May 03, 2008	Saturday	Rabi-us-Sani 26, 1429

KARACHI, May 2: A large number of people seeking to visit Saudi Arabia are having a hard time doing the obligatory paperwork to acquire visas because the Saudi authorities have made it mandatory that an applicant’s name must consist of three parts: first name, middle name and last name.

Travel agents told Dawn that many people had been refused visas due to what they described as an absurd condition of the Saudi authorities as a number of people in the country did not use their surnames in their documents or many even did not have one.

They said that due to the condition set by the Saudi authorities, many people were forced to spend extra money to acquire fresh computerised national identity cards (CNICs) and passports to fulfil this requirement.

This requirement, which has been made mandatory for all kinds of visas, including Umrah visas and employment visas, is also causing procedural problems to those people having multiple visas of some other countries.

“Such a condition has never been imposed by any other country. Though it has existed for many years as part of the Saudi visa requirement, it has been a month since the authorities have become very serious about the issue and are accepting no visa requests without three-part names,” said a travel agent.

Elaborating, he said, a person named Rashid Khan would not be eligible for a Saudi visa as he would not able to write anything in the third field in the applicant’s name column provided in a visa application form.

“We ask such an applicant to add either the title of his caste or his father’s name to his actual name so as to fulfil the mandatory requirement,” he said, adding that people failing to do so were denied visas.

“The problem is even more critical for people with names like Abdur Rahim or Abdur Rehman as the Saudi authorities treat such names as one word. In such cases, we advise people not to apply for the visa at all. They would have to change their identity cards first before applying for a new passport.”

For instance, he said, if a person’s name was only Nawaz in his passport and his father’s name was Shahid, he would have to make a new identity card with a surname or a last name added to it.

An employee at the passport office, who wished not to be named, said that at least forty per cent of applicants visiting the Awami Markaz passport office comprised people who wanted to make some addition to their names for a Saudi visa, but since no change could be made in the machine readable passports, they had to spend extra amount to get a fresh passport.

The Deputy Director of Immigration and Passport, Southern Directorate, Saddar, Khalid Memon, said: “Though the Saudi consulate didn’t give us any direct instructions in this regard, we have taken up the matter with the federal immigration authorities and are hoping that the issue will be resolved in a few days since the population of the entire country is affected. After this development, we have started advising people to wait for the withdrawal of the condition and now few people come with requests for modifications to their passports.”

The step, he said, had been taken in view of the complications which could later on arise in the immigration database system.

“The condition in the Saudi visa form can lead to serious complications in the immigration database. Secondly, it is nearly impossible to re-issue passports to all the around two million people, around two million, who have already received their machine readable passports.”

He recalled that a few years ago the same situation had developed, but at that time manual passports were in place and it was easier to make changes to them.

“Since 2005, around 1.5 million to two million people have been issued machine readable passports and the process is continuing. About 1,500 passports are daily issued in Karachi alone,” he said.

He also said that the immigration and passport department was connected with the National Database and Registration Authority and whatever information was provided in their database was followed.

A staff member of the consulate, who did not identify himself, said that the condition of three-part names had been introduced to tackle the problem of people going missing in Saudi Arabia every year. He refused to offer more comments on the issue.