Migrants and refugees

Update 1: see a story at this time that took me 20 yrs  to tell, Model United Nations 2004 Bahrain.

Update 2: see a later follow-on post here.

Update 3: ref. 2026 current affairs, see here “the doctrine of velayat‑e faqih (“guardianship of the jurist”) that structures Iran’s political system, then compares it with two other religion‑state models—Saudi Arabia’s Islamic monarchy and the Vatican’s papal theocracy—and with Jewish tradition, which develops a rich legal‑religious system (halakha) but does not instantiate a modern, centralized theocratic state. The aim is to clarify how different traditions conceive the relationship between religious authority and political sovereignty, especially as Iran faces a succession crisis around its new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei”.

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Picking up where the previous post left of, on a possible origin of migrant worker patterns, let's rewind a few years to Bahrain a decade prior. While I had been to the Middle East in Oman five years prior, the ten days I spent in Bahrain made me fall in love with the region. Previous business visits where we were fêted and in group sessions, contrasted with attending a week-long industry show, solo, bracketed by two weekends. Our local fixer visited me and took me on a business daytrip to Qatar, but that was it. He appeared fidgety and uneasy, I was to learn why...

No sooner had the Second Intifada started in Israel, that the Shaikh of Bahrain launched telethon - you know, radio & TV rather than internet never mind social media - and raised enough cash that by the time I left Bahrain, a convoy of food & medicine trucks was already heading toward Palestine. This was a skillful move prefacing a National Charter and new Constitution over the next couple of years, ushering in a era of democratization under then newly installed Shaikh (deets at bottom).

As a side note, I arrived a day earlier to help acclimate... and my hotel was across the street from a Heritage Park where Bahrain's National Day was celenrated. That evening I wnet down to stroll among numerous exhibits and reconstructions of buildings and trades from te many nationalities - the Gulf countries were trading nations between Asia and Europe since the Middle Ages - and on thing struck me: I saw pitch-black faces with aquiline features and light brown negroid faces; I was accustomed to the reverse and thus was awestruck... goes to show how far your preconceived notions go when you travel, not!

Fast forward back to Kuwait a decade ago, I had two worlds: on one hand expats mostly European and Canadian who lived south of Kuwait City in Expat Alley (Mangaf map) in between Kuwait Oil Co.'s Al Ahmadi and Chevron's Wafra - contrasting with Shuwaikh Port and its then nascent free trade zone - on the other Middle-easterners from Egypt, Jordan, Palestine & Syria who lived scattered across Kuwait City mostly to the west - I myself lived near a Palestinian area I was told - Kuwaiti nationals were a very small minority mostly management roles. 

There was a third hidden group, however, stateless Kuwaitis or Beduns (not Bedouin princes of the desert), who happened to be there in the early 1900s when Sykes and Picot divided up the Middle-east into English and French colonial zones: As Beduns didn't move in they neither crossed borders nor were granted citizenship, and could only leave the country for medical aid, Haj or studies, neither of which they could afford... 

 

Jihadist Black Standard

The riots the anti-Israeli sentiment engendered was something else, with muezzin clearly whipping up the crowd judging by the tone!  That's when I first saw the Black Standard with inscriptions on it - the driver explained the difference between majority Shia and ruling Sunni, and the slaying of brothers from the former by members of the latter before Mohamed, all a catalyst or funnel stoking the anger around violence on the left bank of the Jordan and in the Gaza strip. It was only two decades later, however, that I was to learn the significance of those black flags: was it the seminal  roots of Daesh / ISIS or was that anger dormant and ready to be lit up?

Feast! Varieties of nationalities and foods...

Until the internet era broke the cycle: on-line degrees were affordable, mostly in comp. sci. that offered immediate jobs, and initially via English unis. like Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester - sure there were English schools and American universities locally, but those were expensive and reserved for Middle-easterners or expats, if they didn't study abroad - not only did I thus meet a few Beduns at work, but they and other Middle-easterners were thrilled when they heard my parents were Hungarian refugees and I had no citizenship for thirteen years (here & here). My hosts explained how the luck of the draw in geography not only split families who happened to be originally on, say, the Jordanian or the Palestinian side of the border, but also determined their need for or chances in migrating as workers across the Middle-east if they happened to originate, say, on the Syrian or the Lebanese war-torn sides!

They also considered themselves lucky not to have lost faith in their region, and thus avoided the long road west toward Europe and beyond, which we hear about so much nowadays. They didn't consider themselves weak or homebound, they just didn't have it bad enough to have to go that far - I think the unspoken subtext was that they were economic migrants not political refugees, meaning they weren't persecuted for their politics or their religion - politics were most definitely off-topic, and I respected that as a guest of both them and Kuwaiti nationals. Another divide they mentioned was distance: those in  Iraq and Iran looked more often west beyond Turkey, whereas those in Syria, Egypt and Jordan looked more toward the Gulf countries. This is a very complex issue and we just scratched the surface, but it was for me a refreshing view from the East rather than the West, or the feeder rather than the receiver, and north-south as much as east-west... 

My favorite joke from a Palestinian colleague that sums it all up: "If you think you had it bad, then look over your shoulder and you'll surely find someone who had it worse".

This topic was brought up by an event organized by Cambridge Quakers and Cambridge Refugee Resettlement Campaign. We'll pick this up in the next post: Language and mores. A great source is also Al Jazeera English.

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Copilot: Bahrain is officially a kingdom. It became the Kingdom of Bahrain in 2002 when the then-Emir, Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, declared it a kingdom and assumed the title of king [1] [2]. The country operates as a constitutional monarchy with a king as the head of state [3].