ChChapter 2: Origins and influences of nationality law Perhaps the greatest culprit when it comes to the origins of nationality problems in the MENA region have been policies informed by a philosophy of Arabisation which was embraced by several MENA governments, at one time or another, during the second half of the twentieth century. Under such policies, the identity of the states in question was (re) asserted as that of an Arab nation and those who did not fit within the authorities’ concept of Arabness became the object of increased and increasingly institutionalised discrimination and marginalisation. In certain extreme cases, nationality policy was used as a mechanism to target non-Arab groups and exclude them – politically, legally and sometimes physically – from the state. Such policies were seen in Syria, Iraq, Mauritania and Libya. In Syria, it was the country’s minority Kurdish community whose presence contrasted with the purported Arabness of the state and whose ethnic and cultural identity was subject to a range of suppressive measures. In 1962, an arbitrarily conceived and conducted one-day population census in a region predominantly inhabited by Kurds resulted in the exclusion of a vast number of this community from Syrian nationality. Through this measure, statelessness came into existence in the country – those who became “Ajanib” (foreigners) or “Maktoumeen” (unregistered) through the census enjoying neither 63