Month: November 2009

Dear Editor,
The bill on banning places of worship for other religions is totally pathetic. Do we need bills on all kinds of schizophrenia? This is like passing a bill that bans all places dark just because an MP is Achluophobic!
Since our Constitution is based on Islamic Sharia, no law can contradict Islamic Sharia. If these so-called God fearing and self-proclaimed people of knowledge prohibit something that is allowed in Islam, what do they stand for? Wouldn’t they become non-believers then for making Haram what is lawful in Islam?
Why are we so afraid to learn the facts and debate the pros and cons of issues rather than succumb into the coziness of the status quo?
Regards,
Haleem

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Dear Editor,
I can’t undstand why you give so much importance to Azima!
She is not an angel or saint. Nor is she a person capable of saying anything so great to be put in a newspaper headline.
Former is former! It would be very sensible to keep thoes stupid names out of your headlines!
Regards,
Anonymous

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Dear Editor,
I am appalled at the ease with which Muslims in the Maldives and all over the world take offence at the slightest indication that there is an opposing view expressively forbidden by Islam. Constitutional law dictates that all tenets of Islam should be observed strictly and nothing else can supersede this entrenchment. Unfortunately, we do not do that. We have adapted and inherited a watered-down version of Islam and rally in Islam’s names as hypocrites. Hypocrisy is the Maldivian National Identity.
I strongly appeal as a Muslim moderate to open up a dialogue and invite the public to educate and inform about the numerous cases of openly homosexual, atheistic or agnostic Maldivians, who by law are stateless. The purpose of this is not their persecution, but the need to create awareness among the public on how to use tolerant means to either get these segments of society to respect our constitution and the growing need to secure rights for minorities without necessarily secularising the Maldives.
As Maldivians, we have to acknowledge that there are Maldivians who are either apostates or non-practicing Muslims, for a milder word. We need to respect their rights. And they in turn need to respect the Islamic sentiments and sensitivities of the Maldivian People. Without it, we are doomed to anticipate religious conflict which will be perpetuated by extremists on either end of the table.
Regards,
Anonymous

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Dear Editor,
I find all this political rhetoric being promulgated about Islam extremely disturbing. In my view, Islam is about personal faith and spirituality, about individual closeness with Allah, about a way of life that is honest, decent, clean and tolerant. Whether it is the DRP or the MDP or the IDP or Adhaalath or whoever that uses Islam as a political tool, it is a gross insult to the beauty and sacred nature of religion. Even in the last presidential election entire campaigns were run on creating fear using the name Islam as a political tool – that people will lose their faith if a particular party comes in, etc etc. Islam forbids not just alcohol, but corruption, greed, opulence and dishonesty. Islam forbids sex outside of marriage and many other things that are harmful to individuals and society. Yet these are all things that are endemic in the Maldivian society. These are all traits that many of these politicians themselves seem to overtly display. My understanding of Islam is that it is only Allah who would know what is in our hearts, and what our intentions are – and yet many of these politicians run around claiming each other as infidels and non-Muslims, and harbingers of other religions or atheism and whatnot.
Having lived overseas, in multicultural societies, within multi-religious households, having attended ceremonies of various religions numerous times, having lived in environments where alcohol and other things were freely available, I personally believe that today I am more confident in my faith and my belief in Allah and the values of Islam. Many of my friends from outside Maldives are non-Muslim, yet none of them try to convert me or I them. Most of them, whether they practice any religion or not, live decent lives, earn an honest living, and are neither alcoholics nor sex maniacs nor axe murderers.
Many of today’s Maldivian politicians have themselves lived overseas, studied overseas in multi-religious societies, and just like me, I am sure would have friends from various ethnic and religious groups. So unless they believe themselves to have lost their faith as a result, I cannot understand how they can assume that their compatriots would lose their personal faith at the sight of a bottle of alcohol or a non-Muslim or a place of worship of another religion.
Having said that, I feel that over protection and over regulation in religion as in many other things has created a population in the Maldives that has lost the confidence to believe in themselves, or their direct access to Allah, that has lost their resilience and become dependent on others and external factors to meet many of their needs. This is the reason that people are so easily led, whether it be by politicians, religious extremists, gangsters or others. Politicians so often exploit this weakness in the name of religion, which to my mind cannot be anything but irreligious in itself.
I am not advocating for setting up churches or temples or kovils, I am not advocating for legalising alcohol; I am expressing my absolute disgust with the antics of politicians with double standards. My hope and prayer is that Allah will open the hearts and minds of my countrymen and women, strengthen our Iman, Ihsan and Islam, enable us to think for ourselves and not be exploited by those seeking to make sheep of us.
As Rabindranath Tagore so eloquently worded it:
“Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls
Where words come from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward into ever widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, let my country awake”
Regards,
Anonymous

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Contracts were signed today to establish transport networks in the Upper North and Upper South Provinces with high speed ferries.

