The Unforgiven

On the night of the failed counter-coup, 23-year-old Jaber Al-Kahla was ordered to report for duty as normal as a member of the elite Emiri Guard, the unit tasked with protecting Sheikh Hamad. The coup was foiled, but a few days later Al-Kahla was called before a superior officer.

“He asked me: ‘Are you member of the Al-Ghufran tribe?’ and I said yes. He listed some names of other men in my unit, who were my relatives, and asked if they also belonged to the tribe. I told him yes.

“He then said that we were suspended from work until further notice.”

It was the start of a nightmare for Al-Kahla and many of his compatriots that continues until today.

Al-Kahla’s suspension lasted for about eight months, which he spent at his home in Doha on full pay. At one point he was called back to base and interrogated about his whereabouts on the night of the failed coup. “I told them that I was in the headquarters of my unit, and that my colleagues could corroborate this.” He was held in detention for several days.

Eventually, his suspension was ended, but his ordeal was far from over. “Afterwards, I applied for leave for six days because I wanted to attend the marriage of one of my relatives in Saudi Arabia,” he says.

Leave was granted, and Al-Kahla duly traveled by car to the Kingdom’s Eastern Province with his wife and two children. But when they tried to return to Qatar through the border crossing at Abu Samra at the end of the family’s week away, “I was told that my citizenship was withdrawn and that I was not allowed to return to my homeland.”

Al-Kahla was just 23. He was forced to abandon his home in Doha and ever since has lived in Al-Mane’ya in Saudi Arabia, where he is unemployed.

“My vacation extended to 23 years,” he says. “Now I am 46 and I have 12 children, all of whom are deprived of their country.”

After all this time, he remains deeply wounded by the slur on his loyalty. “I was just a military man doing his job, defending my ruler. If I went back in time, I would do the same thing — defend the ruler of my country,” he says.

Three months before the abortive coup, Saleh Jaber Al-Humran, another member of the Al-Ghufran tribe and a fellow Emiri guardsman, went absent from work for a month. On his return he was placed in detention and “on the day I got out, the so-called coup took place and I was accused of taking part in it.” He had left the base to visit his mother in her house in Doha. 

“A friend told me after the coup that an arrest warrant had been issued against me,” he recalls. “I called a friend at the airport who confirmed that my name was indeed listed, so I decided to travel to Kuwait until things calmed down.” He drove to Kuwait and “since then I have been banned from returning to my country.”

Al-Humran and his family stayed in Kuwait for several months before moving to Abqaiq in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, where they remain. He is unemployed.

At one point during his exile his mother, who still lived in Doha, fell ill and he tried to visit her. He flew in from Kuwait to Doha’s Hamad International Airport with his children. “But I was detained and barred from entering,” he says.

Despite Al-Humran explaining that he had a serious heart condition, “the airport authorities interrogated me for seven hours.” They sent him back to Kuwait where his condition deteriorated. He then flew to Saudi Arabia, where he underwent heart surgery at Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz Hospital in Al-Ahsa.

“It saddens me that my homeland denied my right and refused to carry out my operation close to my mother and my brothers, especially since my mother is old and cannot travel. I was not able to see her in person for four years.” The family members who remained behind in Qatar would not have been able to re-enter the country again if they had left for Saudi Arabia.

When one of his brothers died, “the others were prevented from burying his body because there was no citizenship or any document proving his identity. His body stayed in the hospital for a day until a Qatari intervened to obtain a burial permit.” Al-Humran says he cannot mention the man’s name for fear that his act of kindness will be punished by the Qatari authorities.

Another member of the Al-Ghufran tribe who was stripped of his citizenship was Rashed Al-Amrah, a Qatari police officer. Now aged over 60, he vividly remembers the confusion in the days leading up to and immediately after the attempted counter-coup.

Many Qataris, he says, were still coming to terms with the overthrow just eight months earlier of Sheikh Khalifa bin Hamad Al-Thani, who had ruled Qatar since 1972.

“Some of us did not believe what happened, especially that the son perpetrated the coup against father,” he says. “The father has great stature in the Islamic religion and specifically in Gulf communities.”

According to a contemporary report in The New York Times, the coup was the conclusion of “a long-simmering family dispute” that had seen father and son “feuding for more than two years.” Reuters reported that the coup “followed several weeks of a power struggle in which Sheikh Khalifa ... apparently tried to claw back powers he had passed on to his 45-year-old eldest son, who had been running the day-to-day affairs of the small Gulf oil state for the past three years.”

In a brief televised address reported in newspapers around the world, Sheikh Hamad, the new emir, said: “I am not happy with what has happened, but it had to be done and I had to do it.”

His father, who had been overthrown in his absence while visiting Geneva, had publicly condemned what he called the “abnormal behavior of an ignorant man.”

