The crowd was electrifying. Young people in the front row jumped up and down to the beat, while further back stood the cool and aloof, both enjoying the music.
Passing motorbikes were pulled into the festivities with many stopping to soak up the atmosphere and revel in the happiness.
“I just love this atmosphere. It brings out my patriotism,” laughs Ali Hassan, stopping on his way home.
The band ‘Cops’ belted out number after number, driving the crowd wild, screaming between songs: “Are we behind the national team?” “Yeah!” the crowd would roar.
This was not about music, or entertainment. This was about football fever gripping the nation.
The national team of the Maldives yesterday made it to the finals of the South Asian Football Federation (SAFF) Cup, comfortably beating Sri Lanka 5-1 in Bangladesh and sending the entire country into throes of ecstasy. As one spectator said: “It rained goals.”
At home it rained joy. Afterwards people took to the streets, young and old alike. Flags fluttered proudly on cars and motorcycles, while some people carried giant flags in their hands. Even police jeeps carried the customary flag.
A fan-filled pickup truck. Photo: Mod
“Maldives in the finals!”, some screamed. Women and children did joy rides around the streets of Male on the back of pickup trucks, football songs blasting at full volume. A car zoomed about painted entirely in red, with just a little green border and the white crescent on the side indicative of the flag, beautifully merging aesthetics and patriotism.
Chants of “India! India!” were heard during the other semi-final match between Bangladesh and India that evening. Now visions of July last year – when the SAFF cup was brought home for the first time – are dancing in front of everyone’s eyes.
Corner of Joy
The euphoria is evident in every street corner in the capital, but the corner seeing the maximum action is Lonuziyaraikolhu – it becomes the hub during the tournament festivities.
The seawall to surf point the streets are painted in red, with a bouncing ball appearing here and there to the corner. Maldivian flags flutter on both sides of the street, while up above red, green and white banners give the place a carnival feel.
The famed Olympians band has played twice, while earlier Enteres drove the crowds crazy with their song repertoire prompting one spectator to say: “The oldies have still got what it takes.”
Last night was the turn of the Cops band, with songs like ‘Magey beybe magey dhonbe’, ‘Handhaa’ and the classic ‘Haakalee buruvaalee’ getting the crowds chanting. Maldivian flags were waved in tandem from the front row.
Aiminath Reena, 32, whispered she was “kind of glad” Maldives was not going to play against Bangladesh in the finals. “We have so many Bangladeshis here; I would not want any trouble or anyone to make them feel bad,” she said.
While on the other side, housewife Fathimath Easa, 44, recounts how her corner shop seytu (shopkeeper) told her that his Bangladeshi employee had called up his mother and asked her to support Maldives.
“Now that their team is out, they are supporting the Maldivian team,” she said.
A very patriotic motorcycle. Photo: Mod
The songs continued, people wondered around eating, hot paratas and spicy curries from the Buruzu hotel eatery, or eating diverse dishes from the Salsa stall or freshly made kothu roshi from Royal Park stall. Three girls took turns to pose with the giant poster of the star player Ali Ashfag (Dhagandey) and the national team posted on the Haveeru stall.
“Yesterday we got a lot of support – it goes hand in hand with the success the team is achieving,” says Ahmed Shahid (Saabe), Chef de Mission for the Maldivian Contingent for South Asian Games 2010. Quite aptly, his mobile ringtone is ‘Saabahey dhivehina fahuruveri bathaluna’ (‘hooray for Maldivians and proud heroes’), one of the football movement’s anthems.
Shahid organized the festivities with the Ministry of Human Resources, Youth and Sports forming a committee to oversee the games.
“We chose Lonuziyarai Kolhu cause there is ample space, and it’s an area where people come to enjoy and hangout,” he said.
The Cops band announced it was changing taste and played an Indian song: ‘Yey mera dhil piyar kaa dheevana’. The paradox: Maldivians love all things Indian; food, songs, movies and the country itself. No celebration is complete without something Indian and yet they are now the principal rival.
The Maldives is set to play against India in the final match of SAFF cup tomorrow at 5:00pm. The best team will win the cup, but Maldivians of all ages will be rooting for their team, and the celebrations look set to surpass that of last year. The possibility of getting the cup twice running is just going to ramp up the excitement of this football crazy nation.
To join in the festivities head to Lonuziyaraikolhu, from early evening until 1:00 am on Monday morning.
President Mohamed Nasheed has called upon the Human Rights Commission of Maldives (HRCM) to investigate and uncover the injustices of the past to fulfill its mandate.
In his weekly radio address yesterday, President Nasheed said although the commission’s regulations stated that it could only investigate incidents dating from two years before its formation, the law gave HRCM the authority to conduct investigations before 2001.
“Until past injustices are investigated, the Human Rights Commission of Maldives will not be a commission that properly works for human rights in the country,” he said.
The president said grievous injury was done and serious injustices were perpetrated upon many citizens in the past 30 years.
“I am saying this as a person who has seen these things very closely. Many people have died. Many people were killed. The lives of many were ruined. A lot of people’s property was appropriated. Many people’s lives were destroyed to the point where they had no future,” he said.
