travel.” Although she was elderly and faced the prospect of having her leg amputated, she was not asking the state for money, only for her right to life and mobility.

The second woman was Bashayer Al-Shammari. Her brother pleaded with the authorities to issue her a passport so she could obtain treatment abroad. The Kuwaiti authorities, represented by the Central Agency, deliberately delayed issuing the document until she died.

Such gross disregard for our lives has changed our language: we no longer call this body by its official name, but whisper another, the “Nazi Agency.”

In another shocking statement, Fahd Al-Youssef declared: “I want the Bedoon to continue their studies and learn… and this will make it easier for them to obtain another nationality!”

Excuse me, this is the policy of a state? Or the language of a slave market? By God, this is not the discourse of a state of law and justice but the speech of a slave trader preparing his goods for shipment.

A homeland for sale… again

Today, our homeland is for sale once more. It is as if the state is saying: “Which country will take you? Whoever does, go, and get out!”

Names like Saint Kitts and Nevis are being tossed around. As soon as rumors spread that we were being “sold” to them, the official website of the Kuwait Fund for Development published a statement confirming the talks:

“The Acting Director General of the Kuwait Fund for Development, Mr. Walid Shaman Al-Bahar, received the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Saint Kitts and Nevis, Mr. Denzel Lyolyn Douglas, and his accompanying delegation. The two sides discussed ways of joint cooperation and strengthening relations between the two countries.”

News reports also spoke of possible “sales deals” to Turkey and Syria, especially after a photograph surfaced of Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa visiting Kuwait in the company of Muhammad al-Sharaf, representative of what we call the “Nazi” Central Agency.

It seems we are a desirable commodity, our flesh considered succulent. We are trapped in an unending series of political expulsions and human-trafficking deals designed solely to erase our existence.

This is how our urban presence is being erased today; this is how our homes are demolished and our families forcibly displaced.

Exclusion as official policy

What the authoritarian Kuwaiti authorities are doing to us amounts to systematic exclusion from the Arab Bedouin identity and the collective history of the region. But perhaps most dangerous of all is the collective laughter.

That laughter echoes in gatherings and on social media whenever “news of selling the Bedoon” is circulated, as though it were a joke, promoted as a “radical solution”, while our entire existence is reduced to a “file that must be closed.” This society, which mocks our suffering instead of standing with us, is complicit in the crime and shrouded in the same darkness of injustice.

The Kuwaiti regime has not been content with marginalizing us; it has embarked on a project of outright extermination: expulsion, starvation, displacement, defamation, impoverishment, and systematic ignorance. Despite all this, silence remains the prevailing attitude among civil society and the international community.

This silence is not mere neutrality; it is collusion in its ugliest form.

No voice is raised when a family is expelled from Taimaa or Al-Sulaibiya. No tweet is posted when a girl is imprisoned for being raped and sexually exploited.

In conclusion

History will not be merciful.
History will not forgive.

A generation will come that will curse those who traded us. A generation will rise to fight for our rights and carve your names on the walls of betrayal.

These are crimes of the state, documented in silence, cloaked in denial, and stamped with the signature of a society that has acquiesced and turned its back on us of its own free will.