At a ceremony at Dharubaaruge, two contracts for 50 years each were signed with Trinus-CAE Holdings Pvt Ltd, a joint venture between a Maldivian company and a South African company.

Speaking at the ceremony, Economic Development Minister Mohamed Rasheed said a transport network was essential for national development.

In the past, he said, economic development was concentrated around the capital Male’ and nearby atolls.

“Our tourism industry especially expanded in the region of the capital island,” he said. “The reason was that transport facilities had not been introduced to our country.”

The absence of a nationwide transport network hampered the development of the domestic economy, he said.

Rasheed said the establishment of regional transport networks would facilitate the mobility of labour and transport of goods necessary for businesses to prosper.

The Upper North includes Haa Alif, Haa Dhaal and Shaviyani atolls, while the Upper South Province includes Gaaf Alif and Gaaf Dhaal atolls.

“The difference between this agreement and other transport agreements that we’ve signed is that this is for a joint venture company,” he said, adding he hoped the South African company would be able to build ferries suited for Maldivian seas as soon as possible.

Maizan Ahmed Manik, state minister for transport, told Minivan News the fees for the service will be between Rf10 and Rf50 “up and down” and the ministry will provide terminals.

“They will be given 50-bed tourist facilities from each province,” he said.

The entire project will cost US$400 million over 50 years. 

Ferry services have begun in the Mid-South Province, while they are scheduled to begin in the South Province on 24 November and South Central Province the following day.

Agreements are expected to be signed for the remaining provinces on 30 December.

From 11 September to 11 November, 18,700 people have used the ferry service offered by Dhoni Services in the Mid-South Province, which include Thaa and Laamu atolls.

Speaking at the ceremony, Ismail Samih Ahmed, managing director of Trinus, said engines and ferries designed by the company’s partner Cape Advanced Engineering (CAE) were used across the world.

Samih said the company did not intend to provide the ferry service with dhonis. “We have designed special high speed ferries to provide transport services in these two provinces.”

He added the rough seas and harbours of the provinces were taken into account in designing the vessels.

“We have also considered the environment in designing the ferry,” he said, adding it was designed to use biodiesel in the future.

The ferries are being built in South Africa now and should be introduced to the country next year, he said.

But, he added, temporary services with dhonis will be introduced in the meanwhile.

Mohamed Hunaif, state minister for the Upper North Province, said he constantly received calls from people awaiting the introduction of the services.

Since the islands in the province were far apart and travel was expensive, he added, people would rejoice at the signing of the contracts today.

In his remarks, Umar Jamal, state minister for the Upper South Province, said the absence of affordable public transport was one of the “five pillars of slavery” that had shackled development.

“Today we’re destroying one of those pillars,” he said.

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British Airways held a launch party in Male for its fledgling London-Maldives service, intended to draw sun-starved tourists seeking escape from the cold gloom of the British winter.

Judy Jarvis, BA’s regional commercial manager for South Asia, said that while the route catered primarily to the luxury tourist market and the airline’s strength in the package holiday market, the company was also hoping to grow the number of outbound business passengers travelling to the UK.
 
“It’s very early days, we’ve been operating less than a month,” she said at the function on Tuesday.
 
Minister for Civil Aviation Mahmood Razee said the arrival of British Airways had compelled it to upgrade the airport’s capabilities for dealing with cargo assets, which historically “have not been so great.”
“[British Airways] carries a lot of cargo that originates in the Maldives as well as transit cargo,” he said. “We needed to put in place aspects of security and assurance, most of it procedural – things like storing cargo in a secure place.”

The additional three weekly flights may place further pressure on the airport’s ability to cope with peak periods.

“We have problems with bunching from 8am in the morning to 2pm in the afternoon, especially on a Monday,” Razee explained. “It’s partly because most traffic from Europe arrives early in the morning because of airport curfew requirements in that part of the world.”

The Maldives’ economy is heavily reliant on tourism, revenue from which accounts for one-third of its annual GDP.

Of the 800,000 passengers who pass through it annually, 600,000 are tourists, Razee said. The most prolific user of the airport is Sri Lanka Airways which operates 28 flights weekly, followed by Emirates and Qatar Airways.

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Former Attorney General Azima Shukoor has commended the police for locating the underage concubine yesterday and urged media to protect her identity.

Local media reported yesterday that police raided a house in Male’ and placed the pregnant 17-year-old girl under their protection.

“I believe the society has to give her the protection as she is under 18 years of age,” she said Azima, speaking to press today. “I am saying this because I’ve seen her address revealed in the news media.”

She added revealing the girl’s identity would compromise her future and make others in similar circumstances reluctant to come forward.

Yesterday, daily newspapers reported that unnamed sources had confirmed that the girl was found based on records from Indira Gandhi Memorial Hospital (IGMH).

Azima said she gave information to the police and HRCM for their investigations, adding she believed police had acted very professionally.

In September, President Mohamed Nasheed asked the relevant authorities to investigate reports of an underage concubine being kept for sex by religious extremists in the Maldives.

