The Trek of the Al-Kuwaiti

During the 1990 Gulf Crisis, more than 4100 Bedouin families entered Jordan and about half of them walked the 1000 kilometres from Kuwait. Almost nobody knows about this migration because it was illegal. They were illegal immigrants and smugglers, having not paid the 5 dinar import fee for each of their animals. They brought 1.8 million sheep, goats, and camels into rangeland already overgrazed and fully occupied by resident tribes.
Jordan is the eye in the storm of the Middle East. It is the closest country to a democracy, the most open socially, the most peaceful, the most religiously pluralistic, and the most lawful. Too often, news about the Middle East that mentions “tribes” contains “lawless” in the same sentence. It’s true in Jordan that tribal law is strong and exists alongside government law, but that does not make it lawless. Tribal leaders in Jordan are struggling to adapt their laws and customs to the 21st century.
On August 2, 1990, when Saddam Hussein’s bombs began falling on Kuwait, Sheikh Al-Kuwaiti called his clan leaders together. (This is not his real name; I used a pseudonym for the Sheikh’s name and tribe’s name to protect their identity.) This took some time because many were scattered with their families and flocks across the arid rangelands. By the time they met, their situation was dire: tanks and troops were everywhere and their sheep and goats couldn’t graze. There was talk of other countries attacking to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait; clearly, their animals could not survive in a war zone. Without their livestock, Bedouins are nothing. Saddam had ordered all able-bodied men to join the Iraq army on pain of death. Without her husband and sons, a Bedouin wife and mother struggles because she can’t show her face in public and would have no financial support. It takes the whole family to raise and market sheep and care for the goats, donkeys, and camels. No honourable man would leave his wife, mother, or daughters to such a fate. They must go. But were?
In the first days of the war, 1.4 million people, mostly foreign workers and students, fled Kuwait for Jordan, the only safe haven. Most booked a flight to Queen Alia airport, took a ferry to Jordan’s port of Aqaba on the Red Sea, or bought a bus ticket to Amman via Iraq to the Jordanian border outpost at Ruwayshid. Other Bedouins from Kuwait and Iraq had hired trucks to drive their animals to Jordan, and tens of thousands per day arrived at Ruwayshid. But these options were not open to the Al-Kuwaiti tribe. They were “bidoon jinseya,” people without citizenship in any country, a relic of the formation of the modern Gulf States. They could not legally enter any other country. The Sheikh made a decision that saved his tribe from destruction, but at a high cost: they would walk. They were Bedu, after all: people of the desert.
Travelling at night and hiding in wadis by day, they followed the ancient migration routes to avoid capture by the Iraqi army and the Saudi border patrols. Under the August sun, the trek took about six weeks for some and longer for those who veered south through Saudi Arabia or north through Syria to avoid the Jordan-Iraq border.
Only the Al-Kuwaiti know what rigours they faced, and they rarely speak of it to outsiders because of legal issues. Jordanian veterinarians working for the Ministry of Agriculture reported that their animals were starving and carried high disease and parasites burdens. The toll on the humans can only be guessed.
In 2002, my colleagues and I began interviewing the Al-Kuwaiti and other tribes and studying the ecology as part of Jordan’s claim against Iraq for damages to 7.1 million hectares of arid rangeland and wildlife habitat caused by the overgrazing. The land was already overgrazed before they arrived, but the doubling of the livestock population in just a few months forced the starving animals to eat every living plant, even pulling up shrubs to gnaw at the roots. Wildlife, such as the goitered gazelles, a species unique to the region, virtually disappeared. The Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature (www.rscn.org.jo/) had started a captive breeding program for the Arabian oryx, which had been extirpated from the wild about 1973, and was about to begin releasing them back to the wild when the war broke out. But with such severe overgrazing, there was no suitable habitat left to release them into. The release was put on hold, and the program began winding down. When we surveyed the eastern desert in 2002 (our team included Jordani ecologists and engineers, British environmental economists and American lawyers), there were large areas with no shrubs at all, but with dead stumps of bushes proving that what was now bare desert had previously been a brushy, shrub-steppe grassland. By then, Jordan had granted citizenship to about 2000, but most of the Al-Kuwaiti were still living in tents.