“In truth, there is no way to find justice for these things. The time that was lost to them cannot be given back, the wrongs done to them cannot be set right. But, we have to carry out full investigations into these things to find out how it happened in order to ensure that it is not repeated.”
The president’s office continues to receive complaints from citizens about injustices done to them by the previous government.
Many senior officials of the government and MPs of the ruling Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) had “endured serious inhumane treatment”.
“I would like to note the harm done to MDP parliamentary group leader Reeko Moosa Manik,” he said. “The former government destroyed his life when he was very young.”
In 1983, Moosa was sentenced to death on charges of conspiring to overthrow the government.
In the run-up to last year’s presidential election and beyond, Moosa spoke extensively about his experiences in jail and how he was tortured.
The president said he was not asking the commission to investigate such cases based on a desire for vengeance on the part of either Moosa Manik or other MDP members. “We don’t wish for this to happen again to our children. Therefore, I believe that understanding how things happened in the past will give us the opportunity for us to stay clear of these things.”
Opening his address, the president said the biggest obstacle to progress and development of the country was the failure to secure human rights for citizens and the suppression of free expression.
Nasheed said the former government lost its way because people were not allowed to criticise or oppose its policies.
“It is very important for citizens to have their rights to keep the government on the right track; for everyone to know that they have certain rights,” he said.
The president said he wanted to assure citizens that anyone whose rights were violated in the past year of the first democratically elected government had the opportunity to seek redress for injustices.
Attorney General Husnu Suood has said the practice of female circumcision in the name of Islam has been revived in Addu atoll.
Speaking at a human rights function last night, Suood said although there have been significant successes in human rights in the past six years new problems and violations were emerging, “especially atrocities against women and children”.
Suood said “false scholars” were promoting anti-Islamic activities that also violated human rights principles.
“I will note one thing I learned in the past two weeks: religious scholars are going around to midwives giving fatwas that girls have to be circumcised. They’re giving fatwas saying it is religiously compulsory. According to my information, the circumcising of girls has started and is going on with a new spirit.”
He added it had to be stopped and “cannot be tolerated.”
“This is not something we can just stand by and watch. In the recent past, I would say this had ceased almost completely. But today in Addu atoll, the circumcision of girls is going on at some speed. I call upon the relevant authorities to stop this.”
Suood said one of violation the authorities have been alerted to was violence against women in the name of Islam.
“Violence against women and children in the name of Islam, or in the name of promoting Islam, is something we should be concerned about,” he said.
Suood said Islam is a religion that protects the dignity of human beings, and referred to the efforts to put an end to the practice of female infanticide during the early days of Islam.
Attorney General Husnu Suood
“Robbing people of their human rights or burying their rights in the name of religion is not acceptable,” he said. “I believe it is in defiance of our religion.”
He added there were cases of husbands forcing their wives to sleep on the floor “in the name of religion, saying, ‘this is how it is in Islam’.”
Further, some families were refusing to send girls to school or let them find employment across the country.
Another growing concern was the rise of human trafficking, he said, with a number of under-age girls recently brought to the country for sex trafficking.
“Human trafficking was certainly not something we have heard of in the Maldives in our recent history, especially the trafficking of women for sexual purposes,” Suood said, adding that the growth of the problem was something the government had to take immediate action against.
He further noted the rise of child abuse, referring to the recently passed law on special provisions for sex offenders as a step forward.
The attorney general also said that harassment and abuse of expatriate workers remained a serious problem.
A report by the Human Rights Commission revealed the dire situation of some expatriates in the country, who endure cramped and unsuitable living quarters and the non-payment of wages.
Opening his remarks, Suood said it was essential for Maldivians to change their mentality and ways of thinking to make progress on human rights issues.
The most important task at hand was to identify the areas where special measures were needed, he urged.
“Six years ago, our attention was mainly focused on political freedom and political rights, and how those rights could be won,” he said, adding there has been significant development in that area with the ratification of the new constitution.
But, he added, writing down rights on a piece of paper does not secure them. A bill of rights could not guarantee essential liberty unless Maldivians changed their “mentality and attitude”, he said, proposing human rights be taught as a school subject from pre-school to higher education.
Securing womens’ rights is essential to protecting the rights of children, declared Deputy Minister of Health and Family Mariya Ali at a human rights function last night, moving the audience with her experience of handling a particularly insidious case of maternal child abuse.
“I first saw this case in 2000 when I started working in the childrens’ rights unit,” Maryia said. “At the time, the child was 11 years old. We had first accepted the case when he was six – he had bitten a classmate’s cheek and chewed off a piece of flesh, and his class teacher was despairing about what to do with him. He asked us to send him to the juvenile centre in Maafushi.”
The child had been diagnosed with attention-deficit-with-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), she said. “But his mother wasn’t told to avoid feeding him certain foods, or not to give him Coke or sugary things, or any information like that. So she gave him Coke. And then, when he stole a lump of sugar from a neighbour’s house when he was six, she poured scalding hot water on his hand.”
