Behold the Faces of Statelessness

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Originally from northern India, Roma are the most widespread stateless nation on the planet. Frequently referred to as "gypsies," they face unjustified stereotypes, systematic discrimination, and marginalization in every country in which they attempt to settle. In the U.S., police departments across the country have access to files containing information on all known Roma within their jurisdictions, receive training on how to identify Roma, and frequently accuse innocent Roma of crimes based solely on their ethnicity. In Europe, Roma families are often driven out of their homes and communities by acts of violence including battery and arson. Worldwide, Roma are at the mercy of inhumane state and non-state actors with no way to protect themselves and no path to justice.

For more than a century, Kurds have struggled to build a sovereign state to no avail. As the largest stateless nation in the world, Kurdish populations are found primarily in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Though widely subjected to discrimination and marginalization, Kurds were reluctantly tolerated by their host countries until 1962, when Syria revoked the citizenship of 120,000 Kurdish residents who had legally settled in the country but could not prove that their arrival in Syria preceded 1945. This move to alienate and eradicate Kurds was followed by a long line of atrocities throughout the region, including the genocide of up to 180,000 Kurds by Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in 1988 and, more recently, horrific war crimes against Kurds in Syria by Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

As a distinct minority group, the Rohingya contended with ethnic and religious persecution at the hands of Myanmar's government for many years and were ultimately barred from citizenship in 1982. With the onset of a vicious military crackdown in 2017, more than 700,000 Rohingya were forced to flee across the border to Bangladesh, creating the world's largest refugee camp. While other Rohingya escaped to India, Thailand, and Malaysia, the population of the refugee camp has since risen to over 1,000,000. With no country to call home, these survivors of Myanmar's ethnic cleansing campaign are relegated to living in makeshift shelters amidst life-threatening monsoons and face a never-ending battle with diseases brought about by malnutrition and poor sanitation. 

While Palestine has been rife with conflict since ancient times, current tensions can be traced back to Britain's 30-year occupation of the land previously ruled by the Ottoman Empire and the United Nations' 1947 plan to partition what was then known as Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states. In 1948, Israel's declaration of statehood was met with a declaration of war by five Arab states. That conflict combined with the 1967 Six-Day War resulted in Israel's control of all the land in question. Although the 1993 Oslo Accord paved the way for the creation of a Palestinian government in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, the 1995 Accord failed to achieve a peace agreement. Ongoing tensions have since escalated to full-fledged war and utter destruction of the Palestinian homeland.

Originally from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, over half a million Uyghers are stateless as a result of the Chinese government's increasingly repressive policies targeting the group's ethnic and religious identity. Faced with the post-Cold War independence of several Soviet republics, China feared that Uyghers would also attempt to secede. In response, the government enacted measures to surveille and securitize the population. Later, the post-9/11 war on terror, coupled with increasingly violent protests by Uyghers, provided the justification China had been seeking to detain the group en masse and strip individuals of their basic human rights. Within China's infamous internment camps, Uyghers are now subjected to daily indoctrination tactics as well as emotional and physical torture.

In 2013, over 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian Descent were rendered stateless when a decision by the Constitutional Tribunal revoked birthright citizenship in the Dominican Republic. Moreover, by applying the decision retroactively to 1929, the tribunal created a system of transgenerational statelessness. While international pressure compelled the government to enact a 2014 law to correct the problem, bureaucracy and unrealistic requirements prevented the law from having any effect. Ten years later, rather than mitigating the suffering of the stateless within its borders, the Dominican Republic is detaining people of Haitian descent in record numbers then transporting detainees across the border into Haiti with no resources and no protection from gangs who control the country..

Displaced from their native homeland two centuries ago, the Hmong are dispersed across Southeast Asia. During the Vietnam War, Hmong men who had settled in Laos were recruited by the U.S. to disrupt the flow of supplies to Viet Cong via the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In 1975, two years after the withdrawal of American troops from South Vietnam, Laos fell to a communist regime that was well aware of the group's former collaboration with the U.S. Fearful for their lives, many Hmong fled to Thailand, overwhelming U.N. refugee camps. Tragically, those who remained in Laos.were subjected to various forms of persecution for decades, including internment in "reeducation camps." While the mass detention of Hmong has ceased, they continue to experience harassment and marginalization.

In addition to approximately two million ethnic Bengalis in Karachi who have been systematically relegated to statelessness despite their eligibility for citizenship under Pakistani law, another two million primarily-Muslim Bengalis in primarily-Hindu India have been stripped of the rights and protections of citizenship by their own country. Under the guise of identifying undocumented Bengali immigrants from Bangladesh within the state of Assam, the government issued an updated National Register of Citizens in 2019 that excluded all Bengalis living in that state. However, not only Bengalis were impacted by the NRC. In fact, thousands of impoverished Assamese women were rendered stateless and sent to detention centers because they could not provide evidence of patrilineal legacy.

The legacy of Western imperialism is hard to escape in the Global South, where the wounds of colonization and U.N. mandates fester to this day. Countries that did not even exist prior to European occupation now find themselves ravaged by civil wars. For example, Cameroon came into being as a result of German colonization, which was replaced by British and French occupation following WWI. While the Francophone region was granted sovereignty in 1960, the smaller Anglophone region was relegated to joining French Cameroon. In 2017, following decades of political persecution, an Anglophone revolt was met with a violent crackdown by the Francophone government resulting in the razing of over 500 Anglophone villages and the displacement of more than a million innocent people.

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, more than 10 million men, women and children representing over 1,000 ethnically distinct groups have no country to call home and no system of laws to protect them. If you belong to a stateless group that is not listed on this page, please email a description and photo to info@statelessnations.org so we can spread awareness of your plight and give your people the recognition they deserve. Then, consider becoming a member of The League of Stateless Nations so we can seek justice together!