Of course, this influx of livestock and people did not only affect the rangeland and the wildlife that live there. It also affected the resident Bedu, who had had to compete with the newly arrived Kuwaiti and Iraqi Bedu for grazing land. They also had to find a way to integrate them into the Bedu society, a process not easily accomplished for a tribal society with deep attachments to their lands and traditional affiliations and animosities among tribes.
In 2005, as a result of our work, the United Nations Compensation Commission awarded Jordan $161 million damages for the overgrazing. In 2006, we went back to help design the rangeland rehabilitation program and met with Sheikhs of all the desert tribes to seek their input. The damage to the Bedu, however, still persists and I believe is irrecoverable. The overgrazing was so severe that, along with other factors, the average number of sheep per family fell from about 400 to around 20, and many men were forced to leave the livestock business and seek wage employment. This tore the social fabric and disproportionately affected women, who for cultural reasons often cannot work outside the home. Before the Gulf Crisis, virtually all women were “employed” in managing the family livestock business. After it, those whose families could no longer make a living raising sheep were “unemployed” in that they had nothing to do and contributed little to the family’s livelihood. Many girls began to think about school or employment, causing tension with the traditional-minded men.
Even so, the Bedouin traditions are strong and their culture persists. Outside of the cities, about 98% of the population identify themselves as “Bedu,” and identify with one of the 40 or so Jordanian tribes. Almost all have at least a few sheep or goats, while those better off still count their wealth in camels. More than 60% are semi-nomadic, spending at least one season away from their homes in search of pasture, and 5–10% are fully nomadic, with no permanent homes. They have a deep attachment to the land and love the lifestyle. Nor are they without power. Land tenure and other issues pressured the government to apportion seats in Parliament by area. One consequence is that the tribes have strong, possibly even controlling representation. A family might have no money, but the tribe does and the Sheikh controls it. He and the clan leaders decide who can buy a new truck for the livestock, how the families will share it, which bright students will go to university, and what they will study.
Once, in 2002, to interview a clan chief in a remote part of the desert we had hired a local guide to find him and needed a good 4x4 to navigate the trackless desert. As we sat in his tent on killims (rugs of woven goat hair dyed in the beautiful patterns of his tribe), sipping tea, this man and his family appeared to be the personification of poverty. There was no furniture, no equipment that couldn't be easily loaded onto a camel, and the tent showed the wear of decades. He and his sons wore the traditional white robe and Hashemite-patterened kafiya, or man's shawl, and their dress also reflected the toil of life in the desert. His wife and daughters, of course, stayed in the private part of the tent. A hundred or so sheep and a few goats grazed outside and a lamb came into the tent, and was petted by the youngest son while we talked. Then his other son drove up in a new Lincon Escalade and got out wearing a business suit. Such are the contrasts of modern Bedouin life.
The rangeland restoration program is now underway. A new, large nature reserve is under development in the northeast, and a captive breeding program for the endangered Arabian oryx has been rejuvenated. The government is encouraging families to keep fewer sheep and goats to that the rangeland can recover, and is attempting to develop alternative sources of livelihood for them. How these tribes, clans, and families respond to the new reality will determine Jordan’s political, social, and economic future.
References
My Jordanian colleagues and I published the outline of this story in a journal article about the Arabian oryx [Harding, L.E., Omar Abu Eid, et al. (2007). "Re-introduction of the Arabian oryx (Oryx leucoryx) in Jordan: war and redemption." Oryx 41(4): 478-487].
Details of the UNCC claims and compensation awards can be found at http://www.uncc.ch/.
Information on the Bidoons of Kuwait is available at numerous Web sites including http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2001/nea/8268.htm, http://www.fco.gov.uk/en/travel-and-living-abroad/travel-advice-by-country/country-profile/middle-east-north-africa/kuwait?profile=all, http://www.unhchr.ch/tbs/doc.nsf/(Symbol)/1fae9818c5381a0a8025673e00390939?Opendocument.