On June 28, 1995, the UK’s Independent reported that “senior members of the ruling Al-Thani family, which numbers some 1,500 men, gathered in the capital, Doha, to pledge allegiance.” Nevertheless, recalls Al-Amrah, “there was hearsay and statements made by Sheikh Khalifa that he would return to Qatar and reinstall himself as emir.”

In a statement issued in Geneva, Sheikh Khalifa had said: “I am still their legitimate emir, whether it is for the royal family, for the people or for the army, and I will return home whatever it costs.”

“People were confused,” says Al-Amrah. “Should they support Sheikh Hamad or stand with their former legitimate ruler? Many Qataris protested against the coup, asserting that Sheikh Khalifa was the rightful ruler of Qatar.”

In February 1996 word spread that Sheikh Khalifa was planning to return to Qatar and had asked a number of his close relatives and supporters to meet him at Doha’s military airport. “Everyone,” says Al-Amrah, “was ready for the return of the legitimate ruler,” but he never came.

In the event the plan was discovered and foiled, and Sheikh Khalifa’s aircraft was prevented from taking off in France by the French authorities — some believe at the direct request of Sheikh Hamad. Sheikh Khalifa, who initially was offered and accepted sanctuary in Abu Dhabi, eventually moved to France. In 2004, he was allowed to return to live out his days in Qatar, where he died in 2016. His former subjects, however, were shown no such compassion.

Although he had played no part in the plot, Al-Amrah, who had traveled to Saudi Arabia for the Eid holidays and to visit relatives, found himself in difficulty. “The Qatari authorities began to investigate and search for those who were supporting Sheikh Khalifa,” he says. Suspicion fell on the members of several tribes, including the Al-Kaabi, Al-Suwaidi, Bani Hajjar, Al-Abdullah, Al-Mouhannadi, Al-Kuwari, even the Al-Thani — and the Al-Ghufran.

Many members of the Al-Ghufran who were in the security or armed forces were arrested and imprisoned, as were members of other tribes. More than a dozen people would be sentenced to death for their part in the coup, although all would eventually be pardoned or have their sentences commuted.

“After Eid, we knew that there were orders to arrest and imprison all members of the Al-Ghufran clan attempting to return to Qatar,” Al-Amrah recalls. “I was afraid for myself and my family, so I decided not to return until things were cleared up. We also knew that any Qatari outside Qatar who could not return to his country for fear of what would happen could go to Sheikh Khalifa in Abu Dhabi where he would be welcomed.”

The deposed emir had been offered sanctuary in Abu Dhabi by Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al-Nahyan, then president of the UAE. “I headed to Abu Dhabi, where we were housed at the InterContinental Hotel and received a salary from Sheikh Khalifa,” says Al-Amrah. “I stayed in Abu Dhabi for four years.” After that he moved to the Saudi capital Riyadh.

Life for the members of the tribe who remained behind in Qatar became intolerable, as Rashed’s son, Jaber Al-Amrah, recalls.

“The Qatari Emiri Diwan issued a letter to all government departments in Qatar preventing them from dealing with Al-Ghufran tribe members. They were prevented from obtaining water and electricity subscription. They also banned charities from giving them aid, and the Ministry of Health was prevented from receiving any patient from the Al-Ghufran tribe.”

Tragedies as a result of this policy were inevitable. “The brother of one of the suspects in the so-called coup fell sick and had a seizure,” says Jaber Al-Amrah. “When he went to the hospital, they refused to receive him, and he stayed the whole day in the back of a pick-up truck until he died.”

After waiting for days outside the morgue, his family were able to bury him thanks only to a humanitarian intervention by a member of the ruling Al-Thani tribe.

Jaber Al-Amrah, who was born in Qatar, was 11 years old when the counter-coup was foiled. “I didn’t know what was happening,” he recalls. After traveling with his family to Saudi Arabia during the Eid holidays, he went into exile in Abu Dhabi with his father.

“I could not go back to my home, my school and my friends in Qatar. I moved to a second country where I lived for six years and then left the Emirates and headed to Saudi Arabia.”

He still has the Qatari birth certificate proving that he was born in the maternity hospital in Doha, “and my name was added to my mother’s Qatari passport as a Qatari citizen. But after my father left Qatar, the citizenship of my mother, father and all my brothers and sisters was withdrawn.”

By necessity, Jaber Al-Amrah has forged a new life for himself. For four years he and his brothers continued their schooling in Abu Dhabi before returning to live with their relatives in Saudi Arabia, where they remain to this day. Now 33 and married with three children, he has a government job in Riyadh. Thanks to the intervention of the future King Salman, who was the governor of Riyadh at that time, Jaber Al-Amrah and his family were granted Saudi citizenship.

He will always be grateful for that, but he cannot forgive the loss of his birthright as a Qatari citizen. “I am not responsible for what happened in 1996. I did not even know who was the emir or the crown prince, or the meaning of a coup. I was a child when my citizenship was revoked and my rights violated, and I was stopped from continuing my studies and my normal life.”

