‘Kuwaiticization’ Spurs a Postwar Exodus : Mideast: The emirate is driving out non-citizens for economic and security reasons. The result for many is tragedy and fear.

At 21, Madallah is an urban nomad. Like his Bedouin ancestors who drove their sheep across the Arabian desert, he moves every few days--not from oasis to oasis but from safehouse to safehouse.

“I live just like an animal,” he said. “Eat and sleep, eat and sleep.”

And hide. Madallah is on the run from the Kuwaiti police, who have orders to detain young bidoun , or stateless tribes people, like him until they “voluntarily” leave the war-scarred emirate. In the eyes of most Kuwaitis, the tens of thousands of bidoun were collaborators with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s brutal occupation army.

Khalid Ahmed doesn’t live much better. He and his wife change apartments every two weeks, hiding in the mazes of low-rent flats in the shadows of Kuwait city’s lavish villas.

Ahmed, who wears blue jeans and designer sunglasses, is not a bidoun. He’s an Iraqi Kurd. Like thousands of others here whose ethnic roots are traced to the land of Kuwait’s hated occupiers, Ahmed is targeted for possible deportation to a place where the persecution of the Kurdish minority would be for him a fate far worse than life on the run.

Madallah and Ahmed have never met, and their backgrounds are quite different. But together they symbolize an enduring human and demographic nightmare left over from last year’s Persian Gulf War.

Both men were born in Kuwait. Both are stateless. And now both are trapped in this oil-rich emirate’s post-liberation policy of “Kuwaiticization”--a drive to thin the ranks of non-Kuwaitis, fueled partly by revenge and partly by economics.

It is working: In less than two years, the emirate has driven out nearly 1 million largely Kuwaiti-born Palestinians, bidoun , Yemenis, Asians, Persians, Iraqis and even a few thousand Westerners. In the past 18 months, Kuwait has chopped its prewar population of 2.3 million, including citizens and non-citizens, in half. The postwar population-purification policy has spurred a modern exodus perhaps rivaled only by that in the war-torn Balkans.

The policy’s adherents, who include most of Kuwait’s estimated 620,000 citizens, bristle at any hint that the government’s push to expel anyone seen as a potential Iraqi sympathizer is even vaguely akin to “ethnic cleansing,” the notorious policy being carried out in some of the republics that used to make up Yugoslavia.

Kuwaiticization, they contend, is a vital step toward internal security and stability. It is also an essential element in Kuwait’s long-term economic plan to curb the sheikdom’s traditional reliance on foreign labor--particularly on a once-large population of Palestinian professionals who formed the backbone of its bureaucracy, banking, education and management systems until the Palestinian leadership threw its support behind Iraq’s invasion in August, 1990.

The government appointed by Kuwait’s ruling Sabah family insists that no one has been expelled--not even the tens of thousands of Palestinians and thousands of bidoun who joined forces with the Iraqis during the seven-month occupation that left Kuwait in tatters. Those who left, the government contends, either fled during liberation or voluntarily emigrated later to escape the ruins of postwar Kuwait.

But officials concede that the government did radically tighten its residency and citizenship laws in a successful effort to give the Kuwaitis, for the first time in decades, a narrow majority in their own nation.

They also acknowledge intensified police efforts to track, detain and deport non-Kuwaitis who violate the new requirements. And privately, they concede that the push for Kuwaiticization, in a land long dependent on foreign labor for all but the most comfortable of jobs, has had enormous repercussions.

The policy has torn the spine out of Kuwait’s financial sector, its educational system, its power plants and communications facilities and its multitiered government bureaucracy, all of which relied on the prewar population of about 280,000 highly skilled Palestinians and the country’s large Jordanian population to keep the emirate running smoothly.

It has left behind empty schools, half-full hospitals, empty low-rent apartment blocks and an emerging private-sector economy critically short on efficient, skilled labor.

Attempts to replace the Palestinians with Egyptians, Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis--ethnic groups not tainted by their governments’ stance during the war--and to rebuild Kuwait’s infrastructure and run the nation during the transition to Kuwaiti management have fallen short, according to several Kuwaiti analysts. Some Kuwaitis have replaced Palestinians in key jobs, but most positions have just been left vacant or filled with another set of foreign workers.

