Category: News in Brief

Rising Islamism Set Stage for Maldives Coup: Wall Street Journal

In the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s ouster of President Mohamed Nasheed, his political opponents fomented opposition among conservative Muslims by claiming Mr Nasheed’s government was trying to undermine their faith, writes Tom Wright for the Wall Street Journal.

Islamists calling for jihad against Mr Nasheed played a significant part in antigovernment protests that began in January. Events came to a head Tuesday when a band of armed police and army officers backed the protesters and forced Mr. Nasheed to resign.

The emergence of hard-line Islam is a relatively new development for the Maldives. But it is stoking concern in neighboring India that it could be used as a potential base for Islamist militants. It also raises questions about the stability of a country which sits on strategically important sea lanes used to transport a large portion of the world’s crude oil.

And the rise of conservative Islam could have an impact on the country’s tourism industry. Around 900,000 foreigners come to the country each year and the development of spas and bars to cater for them has angered some Islamist leaders.

Ahmed Naseem, the country’s recently ousted foreign minister, faced opposition at home last year when he became the first Maldivian official to visit Israel. He says religious orthodoxy has become the norm as more people go to study in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

“This country had no one wearing headscarves 10 years ago” but it’s common now, said Mr. Naseem. The political opposition, he added, capitalized on this growing religiosity by portraying Mr. Nasheed as un-Islamic. “They’re using Islam as a tool.”

The party of Mohamed Jameel, who was sworn in as Home Minister this week, issued a pamphlet last month in the local language entitled, “President Nasheed’s Devious Plot to Destroy the Islamic Faith of Maldivians,” according to a translation reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The pamphlet claimed that empty bottles of alcohol, which is proscribed for Maldivians, were found in offices of Mr. Nasheed’s government. It blamed the government for planning to sell land to Israel. And it said the then-president was working to undermine Islamic law in the country.

Mr. Jameel, in an interview Friday in his offices overlooking Male’s aquamarine harbor, acknowledged the pamphlet. He said Mr. Nasheed had at times lacked sensitivity toward Muslims.

“It’s one of the obligations of the state to protect Islam,” said Mr. Jameel, who went to a religious high school in Pakistan and got his doctoral degree from London University.

The Maldives, a country of almost 400,000 people, is almost entirely Muslim. The constitution makes Islam the state religion and minority faiths are not recognized. The legal system is a mixture of common law, a legacy of the former British colonists, and Quranic law.

After the December rally, the participation of Muslim extremists in antigovernment protests grew. During demonstrations earlier this week, a group of Islamists, their faces covered, trashed Buddhist statues in the National Museum.

For now, tourism has not suffered visibly. Most visitors arrive at an airport on its own island and are ferried to their resorts on uninhabited atolls, where alcohol is allowed. But as numbers grow, more tourists also are stopping off in Male, causing frictions.

“There are some fringe religious extremist elements and we hope the radicalism doesn’t hamper the Maldives’ image as a tourist destination,” an Indian government official said Friday.

Read full story

Likes(0)Dislikes(0)

Maldives mishandled by India: Eurasia Review

The Government of India appears to have been caught napping in the Maldives on two counts, writes B. Raman for the Eurasia Review.

First, it failed to foresee the implications of some arbitrary actions of former President Mohammed Nasheed such as the arrest of the Chief Judge of the Criminal Court and disciplinary action against a Sandhurst-trained Colonel of the Maldives National Defence Force (MNDF), who were perceived to be anti-Nasheed and advise him to desist from such actions.

These actions antagonised the judiciary and created fissures in the MNDF and the Police. These elements joined hands with anti-Nasheed protesters in forcing him to quit as the President.

Secondly, it failed to realise that despite his antagonising the judiciary and sections of the Police and the MNDF, Nasheed retained considerable popular support particularly among the younger generation and was in a position to take the battle against his opponents to the streets. Instead of keeping quiet till the street equations became clear and instead of desisting from any action that might be misinterpreted as granting legitimacy to the MNDF-engineered replacement of Nasheed by his Vice-President Mohamed Waheed Hassan, the Government of India prematurely made statements that were interpreted in Maldives as amounting to India’s abandoning its support to the democratically-elected President.

When Nasheed’s supporters, with a defiant Nasheed at their head, took the battle against their opponents to the streets, the Government of India found itself with its credibility badly weakened.

The result: the Government of India’s traditional position as the sole arbiter of political fortunes in the Maldives has been badly damaged and a number of international actors from the UK, the US, the European Union and the United Nations have rushed to the Maldives to try their hand in internal peace-making, thereby marginalising the traditional role of India. Only China and Pakistan have not yet entered the political fray in the Maldives. If they do, that will be ultimate humiliation for Indian diplomacy at its southern door-step.