All this, he believes, was as a result of the whim of one man. “The ruler of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa, decided that I should live homeless, stateless and without rights,” he says.

Many of the unforgiven members of the Al-Ghufran tribe blame only Sheikh Hamad for the injustice that befell them. “You cannot blame all Al-Thani family members for a mistake that Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani committed,” says Jaber Al-Kahla. “They always treated their people in the best of ways.

“Our conflict is with an unjust ruler who violated the rights of the Al-Ghufran tribe, which then had 6,000 members. Now this number is much higher. By revoking their citizenship, they were deprived of their most basic right.

“If you are a member of the Al-Ghufran tribe, you cannot even get a SIM card for a mobile phone because you do not have citizenship and you cannot even object this — you have no recourse to the law to protect your rights.”

In September 2018, a delegation of the Al-Ghufran took their case to the 39th session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, appealing for help from the special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples at the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). At the time, they said they had decided to appeal to the international community “only after the government of our own country closed all ways of appeal, and did not engage or listen to our demands.”

In Geneva, one member of the delegation, Gaber Saleh Al-Ghufrani, made an emotional appeal to Qatar’s leadership and his fellow countrymen. “We call on the elders of the honorable Al-Thani family and to the generous and righteous people of Qatar and to the Al Murra tribe, known for their nobility and chivalry,” he said.

“We call on you as your brothers, young and old, elders and children, men and women, inside and outside Qatar, and we appeal to your proud Arab origin because the Qatari government has let us down, made untrue claims about us and stripped us of our rights.”

At a press conference in Geneva Jabir bin Saleh Al-Ghufrani, a tribal elder, said that the Qatari government had “taken away our social, political and economic rights ... I left on a vacation in 1996, and now I can never go back to my country. I can go to any place on this earth, but not my home, not Qatar.”

A spokesperson for OHCHR told Arab News that after meeting with representatives of the Al-Ghufran, its staff had subsequently “raised their concerns to the National Human Rights Committee in Qatar.”

It was an unexpected response by the OHCHR that will have dismayed many members of the Al-Ghufran, who in their petition to the High Commissioner made plain their concern that Qatar’s National Human Rights Committee was little more than another instrument of the state aligned against them.

In their petition the tribe’s representatives had written that “the Qatari authorities, ranging from the Emir of Qatar, the Prime Minister, the Attorney General, the President of the National Committee for Human Rights, senior security officials and dignitaries, are aware of the discrimination … and those senior officials are deeply involved in this crime.”

They added: “We hope that your intervention will result in achieving human justice on the ground through your objective and impartial treatment of this suffering, and not to only depend on the National Human Rights Committee of Qatar which has unfortunately became an obstacle in our struggle for justice.”

The OHCHR told Arab News it had received a response from the committee but could not share it because “this information is confidential.”

It wasn’t the first time the plight of the Al-Ghufran had been brought before the UN. In a report to the UN’s Human Rights Council in 2010, Amnesty International noted that of 20 people under sentence of death in Qatar, 17 had been convicted of involvement in the 1996 attempted coup “following unfair trials.” They had originally been sentenced to life imprisonment, but their sentences had been increased to the death penalty by Qatar’s Court of Appeal in May 2001.

At the time of the original trial, Amnesty International’s report noted, “many of them claimed that ‘confessions’ had been extracted under torture.”

A report to the UN by the Swiss-based human-rights organization Alkarama, also submitted to the Human Rights Council as part of its periodic review of rights in Qatar, said that between 1996 and 2000 dozens were arrested as part of the investigation into the failed coup. Other sources say that more than 300 suspects from more than 17 Qatari tribes were arrested. In 1997, 121 people, including 21 members of the Al-Ghufran, went on trial. The trials ended in 2001, and the systematic withdrawal of Al-Ghufran nationality began in earnest in 2004.

According to the summary of submissions published by the Human Rights Council in 2010, “a code governing nationality was promulgated in 2005 (Law No. 38 of 2005)” — ironically, the same year a department for human rights was established within the Ministry of Interior — under which “the emir is given sweeping powers to grant, revoke or reinstate Qatari nationality.”

Amnesty International reported that the law had been used “against a number of individuals and tribes to target political opponents,” including “as many as 6,000 members of the Al-Ghufran branch of the Al-Murra tribe ... on the ground, believed to be spurious, that they were nationals of other countries.”

About 4,000 were believed to have had their Qatari nationality subsequently reinstated, but “in the majority of cases, their birthplace had been altered to state that they were born in a neighboring country and therefore did not have the right to vote in elections in Qatar.”

