Author: JJ Robinson

Commonwealth Secretary-General to visit Maldives

Commonwealth Secretary-General Kamalesh Sharma will visit Maldives from October 16-18, and will meet with the President, opposition Dhivehi Rayyithunge Party leader Ahmed Thasmeen Ali and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Ahmed Faiz Hussain.

The Secretary-General is also scheduled to meet Foreign Minister Dr Ahmed Shaheed, Health and Family Minister Dr Aminath Jameel, Minister of Human Resources, Youth and Sport Hassan Latheef, Speaker of the People’s Majlis Abdulla Shahid and the Chairperson of the Maldivian Democratic Party Mariya Ahmed Didi.

Discussions are expected to focus on capacity-building for socio-economic growth, climate change and other issues faced by small island developing states like Maldives.

“I look forward to further discussions on [the President’s] vision for Maldives and how the Commonwealth can work hand-in-hand with his administration and other stakeholders in Maldives to support national development, including the consolidation of democratic processes, institutions and culture, and in particular, the promotion of the Commonwealth’s Latimer House Principles that define the balance between the three branches of government,” Sharma said.

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MPs positive domestic violence bill will be passed

Preliminary debate today over the proposed Domestic Violence Bill has MPs optimistic it will be passed, after it is sent to a special committee to refine the particulars.

“It will most definitely be passed – there are a few things we must keep in mind but there is nothing contentious about it,” said Eva Abdulla, MP for the ruling Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP).

“We need to ensure it fits with international best practice, and ensure sufficient budget allocation for each step, as without sufficent budget things like the protective services mentioned in the bill become futile.”

Eva noted that the bill also needed to categorise different offenses, “as sweeping criminal offences do not fully protect the victims and can often discourage the reporting of offenses.”

“The draft bill is very good, however it only becomes meaningful if we can meet it with the necessary human and financial resources,” she added.

Opposition Dhivehi Rayyithunge Party (DRP) MP Rozaina Adam, who presented the bill to parliament, noted that both major parties were working together on getting the bill passed, and would likely vote to send it to a special committee tomorrow.

“Some MPs are finding it hard to accept that this is about violence against women, and are trying to twist it by saying violence also occurs against men. But most accept it,” she said.

Health authorities identify domestic violence as a major problem in the country. Rozaina noted that it was difficult to obtain figures because of a lack of reporting: “a lot of women accept it as if it’s their due.”

If passed, the bill would require monitoring of domestic violence cases and the publication of figures at the end of each year.

“Right now people don’t report it, and people are reluctant to make bring very personal family issues public,” Rozaina said. “We hope that NGOs and the health sector can become more involved, rather than people having to go to the police all the time.”

Deputy Minister for Health Mariya Ali said that the Ministry received 100 cases of reported domestic violence last year, “and so far this year we are already up to 100.  It is a significant problem, and I don’t think this reflects the true prevalence,” she said, adding that more women were likely to come forward once the Ministry had completed work on a temporary shelter, hopefully by November.

“This bill will bring positive changes to the lives of women,” she added.

The DRP announced it was drafting a bill on domestic violence in April, hoping to create more comprehensive legislation for victims and perpetrators of violence in the home.

The bill would encompasses legislation on both physical and sexual violence against women and children, as well as improve how people who report these cases are dealt with, and to give more security and assistance to anyone affected by domestic violence.

Former president Maumoon Abdul Gayoom’s daughter and leader of the DRP’s Women’s Wing, Dhunya Maumoon, first announced the drafting of the bill.

In November last year MPs signed a declaration supporting the elimination of violence against women, recognising the problem of domestic violence facing the Maldives and undertaking to bear it in mind when legislating.

The signing marked the 10th anniversary of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, a UN-led initiative to encourage countries to create and enforce laws punishing violence against women and girls, increase public awareness and strengthen collection of data on the issue.

In April 2007, a student who was the subject of a sexual assault by her teacher spoke to Minivan News about the incident and how she felt justice had betrayed her.