No assessments of the child’s family background had been made, and nobody “realised just how bad his life was,” Mariya said.
“Because he had ADHD he was difficult to control – so he was put in chains. When I went to the house, his foot was chained to a pole in the middle a dark room with nothing in it except a bed.
“He hadn’t been fed because he had misbehaved, so I asked him what he had done. He got scared and hid under the bed and started to cry, saying, ‘sister, please save me from this place.’ I touched his head and saw it was swollen all over – he said he was beaten by his brother.”
In later appointments, Mariya discovered that each of the other siblings in the family had some kind of psychiatric problem. It later emerged that the child had also been sexually abused.
“When I was evaluating the child, his mother told me ‘he only stays still when you show him horror films’ – she would show him five a day. She told me he couldn’t sleep without killing some kind of animal or living thing, and when the animals were buried, the next day he would dig them up and cut off pieces.”
Horrified, Mariya turned to child psychology experts in the UK for advice. She was told the damage could not be reversed even if the boy was given 11 years of therapy.
“A lot happened to this child,” she said. “It began with ADHD; that was something we could have managed. But [the situation] went beyond of our reach because we because we failed to assure his rights for him. When we consider the human rights conventions [that the Maldives has signed], here is a case where so many of those rights have been violated.”
The Ministry was now working to strengthen the mechanisms for child protection and fulfil its obligations under the convention, she said.
“Securing women’s rights is essential to protecting children rights: mothers have to be psychologically fit to take care of a child.”
The Maldives National Broadcasting Corporation (MNBC) has asked Television Maldives (TVM) to investigate its poll on religious freedom and take measures against those responsible.
Speaking to Minivan News today, Ibrahim Khaleel, managing director of MNBC, said the board has asked Mohamed Asif, deputy director general of MNBC currently in charge of running TVM, to look into the matter after opposition Dhivehi Qaumee Party (DQP) accused the government of attempting to establish other religions in the Maldives.
“I’ve asked Asif to investigate how it happened, and if anyone is responsible, to take measures [against them],” he said. “He will investigate to see if it happened the way they said it did, and take measures based on the findings.”
The poll asked whether freedom of religion should be allowed in the Maldives; the investigation will look into how the topic was chosen and for what purpose, Khaleel said.
In a press release on Monday, the DQP condemned the poll as unconstitutional and accused the government of attempting to introduce religions other than Islam into the Maldives.
The former coalition partner claimed the poll on Sunday night was part of “a devious scheme” intended to show that other religions could be practiced in the country.
The party referred to article 10 of the constitution, which states that Islam shall be the state religion and the basis of all the laws in the Maldives.
Khaleel said he has since watched the show and it was clear that the DQP had taken the poll out of context.
“The discussion was about differences of opinion within Islam, like different sects, and to what extent it should be allowed,” he said.
Two religious scholars, MP Dr Afrashim Ali of the opposition Dhivehi Rayyithunge Party and Sheikh Mohamed Shaheem Ali Saeed, state minister for Islamic affairs, were on the programme.
“If something unconstitutional was being talked about, I find it hard to believe these two scholars would stand by and let it happen,” said Khaleel.
He added it was apparent from DQP’s press release that they did not watch the programme.
Khaleel said it was “regrettable” that a political party was acting “irresponsibly” in issuing such press releases at a time when freedom of speech was in its infancy.
He denied the DQP’s allegation that the poll was taken on orders from the president’s office.
Mohamed Afruh Rasheed, producer of the show, told Minivan News it focuses on “controversial social issues” that were not being openly debated in society or suppressed.
Some of the issues discussed in the programme have included the rights of expatriates and neglect of the elderly as well as press freedom.
The results of Sunday night’s poll were 14 per cent in favour and 82 per cent against.
The Maldives beat India 2-0 in the South Asian Football Federation (SAFF) cup, taking them to the semifinals against Sri Lanka this Friday, Haveeru reports.
Ahmed Thoriq scored the first goal in the 15th minute after a pass by Ali Ashfag (Dhangadey). The score remained 1-0 at half time.
In the second half, the Indian team lost one of their strikers, Balwant Singh, who was sent off for an awkward dive.
The second goal was scored in the 82nd minute by Fazeel Ibrahim (Oppo).
The match was held at Bangabandhu National Stadium in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
The cabinet withdrew 39 islands selected for resort development from the list of 64 on Tuesday, according to Haveeru.
Although the 39 islands had been leased out for resorts, no construction work had yet been carried out.
Tourism Minister Dr Ahmed Ali Sawad said the government had decided to give additional time to resorts where construction was underway but had not reached a decision on islands where construction had not yet begun.
Sawad said the government was authorised to take action against lessees if they did not adhere to their contracts even if an advance payment had been paid.
He added the government’s intention was to ensure that the leased islands were developed as tourist resorts.
“We have to take all the necessary steps to ensure that the development of the resorts proceeds,” Sawad said. “We also have to see which parties have the financial means to do it. They have to be given the opportunity.”
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