In 2010, Saudi King Abdullah intervened with Qatar on behalf of 21 members of the Al-Ghufran tribe who had been sentenced to life imprisonment. He succeeded in having them freed and flown to new lives in Saudi Arabia.

According to former Qatari police officer Rashed Al-Amrah, who along with thousands of other Al-Ghufran was stripped of his citizenship, a delegation from the tribe had taken their case to the king. “They told him that the detainees had done nothing but have dual nationality, and Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani had accused them of trying to kill him when Sheikh Khalifa tried to return to Qatar.”

There was, they told the king, no evidence to substantiate the accusations against them.  The delegation reminded the king that they had first tried appealing to him a year earlier, but without success. “King Abdullah told them that Sheikh Hamad had lied to him,” says Al-Amrah. “He said, ‘He lied to me two times, but hopefully you will hear good news soon.’”

One month later, King Abdullah sent his son, Prince Mutaib, to Qatar. “He asked him to tell Sheikh Hamad that ‘King Abdullah sends his greetings and asks you to release the Al-Ghufran tribe.’ The answer was positive.”

Later, the released men recalled how they were told to collect their belongings and, still wearing their prison clothing, were taken to the airport. “They saw the Saudi plane and Prince Mutaib standing at its door,” says Al-Amrah. “He received them and welcomed them one by one. The plane landed in Jeddah, and in the evening they met with King Abdullah and their suffering ended, thanks to King Abdullah’s confidence in their innocence.”

An end in sight?

Many hope that 2019 is the year that will bring an end to the suffering of the Al-Ghufran.

Over the years the clan has won the support of groups including the Arab Federation for Human Rights, the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, the Manama Center for Human Rights, the US-based World Aid Organization for Human Rights and Amnesty International, and in May New York-based Human Rights Watch took up their case.

Stateless members of the clan, reported the NGO, “are deprived of their rights to decent work, access to health care, education, marriage and starting a family, owning property and freedom of movement.

“Without valid identity documents, they face restrictions on opening bank accounts and acquiring drivers’ licenses and are at risk of arbitrary detention. Those living in Qatar are also denied a range of government benefits afforded to Qatari citizens, including state jobs, food and energy subsidies, and free health care.”

After interviewing nine members of three stateless families of the clan living in Qatar and one person from a fourth family who lives in Saudi Arabia, the NGO called on the Qatari government to “immediately end the suffering of those left stateless and give them and those who have since acquired other nationalities a clear path toward regaining their Qatari citizenship.”

Human Rights Watch wrote to the Qatari Ministry of Interior to raise its concerns, but received no response. (Arab News also tried to reach the ministry, and Qatar’s media office, but they did not respond to a request for comment.)

In September, the rapporteurs of the UN’s Working Group on the Universal Periodic Review of Qatar’s human rights record published their report. It recorded Qatar’s view that the revocation of the nationality of members of the Al-Ghufran “had not been a frivolous or unjust measure,” but one “carried out in accordance with the law, which prohibited dual citizenship.” 

The report, a lengthy document with observations from dozens of states, also recorded Saudi Arabia’s appeal to Qatar to “take all necessary and immediate measures to restore the nationality to the Al-Ghufran tribe and ... to return the property and money of the Al-Ghufran tribe, which have been confiscated.”

Many of the displaced and dispossessed Al-Ghufran are now pinning their hopes for a resolution to their 23-year ordeal on a high-level session on statelessness being convened by the UN Refugee Council on Monday, Oct. 7. The date marks the mid-point of the UN’s “I Belong” campaign to end global statelessness by 2024. The UN says heads of state and government representatives will be asked “to highlight key achievements in addressing statelessness since the I Belong campaign was launched in November 2014 and to deliver concrete pledges to address statelessness in the remaining five years of the campaign.”

This, says Drewery Dyke, chair of the Rights Realization Center, is Qatar’s chance to do the right thing.

“It is incumbent upon the government of Qatar to make good on the commitments expressed in previous years, or certainly hinted at, in respect to the I Belong campaign, and undertake a renationalization program for all those Al-Ghufran clan members who wish to return to their country.”

At the 2011 UN Ministerial Intergovernmental Event on Refugees and Stateless Persons, more than 60 states made concrete pledges to address the issue of statelessness. Qatar, however, limited itself to a statement that conspicuously skirted the central issue:  “We renew the state of Qatar’s commitment to the noble humanitarian principles of the UNHCR and its pledge to continue providing necessary support to UNHCR’s different activities to ensure a dignified life for all.”

In Geneva on Oct. 7, “all eyes will be on the government of Qatar,” says Dyke.

“The Rights Realization Center, the Institute of Statelessness and Inclusion and other human rights groups, and not least the members of the Al-Ghufran community themselves, are calling on Qatar to allow back into the country and to renationalize all those people who were arbitrarily denationalized unfairly, in violation of international human rights standards, and for them to be (restituted in) recognition of what they have been through.”