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Maldives democracy must prove it can guarantee liberty: European Commission report

Democracy in the Maldives is in a crucial phase and needs to prove to the people that it is able to guarantee liberty, according an independent evaluation of the European Commission’s €26.3 million (US$36.6 million) assistance package to the Maldives over the last 10 years.

“The political, administrative, and judicial system needs reforming in order to implement constitutional guarantees and requirements,” the report found.

“The passing of an important number of bills has been delayed in parliament, which is composed predominately of newcomers to politics and in which the opposition coalition has the majority – resulting in the problem of consensus having to be reached between the government and its parliamentary opposition.”

As a consequence, the country was under pressure to provide a functioning political, judicial and local governance system, the EC report noted, identifying two major areas of reform: the judicial sector (including police and prisons), “and the decentralisation reform, beginning with the local [council] elections.”

The independent evaluation was commissioned by the EC to critique its funding of programs between 1999 to 2009, which have included support for the empowerment of women, over €15 million in tsunami-related assistance, technical support for the presidential and parliamentary elections, island waste management centres and more recently, pledges off €6.5 million for climate change adaption and mitigation support, as well as €1.3 million earmarked for combating drug abuse.

The report was presented at Holiday Inn yesterday to a cross section of stakeholders including government officials, civil society, international donor organisations and the press.

Overall achievement of executives was described as “mixed”. The strategic planning of many programmes was “too ambitious given the level of available funding”, the report noted, with gaps between planning and implementation.

“The environmental support program was too ambitiously planned and had to be scaled down to solid waste management only,” the report stated. “Constructed island waste management systems are, with few exceptions, not operational, and waste management centres are unequipped.”

The failings of this project were due in part to “technical” problems, including design weaknesses and missing equipment, “and insufficient involvement of communities in general, notably the Island Women Development committees.”

“Women on the islands are quite well organised and are often the main actors in terms of environmental issues and social and economic life. Many households are managed by women, as men are often working in the tourist resorts, in the fisheries industry, or abroad,” the report observed.

“However the present local governance structures generally do not sufficiently allow women to play an effective role in the local decision-making process.”

Equipment for the island waste management systems, purchased with the project’s remaining funding, remains stored in Male’, the report noted.

Economic vulnerability

The EC had identified the Maldives’ reliance on a single export commodity as a fundamental weakness in its commodity, but plans to diversify these exports “were too ambitious an objective for EC support.”

The problem was going to exacerbate when the Maldives graduates from Less Developed Country (LDC) status in January 2011, the report noted, when it will lose preferential market access and technical and financial support from multilateral and regional sources. This will have particular impact on the country’s trade with Sri Lanka and Thailand.

“Maldives exports can be built up and diversified only if action is taken to resolve serious supply-side issues in the economy, including access to investment finance, improvement of production procedures and standards, training of the workforce, development of modern marketing principles, and improvement of transport infrastructure.”

Programmes identified as successful by the EC report included that allocated to the presidential and parliamentary elections, which produced “a positive perception of the EC as a recognised political partner in the democratisation process.”

Looking ahead, the report suggested ensuring that projects had clearer objectives and were realistically planned, and preferably managed from within the country rather than outside.

It also recommended greater strategic focus on no more than two areas of priority, “such as environment/climate change and the good governance/decentralisation sector”.

Ambassador and Head of Delegation of the European Union Delegation to Sri Lanka and the Maldives, Bernard Savage, observed that programmes run in cooperation with other donors such as the World Bank and UN Agencies had been the most successful.

“Programmes carried out under this collaboration have been reviewed as both effective and efficient in general,” he said.

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“If you want to sue Shafeeg, you’ll have to sue me,” President tells Gayoom

President Nasheed has promised that the Maldives Police Service will investigate claims made by local historian Ahmed Shafeeg in his book, that 111 Maldivian citizens were held in custody and tortured by the former administration.

The claims led former President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom to declare that he would file a court case against Shafeeg for politically-motivated slander.

Spokesman for the former president, Mohamed Hussain ‘Mundhu’ Shareef, did not respond to Minivan News at time of press. However the former president’s lawyer, Mohamed Waheed Ibrahim, was cited in newspaper Miadhu as saying that lawsuits would be filed “against anyone who writes anything untrue and unfounded against Gayoom”, and that all such cases so far had been won.