“It is a very low-productivity type of labor that we’re importing now, and it’s tilted more toward bachelors, which brings in other social problems,” prominent Kuwaiti economist Jasem Sadoun said. “You cannot depend upon such a population to build the future of Kuwait. Of course, you also cannot live in this new world order when you’re a minority in your own country.

“But we should reduce the number of low-productivity people. And, with 60% of all Kuwaitis under 21, we must set education standards high enough to produce our own management and labor or we’re going to have very serious problems in the future. We had a good chance to do this after the catastrophe, but if you look at the $50 billion we spent to rebuild our country, very little of it went into the Kuwaiti economy and society as a whole.

“Kuwaitis proved during the occupation that they will do anything if they are forced to do it. And, in the long run, this is the only real solution.”

In the short run, though, the problem is as human as it is institutional, and the government’s attempt to solve it through Kuwaiticization has left a trail of tragedy and fear.

Philippine and Indian men recruited after the war to service the ruling emir’s Bayan Palace, for example, are now warehoused, as many as a dozen to a room, in the tiny classrooms of one of the scores of schools left vacant by the departing Palestinians. This is partly the result of cost-cutting measures and partly because of laws that effectively bar entry for the families of the migrant workers.

In the Al Hewaly neighborhood, which housed the largest concentration of Palestinians before the war, there are more than a dozen abandoned elementary and high schools, symbols of what many Kuwaitis term a sharp decline in the quality of education.

Medical care has suffered as well. The patient load at most city hospitals has been cut in half since the great exodus, but so have their medical staffs.

But it is the large population of Kuwaiti-born ethnic groups, many of whose members have lived here for two or more generations, who suffer the most, rendered stateless by a policy that uses prohibitive residency fees, a complex citizenship law and occasionally police harassment to encourage them to leave.

Aside from the Palestinians, who continue to make their arduous way from lifelong homes in Kuwait to Iraq or Jordan at the rate of two dozen families a day, the worst-hit are the bidoun --the Arabic word means “none” or “nothing,” an apt description of their status here.

Before Kuwait’s liberation last year, there were nearly 300,000 bidoun living in the desert towns outside Kuwait city. After the Iraqi invasion, as many as 10,000 of them joined an armed national guard created by Iraq’s secret police to enforce Baghdad’s brutal occupation. Now, diplomats estimate the bidoun population at fewer than 100,000--most of them living in relative poverty in the old town of Jahrah west of Kuwait city.

Even in the best of times, their status here was complicated. They are the descendants of ancient, nomadic shepherding tribes that settled in Kuwait during the years after the first oil was found in the 1930s. Some of the tribes were offered citizenship, but in many cases it was a second-class citizenship with limited civil rights, which many bidoun rejected as an insult.

Abdullah Meiboud is the son of a bidoun who rejected the offer “because it was like treating him as a woman.” Meiboud’s mother accepted the citizenship offer, but that was not enough to make him a citizen; Kuwaiti law does not transfer citizenship maternally.

Madallah’s status is the worst of all. Not since 1952, when his father sold off the family flock and settled in Kuwait, has the government offered his tribe any form of citizenship, the young man said. As a result, he said, he has no identity papers.

“If the police catch me, they will put me in Tahra, and my life will be finished.”

Tahra, he and the others explained, is the name of the Kuwait city district that contains an abandoned school compound that now serves as a warehouse for stateless bidoun. There, they said, people are kept in cell-like rooms until they “volunteer” to migrate to Iraq.

Asked about his sympathies for Iraq, Madallah cringed.

“I hate them,” he said. “They are very, very brutal. We love the royal family here. We love the emir, Sheik Jabbar. It’s not the Sabah (family) who don’t want us. It’s the people under them.

“I was born in Kuwait,” he said. “So maybe I will die in Kuwait--better, I think, than living in Iraq.”

Fineman, chief of the Times’ bureau in Nicosia, Cyprus, was recently on assignment in Kuwait.