We had earlier lost our clout in Sri Lanka as a result of soft and reactive reflexes and we stand in danger of similarly losing our clout -even if we have not already lost it – in the Maldives due to similar apologetic reflexes lacking in robustness of anticipation and action.

In the Net world, one could notice articulation of condemnation of the Government for failing to intervene militarily in the Maldives in support of the democratically-elected Government. Unfavourable comparisons have been made with the robust response of Rajiv Gandhi, the then Prime Minister, to support the then President Abdul Gayoom against threats from foreign mercenaries suspected to be from the LTTE by sending Indian rapid action forces to the Maldives to neutralise the threat.

The hesitation of the Government of India to send rapid action forces in response to a reported SOS from Nasheed is understandable because the present situation is qualitatively different from what prevailed in 1988. The threat to Nasheed was not from external forces, but from sections of his own MNDF and the Police due to his perceived arbitrary style of governance. If the Government of India had sent the security forces to the Maldives this time, they would have been called upon to act not against foreign mercenaries and their local supporters, but against sections of the political opposition in the Maldives and their supporters in the MNDF and the Police.

Our security forces would have been able to overcome opposition from the MNDF and the Police, but then what about managing the messy sequel – with the Maldivian security forces many of whose senior officers were trained by us turning hostile against India?

The criticism of the Government of India for not intervening immediately through our armed forces is not quite justified. But there is a lot of actions short of direct military intervention which we could have taken – such as visibly and noisily strengthening our direct action capability in the vicinity of the Maldives, to convey a message to the contending forces in the Maldives and to external forces that might be tempted to take advantage of the situation to undermine Indian influence that India was prepared to use its armed forces if needed to protect its nationals and interests, and rushing a high level and stick-wielding emissary to Male to cajole, if possible, and to force, if necessary, the contending forces not to undermine democracy and not to allow any other external elements to come in and partake of the broth.

The Government of India failed to take any of these actions and now finds itself with diminishing options in the face of an unpredictably evolving situation domestically and internationally. In 1988, the international community recognised implicitly that the Maldives was India’s concern and that India had every right to act according to its wisdom.

Even though the situation seems to be slipping out of our hands, we can still retrieve it provided we show leadership befitting a big power and act resolutely on the lines indicated above. Evidence of such leadership and resolute action is missing in Delhi.

Read more

Likes(0)Dislikes(0)

The Commonwealth should threaten to expel the Maldives: Mark Seddon

Writing for the Huffington Post, UK journalist Mark Seddon has suggested that the Commonwealth should to threaten to expel the Maldives, following what the nation’s former government called a military coup d’etat on Tuesday, February 7.

“The Commonwealth should immediately threaten to expel the Maldives, as it did when the military seized power in Fiji. And the behemoth that is the European Union should threaten sanctions unless Mohamed Nasheed and his supporters are freed and returned to their rightful place – in government,” Seddon writes.

In his article, Seddon accuses the UK government of “waxing on about the importance of democracy in the Maldives while parading the accepted wisdom that Nasheed had somehow stepped down of his own volition, and been replaced by his vice president.”

“Prime minister David Cameron, despite having boldly declared that ‘Mohamed Nasheed is a friend of mine’, a few months back echoed this pusillanimity with his own: ‘this country does have strong links with the Maldives’, said Cameron, onion in hand, ‘and a good relationship with President Nasheed, but we have to be clear. President Nasheed has resigned, and we have a strong interest in the well-being of several thousand British tourists and in a stable and democratic government in the Maldives.’

“On the basis of that performance, just who would want to be a friend of David Cameron?” Seddon writes.

Observing that “The ‘Maldives Spring’ pre-dated that of the Arab Spring by six years,” Seddon continues that Maldivians “surely deserve a whole lot better from the international community? The mealy mouthed response from the British in particular just will not do. Diplomatic relations should be immediately suspended until the rule of law is once again established.”

Read more on the Huffington Post online.

Likes(0)Dislikes(0)

Dictatorships don’t always die when the dictator leaves office: Nasheed

Dictatorships don’t always die when the dictator leaves office, former President of the Maldives Mohamed Nasheed has said in a New York Times Op-Ed.

“The wave of revolutions that toppled autocrats in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen last year was certainly cause for hope. But the people of those countries should be aware that, long after the revolutions, powerful networks of regime loyalists can remain behind and can attempt to strangle their nascent democracies.

“I learned this lesson quickly. My country, the Maldives, voted out President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, its iron-fisted ruler, back in 2008, in historic elections that swept away three decades of his authoritarian rule. And yet the dictatorship bequeathed to the infant democracy a looted treasury, a ballooning budget deficit and a rotten judiciary.

“I was elected that year, and with the help of the International Monetary Fund, my government worked to cut the deficit, while also building a modern tax base. For the first time in its history, the Maldives — a group of islands in the Indian Ocean — had a democratically elected president, parliament and local councils.