During a ceremony at the Nasandhura Palace Hotel this morning to launch Shafeeg’s book, titled “A Day in the Life of Ahmed Shafeeg”, Nasheed observed that the former President was not solely to blame for human rights violations.

“The [human rights] violations were not committed by Gayoom alone. A whole system committed them. The whole culture of the Maldives committed them,” he said.

Shafeeg, now 82, was held in solitary confinement for 83 days in 1995 together with three other writers, including Hassan Ahmed Maniku, Ali Moosa Didi and Mohamed Latheef.

Shafeeg contends that 50 of his diaries containing evidence relating to the deaths of the 111 Maldivians were confiscated during a raid by 15 armed men. He was ultimately released by Gayoom with without charge, and was told by the investigating officer to write a letter of appreciation to the then-President for the pardon.

The lawyer representing Shafeeg, Abdulla Haseen, said the family intended now intended to press five charges against the former president after the Human Rights Commission of the Maldives (HRCM) rejected the case, claiming it was outside the commission’s mandate.

The President added that he knew the events chronicled by Shafeeg very well.

“Back then, from 1989 and 1990 onward, I spent a very long time – three years in total – in jail. Of that I spent 18 months in solitary confinement, and nine of those months in the tin cell,” he said.

All Maldivian rulers had employed fear to govern, Nasheed said, and he had always believed that Gayoom had him arrested and tortured to serve as a cautionary tale as the former president and his senior officials were already aware of the intent of “a whole generation” to topple his government since the early 80s.

“So the decision to put me through every imaginable torture in the world from the very beginning as an example to all those people was made, in my view, not because of any animosity President Maumoon had towards me personally,” Nasheed said.

He added that Gayoom alone could not be blamed for all the human rights abuses that occurred under his watch.

“It was not done by him alone. It was a whole system that did it. It was Dhivehi tradition that did it. It was Dhivehi culture that did it,” he said.

The President said said he thought that Gayoom’s decision to take legal action against the 82 year-old historian, who has lasting physical and mental damage from his ordeal, “is going beyond the limits.”

“I ask President Maumoon very sincerely and respectfully, don’t do this,” Nasheed said. “Go to Shafeeg. Go and ask for his forgiveness. This is not the time to come out and say ‘I’m going to sue Shafeeg.’ If you want to sue Shafeeg now, you will have to sue me. That is because I will repeat what Shafeeg is saying fourfold.”

Nasheed urged the former President to seek forgiveness, as he believed Gayoom had the “foresight and learning” as well as “capability and talent”, and had made “many contributions to the country.”

Together with allegations of corruption in the former administration, such as those aired by former Auditor General Ibrahim Naeem prior to his dismissal by the opposition-controlled parliament, allegations of torture remain one of the most politically divisive topics in the Maldives.

Opinions – very strongly held – oscillate between a desire for justice and a desire to move on, a desire for revenge and a desire for reconciliation.

Given the current state of the Maldives judiciary, sensitivity of the issue and extreme political polarisation of the country, it is likely that any verdict with even a remote chance of being accepted by both sides would need to come from an international court. Shafeeg’s family have indicated that they are prepared for this course of action should legal proceedings falter in the Maldives.

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Islamic Ministry sends letter to president over co-education

The Ministry of Islamic Affairs has sent a letter to the President criticising Education Minister Dr Mustafa Luthfy for introducing co-education.

The Education Ministry has argued that all schools apart from four are already co-educational.

In the letter, the Ministry claimed that Maldivian educational policies were intended “to repel students away from the creed of Islam.”

Miadhu reported that 40 parents and guardians of students protested outside the President’s residence over the weekend.

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President meets new Bangladeshi High Commissioner

President Mohamed Nasheed has accepted the credentials of the new Bangladeshi High Commissioner accredited to the Maldives, Rear Admiral Abu Saeed Mohamed Abdul Awal.

Nasheed noted that the Maldives and Bangladesh enjoyed close friendly relations and that continued cooperation had enhanced these ties over the years. He said the Maldives valued Bangladesh’s friendship and was committed to forge even closer relations in the years ahead.