The report first hit the headlines when at a DRP rally Azima spoke about an article she had read on blogger Hilath Rasheed’s website about a young girl who had been taken to IGMH.

The doctor treating the girl suspected she had been sexually abused. After questioning her guardian, the doctor was told the girl was a jaariya or concubine.

Since then the police and the HRCM have carried out investigations to locate the girl.

For their investigation HRCM visited IGMH and requested details of underage girls who had taken pregnancy tests at around the time the concubine was reported to have attended the hospital.

It was further reported yesterday that the girl was the sister of a man sentenced to jail for clashing with police at Alif Alif Himandhoo during a crackdown on an independent prayer group on the island.

Both police and the HRCM said today their investigations into the reports of underage concubines are still ongoing.

A police media official said he could not confirm the raid yesterday or whether the girl was in custody.

Aishath Afreen Mohamed, complaints officer at the HRCM, said the commission has asked police about the media reports.

Azima said underaged girls who were abused often believed that they had committed a sin.

“Counsellors have to talk to them for a long time before they believe they haven’t done anything wrong,” she said, adding the victims were worried about being ostracised.

Azima said the issue should not be politicised and it was unfortunate that the Islamic ministry had said the reports of concubines were rumours spread to bring Islam into disrepute.

“I spoke about this because it was an inhumane and illegal act that someone has committed,” she said.

At a press conference in October, Mohamed Shaheem Ali Saeed, state minister for Islamic affairs, was critical of the HRCM for asserting religious extremists were keeping underage concubines without solid evidence.

Shaheeem said he did not believe the reports were true.

Azima said today the investigations would have progressed satisfactorily and without too much media attention if the Islamic ministry had not made such statements.

She added politics and child abuse should not be mixed.

Azima said she was working on other disturbing cases of child abuse.

The former attorney general said she was in the process of registering an NGO with former MP Aneesa Ahmed to target sexual violence against women and girls.

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The Maldives slipped 15 places on the corruption perception index since last year and continues to rank below Sri Lanka and India in the region, global corruption watchdog Transparency International (TI) said in a report released this week.

The Indian Ocean archipelago scored 2.5 on a scale of zero to 10, with zero indicating high levels of corruption and 10 very low. The score is down from 2.8 in 2008 and 3.3 in 2007, signalling worsening levels of perceived corruption.

A TI analysis of the region concluded that major political upheaval in the Maldives and the passage of political reforms over the past year had not been entirely smooth.

Last August, the Maldives ratified a new constitution that established separation of powers and a bill of rights. This was followed by the country’s first-ever multi-party presidential election, which saw incumbent President Mohamed Nasheed unseat Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, Asia’s longest-serving ruler.

In its analysis, TI further noted that a number of human rights abuses and corruption cases have been exposed since last year.

In 2008, Gayoom appointed an independent auditor general who has since published over 30 audit reports detailing corruption in state institutions. Now in opposition, Gayoom’s party, the Dhivehi Rayyithunge Party and its coalition partner, People’s Alliance, have rejected the reports and the auditor general as biased.

“It’s a perception of corruption levels so what would have happened is that in 2008 there was a lot of corruption cases that have been unearthed so that means the corruption perception would have increased. There was not necessarily more corruption,” said Thoriq Hamid, project co-ordinator at Transparency Maldives.

Mohamed Zuhair, president’s office press secretary, told Minivan News today that the decline was most likely because the Maldives was experiencing transition.

“If you covered it in other countries where there was regime change, the same statistics would happen mainly because there was been a flurry of activity at the end of the last regime to cover up what had been going on,” he said.

Zuhair added information about corruption has become available for the first time, noting a number of independent institutions which directly or indirectly deal with corruption under the new constitution.

These include the anti-corruption commission, the police integrity commission and the judicial services commission. “All these commissions need to speed up their work and become strengthened,” he said.

Zuhair further pointed to the government’s efforts to document corruption. In May, President Mohamed Nasheed established a commission to investigate the allegations in the auditor general’s reports, whose activities the opposition have called a “witch-hunt”.

The CPI focuses on corruption in the public sector and is prepared using surveys asking questions relating to the misuse of public power for private benefit.

TI gathered data from four sources and covered both 2008 and 2009. The sources were the Asian Development Bank, World Bank, the country risk service and country forecast by the Economist Intelligence Unit and the global risk service by IHS Global Insight.

One of the purposes of the CPI is to offer a the views of businesspeople and experts who make decisions about trade and investment.

Other countries in the Asia-Pacific region that saw a decline in their scores include Malaysia, Nepal and Afghanistan while Bangladesh, Japan, Tonga and Vanuatu saw their scores significantly rise.

Regionally, the Maldives ranks 23 out of 32 countries while globally it ranks 130 out of 180 countries.

According to TI, the global financial crisis and political change in many countries last year revealed defects in financial and political systems as well as failures in policy, regulations, oversight and enforcement mechanism.

As a result, 13 countries saw a drop in their scores from the 32 countries in the region. 

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