Kuwait police break up stateless demo

Several people were wounded and dozens arrested Friday as Kuwaiti police used tear gas, water cannons and batons to disperse stateless protesters demanding citizenship, witnesses and a rights group said. Hundreds of riot police backed by armoured vehicles assaulted several hundred protesters who braved a stern interior ministry warning not to demonstrate as authorities promised to resolve their decades-old plight. Police chased the protesters into the streets of Jahra, northwest of the capital Kuwait City, and arrested many of them, including a 13-year-old boy, the independent Kuwait Association of Human Rights said on its Twitter account. A number of young protesters were seen with their heads bleeding after they were beaten with batons by riot police, witnesses said. Private Al-Watan TV channel said its photographer was wounded. Stateless people, officially known as illegal residents or bidoons, have been demonstrating over the past several weeks for their rights. Kuwait's interior ministry issued three statements this week warning them not to do so or face punishment. The Islamic Ommah Party, the leftist Progressive Movement and former MPs and election candidates blasted what they called "police repression" and called for a peaceful solution to the bidoons' problem. "The repressive treatment of bidoons proves that the previous government's approach is still continuing," former opposition MP Mussallam al-Barrak said in a statement. Earlier on Friday, Human Rights Watch called on Kuwait to scrap the decision banning stateless people from protesting. "This is a shameful effort to curb the rights to peaceful expression and assembly of Kuwait?s bidoons," Sarah Leah Whitson, Human Rights Watch's Middle East director, said in a statement. Kuwait has long alleged that bidoons, and in some cases their ancestors, destroyed their original passports to claim the right to Kuwaiti citizenship in order to gain access to the services and generous benefits provided to citizens by the state. In a bid to force the bidoons to produce their original nationality papers, Kuwait has refused to issue essential documents to most of them, including birth, marriage and death certificates, according to a June report by the New York-based rights group. Fifty-two bidoons are on trial for protesting while 32 others are under investigation. More than 105,000 stateless people have been living in Kuwait for decades but were denied citizenship. The government says only 34,000 of them qualify for citizenship.