The High Commissioner assured the President of Bangladesh’s continued cooperation with the Maldives during his tenure. He also commended President Nasheed’s efforts to highlight the seriousness of climate change.

Rear Admiral Abu Saeed replaces Professor Selina Muhsin, an outspoken opponent of human trafficking and the exploitation of foreign labour.

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Nasheed installs solar panels on roof, Obama close behind

President Mohamed Nasheed this morning clambered onto his roof and assisted with the installation of 48 solar panel modules on the presidential residence of Muleaage.

“Solar power helps combat climate change, reduces our dependency on imported oil and most importantly cuts our electricity costs,” Nasheed told assembled journalists, in his bright orange hard hat.

Yesterday, US President Barack Obama announced he would be following suit by lining the roof of the White House with photo voltaic cells and installing a solar-powered water heater.

The Muleaage solar system provides 11.5 kilowatts of peak output, enough to power almost 200 standard 60 watt light bulbs, and will save the country US$300,000 over the life of the system. The panels were donated pro bono by LG Electronics, while Sungevity trained local staff to install and maintain the panels.

Moreover, the system is plugged into the city’s grid and any power not being used will be fed back into the system.

The design itself was competed by Sungevity from its offices in Oakland California, without taking even a tape measure to the president’s roof. Using a software algorithm developed by a high school student at Sydney Grammar School in Australia, aerial photographs of Male’ and trigonometry to determine the azimuth of the President’s roof, Sungevity was able to calculate Muleaage’s solar efficiency with a one percent margin of error.

The company is now conducting an energy audit of the building to identify way to cut energy wastage.

“We are proud he chose Sungevity to coordinate the design of a system from halfway around the world,” said the company’s founder, former Greenpeace campaigner Danny Kennedy. “Saving energy and going solar are the keys to unlocking economic growth and energy security.”

The Maldives is presently entirely reliant on imported fossil fuels, and the high cost of electricity – particularly in islands, where it can double – remains a political hot potato, as well as placing the country at the mercy of fluctuating oil prices.

The country’s state-owned power provider, STELCO, faced a loss of Rf547 million (US$43 million) in 2008 and was operating at a daily loss of Rf320,000 (US$25,000), building up staggering levels of debt.

Significant anger was directed at Nasheed’s government when it raised prices to reflect the real cost of providing the utility, culminating in an opposition-led ‘Red Notice’ protest in May which left scores injured.

Following a tense three-hour stand-off, police used water canons and then tear gas to disperse the crowd and took a number of DRP activists into custody. At street-level politics in Male’, the rising cost of electricity comes second only to fears of rising crime and is a key domestic point of contention with Nasheed’s government. It is not uncommon to hear of families paying up to a third of their incomes to STELCO.

This means that unlike many other countries, the Maldives has a strong political as well as economic imperative to drop the cost with proven renewable energy, suggesting Nasheed’s rooftop antics this morning were less of a publicity stunt and more a way of raising the profile of solar technology as a proven alternative.

“The average price in the US is now US$0.24 a kilowatt, which makes solar power already a third cheaper than grid electricity in the Maldives,” noted Danny Kennedy, in an earlier interview with Minivan News.

“The Maldives can move to clean fuel, hedging against fuel price rises while taking on the vested interests of incumbent technology.”

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Importers concerned about dollar shortage

The growing dollar shortage in the Maldives has raised alarm among several commodity import businesses operating in Male’ today, after at least one bank ceased to allow the free transfer of rufiya into dollar accounts.

“The problem we have is that local buyers pay us in rufiya, but our bank has now stopped allowing us to transfer this into our US dollar account,” the manager of one enterprise told Minivan News today.

“Our overseas suppliers have to be paid in dollars. How are you meant to run a business in this place? Surely they can’t go on like this?”

The Maldives grapples with a foreign currency deficit due to a heavy import-export imbalance. Goods from overseas must be purchased with foreign currency, but the Maldives has little ability to earn this outside the resort industry.

This industry typically pays salaries in local currency, while commercial banking is conducted outside the country. As a result the wider Maldives economy sees few of the dollars that tourists bring into the country, aside from what tourists spend in local shops and the little that can be extracted from a compliant bank.

