Kuwait Under Pressure to Let Stateless Arabs Come Home : Refugees: Thousands are trapped in a squalid border camp. There are complaints from relief agencies, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.

The Kuwaiti government is coming under increasing pressure to grant thousands of Arabs stranded in a squalid border camp permission to return to their homes in Kuwait.

The refugees are part of a minority known as the bidoun, stateless Arabs who descended from nomadic desert tribes and lived in Kuwait but who were never recognized as citizens under the law. Since the end of the Persian Gulf War, an estimated 3,900 bidoun have been trapped in a camp near Kuwait’s border with Iraq, with the Kuwaiti government refusing to admit them.

The plight of the bidoun focuses attention on Kuwait’s often discriminatory treatment of residents who are not considered to be Kuwaiti. It is one of a number of human rights issues that have been raised in the wake of the war as Kuwait’s rulers struggle to rebuild their country.

The United States, international relief agencies and now even neighboring Saudi Arabia have joined in urging the Kuwaiti government to accept some or all of the bidoun-- many of whom served in Kuwait’s police and armed forces and became Iraqi prisoners of war.

Acting on a postwar concern that the number of “non-Kuwaitis” within its borders should be limited, Kuwait contends that the bidoun are more closely tied to Iraq than to Kuwait and would pose a security risk if they return.

“Those (refugees) are Iraqis who have left southern Iraq,” Kuwait’s interior minister, Sheik Ahmed al Jabbar al Sabah, said last week in a meeting with reporters. “I know some of them have been here before. Some have left and stayed in Iraq. They are Iraqis.”

The minister’s hard-line position makes it seem unlikely that Kuwait will make concessions to any of the bidoun who have taken refuge at the border camp at Abdali, a desolate, dusty place menaced by flies and packs of wild dogs.

Nevertheless, diplomatic and relief agency sources say the government, under pressure, will consider allowing the bidoun in Kuwait city to travel to the camp to visit relatives trapped there. Such a move could be interpreted as a tacit admission that the refugees indeed have ties in Kuwait.

Kuwait is also being urged to form a task force that would survey the Abdali camp and identify those bidoun whose backgrounds clearly reflect roots in Kuwait. This could be the first step in allowing at least some of them to go home.

“Everyone with a vested interest is putting pressure on Kuwait,” said an international relief official. “But everyone agrees it has to be done in the appropriate manner so that (the Kuwaitis) don’t lose face. . . . I am confident something will happen, but it won’t be tomorrow.”

Editorials in Saudi Arabia’s government-controlled newspapers in recent days highlighted the bidoun issue, arguing that it is Kuwait’s responsibility to repatriate them.

The United Nations’ special humanitarian envoy, Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, reportedly discussed the dilemma in a recent meeting with Kuwait’s crown prince, Sheik Saad al Abdullah al Sabah.

“Their status is less easy to define because of their past traditions,” Sadruddin said to reporters before the meeting. “Hopefully, they can return to their traditional ways.”

But the crown prince is said to have dismissed the bidoun, saying they are not Kuwait’s problem.

The case of the bidoun at the camp is the most dramatic illustration of the ways these underprivileged Kuwaitis are regarded in a country that relies on foreign labor but reserves citizenship for an elite with well-established family and tribal ties to Kuwait.

The bidoun, descendants of tribes that roamed parts of the Persian Gulf, Iraq and Jordan, consider themselves Kuwaiti but are not legally recognized. They are relegated to a second-class position, denied not only status but economic benefits.

Officially stateless, the bidoun are restricted in their rights to own property, rarely hold standard passports and have to pay more for some services, such as medical care, than do Kuwaitis.

Since the war, some have lost jobs. Many of those who were prisoners of war have been ignored, left to languish in camps or return unheralded to the poor bidoun neighborhoods in Jahra, according to relief workers and human rights advocates.

Barjas, a 34-year-old civil engineer who is a bidoun, worked with the Kuwaiti resistance during the Iraqi occupation, helping to bury the Kuwaiti dead and distribute money to trapped families through an underground network.

He was captured in February by Iraqi troops and taken to a prison in Basra. Released after the war, he was part of a group of returning POWs that had to wait more than eight bitterly cold hours at a border post because Kuwait was slow in admitting them.

As a bidoun, Barjas says, he cannot advance in his job, buy the home he wants or travel freely. In order to be able to claim a nationality, he said, he paid nearly $4,000 to purchase a passport from a corrupt diplomat. Barjas--born, raised and schooled in Kuwait--holds an Afghani passport.

“I am Kuwaiti,” he said. “I am Kuwaiti because this is my country.

“Don’t give me privileges, just give me a nationality. I want only to be given a nationality and treated as a human being.”

Barjas, who asked that his full name not be published, said his Iraqi captors offered to free non-Kuwaitis, but he maintained to them that he was Kuwaiti.

Some of the bidoun, officials maintain, held passports from other countries that they concealed when it looked as if they could live a better life in Kuwait. Many of the bidoun were born and raised in Kuwait, sometimes of parents also born in Kuwait. They numbered at least 150,000 before the occupation, and they formed about 60% of the army and much of the police force.