DO THEY KNOW IT'S TIME TO CELEBRATE?

Photo: AFP

Mona Kareem is a student at Binghamton University in upstate New York where she is completing a PhD in comparative literature.

She is stateless. She has no country to call home.

Mona is one of the millions of nobodies, the citizens of nowhere, forgotten or neglected by governments and ignored by census takers. If they all belonged to one nation they would be as big as Chile or Kazakhstan.
Most are unable to work legally, travel across borders, in some cases, outside the towns where they live or use public services like healthcare, banking or even report crimes committed against them.

They live like ghosts, unnoticed on the fringes of society. Almost none can vote. "Being stateless is very humiliating... because you feel rejected," Kareem told the Newsweek in a recent interview.
In 2011, she went to the US on a student visa.

Mona, 26, and her family are bidoons–literally “without”–descendants of the nomadic Bedouin tribes which for centuries roamed freely across what is now Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Jordan and Iraq. There are perhaps more than 100,000 bidoons in Kuwait alone. They cannot prove their family's residence in Kuwait since 1920, and thus cannot become citizens under a harsh 1959 citizenship law.

Railya Abulkhanova, an ethnic Tatar, born in Kazakhstan, now living in France is another 'ghost'. Three years ago, she told a UNHCR film crew that she felt like tumbleweed. "It rolls... with the breeze it rolls away. That is what it is. That is statelessness," she said. "And me; I want to put down roots.”

Gypsies face prejudice and social exclusion in many European countries. Photo: Reuters

According to UNHCR, to be “stateless is to be without nationality or citizenship. There is no legal bond of nationality between the state and the individual.” In a 2011 interview with Time magazine, Antonio Guterres, UNHCR High Commissioner for Refugees called it the most forgotten human-rights problem in today's world. “Estimates of stateless people vary between 12 million and 15 million.” Guterres said. They are found in Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe.

They are stateless for many reasons–politics, migration, refugee flight, racial or ethnic exclusion–but mainly “exclusionary policies are at the root of many statelessness situations,” according to UNHCR.
Myanmar, for example, grants citizenship to 135 ethnic groups–but not the Rohingyas, who are Muslims with a distinctive language in a mainly Buddhist country. Around 800,000 stateless Rohingyas live within its borders and almost as many elsewhere, having fled persecution, many of them to Bangladesh where they are unwelcome.
Perhaps the largest stateless population in the world is in Thailand–about two million, mostly members of ethnic minority groups and hill tribes. Many of them were born in remote areas on the border with Myanmar. They lack documents to prove that they, or one of their parents, were born in Thailand.

In the Malaysian state of Sabah more than 30,000 children, offspring of migrants cannot attend school because they are denied birth certificates.
Russia has many stateless people; many of them forced migrants, or their descendants, who ended up in the wrong place when the Soviet Union collapsed.
An estimated 11 million Gypsies are scattered all over Europe. Some six million live in the EU, most of them EU citizens. Still, they are victims of prejudice and social exclusion.
In the US, there are thousands of people like Mona Kareem, who are trapped and nowhere to go.

There are degrees of statelessness. Palestinians who fled the war that followed Israel's creation and went to Jordan were given passports, but in other Arab states, they got “refugee travel documents”. No Arab state was ready to naturalise them, and their level of rights has varied from place to place.

There have been some success stories in recent years in Asia. In Bangladesh, in 2008, the judiciary granted citizenship to the 'Biharis' or 'stranded Pakistanis' who live in squalid encampments and still face harsh discrimination in the society. Just a year before, Nepal achieved the largest reduction of statelessness the world has seen. But the Himalayan nation still hosts about 800,000 people whose nationality is not confirmed.

The stateless have few friends. Only 60 countries so far have ratified or acceded to a 1961 UN Convention on Reducing Statelessness. Human rights groups often focus on the types of abuses they suffer-trafficking, exploitation, discrimination rather than the root of those conditions, their statelessness.

The first step toward decreasing the number of stateless people is for member nations of the UN to sign and implement the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness. Countries should also adopt national legislation to grant people the possibility of having a nationality.

States must register each birth that occurs within their borders. This not only prevents statelessness from birth, it can also help to keep a record for situations in which someone is stripped of citizenship of a country and forced to find another. “Citizenship,” according to late Earl Warren of the United States Supreme Court, “is man's most basic right, for it is nothing less than the right to have rights.”

On September17, 2014, in a keynote address, Volker Türk, Director of International Protection, UNHCR said, “There is something deeply unethical about perpetuating human suffering through statelessness, especially when solutions are within our reach.”

Many metaphors have been used to describe the stateless: 'nowhere people', 'legal ghosts', the 'invisibles' or the 'unrecognised'. In their variety, they all share the lack of a most fundamental human need–a place to call home.
After she had got a US visa to study in Binghamton University, Mona travelled to the US on a special passport issued by Kuwait's Ministry of Interior Affairs. Under nationality, it reads 'non-identified'. Her student visa will expire soon. She has applied for asylum but she does not have high hopes. She has nowhere to go.