“Currently the resort owners and wealthy businessmen bank overseas,” Press Secretary for the President Mohamed Zuhair explained, adding that this was largely due to a lack of trust in the local banking system.

“There is a lack of trust in the government, insecurity, and fear of things like seizure,” Zuhair said, noting that the government was “trying to promote that trust.”

An unwillingness among the banks to sell dollars for local currency does little to promote this confidence, with many banks imposing withdrawal limits even on dollar accounts. Earlier this week local media reported that average daily withdrawal limits had fallen from US$500 to US$200, effectively denying account holders access to their own money.

This, and a distrust of the banks, leads many Maldivians keep their savings privately – effectively ‘under-the -mattress.’

“A lot of money that should be in circulation is not being circulated, because people keep their savings privately,” Zuhair explained.

Companies forced to deal with suppliers in dollars are compelled to use the black market, which currently sells at Rf13.5-13.35 to the dollar (the rufiya is pegged at 12.85), making access to foreign exchange a matter of ‘friends and connections’. Most people with a local mobile phone will have received circulated text message appeals for dollars in the event of a emergency requiring air travel and overseas hospital fees.

Large currency events such as the donation of Rf9 million in relief aid to Pakistan have a further impact, with one government official observing to Minivan News that the quantity of money raised to assist Pakistan flood victims had reached a size where it would have a visible effect on the economy, even if enough dollars were to be found.

“Given the small size of our economy that amount of money will have an impact. It doesn’t make a difference that it is in dollars,” he said.

“On the one hand we have a currency situation to manage, on the other hand there is a humanitarian cost. Neither answer is politically correct.”

Zuhair noted that the country’s foreign currency income was pegged to foreign grant assistance and foreign investment, “both of which are improving.”

“The government has forecast it will receive $90 million this year in donor pledges, soft loans and grants, which I believe will improve the situation.”

Banks have increased the debit limit imposed on Maldivians travelling overseas, from US$200 to US$600, he said.

Moreover, the dollar shortage was seasonal and typically at a peak before the tourism industry’s high season, he said, due to begin in the next couple of months as winter hits Europe.

But for companies buying in dollars and selling in rufiya, the inability to trade legally in currency is hardly an incentive for further investment. Such companies are forced to rely on the unpredictable black market – or bank overseas, and perpetuate the problem.

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US President to install solar on roof days after Nasheed

The White House is going solar after all – a home improvement that carries modest energy benefits but much larger symbolic importance, writes the Washington Post.

Of course, Obama is a ways behind the Maldives president, Mohamed Nasheed, who on Thursday will put the final touches on a solar photovoltaic system on his official residence. The low-lying group of atolls in the Indian Ocean is vulnerable to sea-level rise, and Nasheed has emerged as one of the developing world’s most vocal proponents of curbing greenhouse gas emissions. Nasheed has pledged to make the Maldives carbon-neutral by 2020.

It isn’t the first time the White House has used solar energy. President Jimmy Carter put 32 solar panels on the roof in the late 1970s, but President Ronald Reagan removed them in 1986. Two grass-roots campaigns have recently been lobbying President Obama to restore them as a sign of his commitment to renewable energy.

The roof of the White House residence will get solar panels and a solar water heater, Energy Secretary Steven Chu and the White House Council on Environmental Quality’s chair, Nancy Sutley, announced Tuesday.

“This project reflects President Obama’s strong commitment to U.S. leadership in solar energy and the jobs it will create here at home,” Chu said. “Deploying solar energy technologies across the country will help America lead the global economy for years to come.”

A campaign launched by Oakland, Calif.-based Sungevity called Solar on the White House and another by 350.org founder Bill McKibben tried to get Obama to reinstall solar panels.

“The White House did the right thing, and for the right reasons: They listened to the Americans who asked for solar on their roof, and they listened to the scientists and engineers who told them this is the path to the future,” McKibben said in a statement.

“If it has anything like the effect of the White House garden, it could be a trigger for a wave of solar installations across the country and around the world,” he said.

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