The Nationality That Opened No Doors
In 2008 the Comoros passed a law allowing it to sell citizenship, and Gulf states bought it in bulk for stateless residents they did not want to naturalise themselves. On 21 November 2022 a former Comorian president was sentenced to life imprisonment for what happened to the money.
The scheme had a legal basis, a foreign government on the other side of it, and a serving president's signature. In late 2008 the Comorian assembly passed a law on economic citizenship, allowing the state to confer nationality on foreign nationals in exchange for investment. The buyers were not the usual clientele of a passport programme. They were the Gulf states, and what they were buying was nationality for other people: the bidoon, long-term residents of Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates who had never been granted the citizenship of the country they lived in and who therefore had no documents at all.
A stateless person cannot be issued a passport, cannot easily be registered, and cannot be deported anywhere, because no state is obliged to receive them. Give them the nationality of a small island republic three thousand kilometres away and all three problems become administrative. The Comoros, for its part, was being offered a sum of money that a country with a national income of a bit over a billion dollars does not turn down twice. Neither side ever had to argue that the arrangement made anyone Comorian.
What the buyers were solving
The bidoon — from bidoon jinsiya, "without nationality" — are the residue of how the Gulf states drew up their citizenship registers in the decades around independence. Families who did not register, or could not prove residence, or were nomadic across borders that had only just been fixed, ended up outside. Their descendants inherited the exclusion. In Kuwait they number in the tens of thousands at least; in the Emirates the figure has never been published. They are educated in parallel systems, restricted in work, and periodically told that the answer to their situation is to accept a foreign nationality first and apply for a local one afterwards. The Comorian passport was that foreign nationality, delivered in bulk, and it did not come with a right the holders actually wanted: the Comoros never expected them to arrive, and most of them have never been there.
What the inquiry found
A commission of the Comorian assembly reported on the programme in 2018. Its findings were that documents had been issued on a scale nobody in Moroni could fully account for — tens of thousands of them — that the state's own records of who had received what were incomplete, and that of the money the scheme was supposed to have generated, put in the order of a hundred million US dollars, only a fraction could be traced into public accounts. The intermediary at the centre of it was Comoro Gulf Holding, a company associated with the Franco-Syrian businessman Bashar Kiwan, which had arrived in the islands earlier in the decade with plans for hotels, a bank and a newspaper. Very little of that was built.
A country with no armed force worth the name, no functioning land registry and a treasury the size of a mid-sized European town's was handed one of the few assets it could sell twice. The remarkable thing is not that the money went missing. It is that the assembly went looking for it.
A president in the dock
Ahmed Abdallah Mohamed Sambi was president from 2006 to 2011, and the economic citizenship law is his. He was placed under house arrest in 2018 as the inquiry progressed and tried before the State Security Court in Moroni. On 21 November 2022 the court convicted him of high treason and sentenced him to life imprisonment; Kiwan and a former vice-president were tried in their absence and also convicted. Sambi's supporters call the trial political, and the objection is not empty. He had been the principal opponent of the sitting president, Azali Assoumani, and the constitutional revision approved by referendum in 2018 reset the presidency that rotated between the three islands — the settlement written into the 2001 constitution to end Anjouan's attempted secession. Resetting the cycle let the incumbent stand again and skipped Anjouan's turn, which was Sambi's own route back to office. In a country that has had something close to twenty coups and attempted coups since independence on 6 July 1975, the first of them four weeks in, nobody reads a trial of a former head of state as purely a matter of accounting. Both things can be true. A prosecution can be selective and the underlying facts can still be what a parliamentary commission said they were.
The seventy kilometres that matter more
The passports sold to the Gulf are not, in the end, the most consequential document question in these islands. That is Mayotte. In the December 1974 independence referendum the results were counted island by island: three islands voted overwhelmingly to leave France and Mayotte voted to stay. The Comoros declared independence over all four anyway, the United Nations General Assembly has affirmed Comorian sovereignty over Mayotte since 1976, and France has held it regardless — it became a full French department in 2011. Until 1995 Comorians moved between Anjouan and Mayotte as freely as between any two islands of the same archipelago. The visa requirement introduced that year ended it, and the crossing became a night run in an open fibreglass boat. The stretch of water between the two islands is the deadliest border in the Indian Ocean, and a French Senate report described it in terms that no one has since improved on: a marine graveyard.
What a passport is worth
The two stories are the same story told from opposite ends. In one, a state that cannot give its own citizens the right to cross seventy kilometres of water sells its nationality to people who have no use for the islands and will never see them. In the other, that nationality is the only thing the state owns that a rich country wants to buy. Comorian nationality was not sold because it was valuable. It was sold because it was cheap to produce and because the buyer's problem was not access — it was paperwork. The exports the islands live on are ylang-ylang, cloves and vanilla, and the largest single flow of money into the country is remittances sent home by the diaspora in France, which is worth more than everything the islands sell abroad. In that light, selling documents was not an aberration in the national economy. It was a variation on its main theme: the most valuable thing the Comoros produces is people with somewhere else to be.