“But it also had a judiciary handpicked by the former president, which was now hiding behind a democratic constitution. These powerful judges provided protection for the former president, his family members and political allies, many of whom are accused of corruption, embezzlement and human rights crimes.

“At the same time, new laws guaranteeing freedom of speech were abused by a new force in Maldivian politics: Islamic extremists. The former president’s cabinet members threw anti-Semitic and anti-Christian slurs at my government, branding as apostates anyone who tried to defend the country’s liberal Islamic traditions and claiming that democracy granted them and their allies license to call for violent jihad and indulge in hate speech.

“In response to these issues, my government asked the United Nations to help us investigate judicial abuses and ordered the arrest of Abdulla Mohamed, the chief judge of the criminal court, on charges of protecting the former president and corrupting the judicial system. However, in a dramatic turn of events on Tuesday, the former president’s supporters protested in the streets, and police officers and army personnel loyal to the old government mutinied and forced me, at gunpoint, to resign. To avoid bloodshed, I did so. I believe this to be a coup d’état and suspect that my vice president, who has since been sworn into office, helped to plan it.

“Choosing to stand up to the judge was a controversial decision, but I feel I had no choice but to do what I did — to have taken no action, and passively watched the country’s democracy strangled, would have been the greatest injustice of all.

“The problems we are facing in the Maldives are a warning for other Muslim nations undergoing democratic reform. At times, dealing with the corrupt system of patronage the former regime left behind can feel like wrestling with a Hydra: when you remove one head, two more grow back. With patience and determination, the beast can be slain. But let the Maldives be a lesson for aspiring democrats everywhere: the dictator can be removed in a day, but it can take years to stamp out the lingering remnants of his dictatorship.”

Read more

Likes(2)Dislikes(0)

“This coup will not be the last word”: Mark Lynas

Ousted President Mohamed Nasheed will not stop promoting democracy and freedom of expression in the Maldives, writes Mark Lynas in UK’s Guardian newspaper.

A former climate change advisor to Nasheed, Lynas warns that governments who value democracy “should not be under illusion about what has just taken place [in the Maldives.]”

“The first democratically elected leader of a 100% Muslim country, [Nasheed] swept away the 30-year dictatorship of Maumoon Gayoom in national elections back in 2008. Now the Maldives sadly sees its spring being rolled back: a leader elected through the ballot box has just been deposed by street violence and intimidation,” writes Lynas.

Lynas suggests that progress achieved under Nasheed was the fruits of an uphill battle which included multiple arrests and even personal torture.

“The former dictator Gayoom and his forces never accepted the outcome of the 2008 elections, and their networks of power and influence were increasingly threatened by Nasheed’s campaign against corruption in the judiciary. Indeed, this crisis was sparked by the arrest of senior court judge who had repeatedly refused to prosecute corruption cases in order to protect powerful allies from the former regime. Recently the opposition had begun to use inflammatory antisemitic and jihadi hate-speech to falsely accuse Nasheed of undermining Islam,” Lynas writes.

Lynas goes on to state that Nasheed’s efforts to make the Maldives “the world’s first carbon-neutral country was typically ambitious” and had seen progress, however “all bets are now off.”

Meanwhile, environmental NGO 350.org launched a petition early this morning calling for leaders world wide to apply diplomacy to ensure the safety of Nasheed “and the Maldivian people.” The organisation has called Nasheed a leading figure in the movement against climate change.

Expressing uncertainty over the Maldives’ current trajectory, Lynas concludes, “If I know the man at all, this coup will not be the last word.”

Red more on The Guardian.

Likes(0)Dislikes(0)

“Mandela of the Maldives” forced out by police mutiny: Independent

President Mohamed Nasheed was been forced to step down after weeks of opposition protests culminated in a mutiny by police, reports Andrew Buncombe for the UK’s Independent newspaper.

“Supporters of the President said he was the victim of what amounted to a coup.

The former political prisoner who some nicknamed the “Mandela of the Maldives” announced his resignation during a live television broadcast yesterday, saying he would rather stand down than use force against his own citizens. Foreign tourists who flock to the nation’s luxury resorts were not believed to be in any danger.

“I resign because I am not a person who wishes to rule with the use of power. I believe that if the government were to remain in power it would require the use of force which would harm many citizens,” he said. “I resign because I believe that if the government continues to stay in power, it is very likely that we may face foreign influences.”

The British-educated, former journalist was the first democratically elected leader of the Muslim Indian Ocean nation of more than 1,200 islands. But his opponents had recently been holding daily demonstrations and seized on the President’s decision to arrest and detain a judge – accusing him of acting undemocratically.

Among the protesters were members of the police force and yesterday they gathered outside the military headquarters where Mr Nasheed was seeking refuge, in the capital, Male. The mutinying police set fire to an office of Mr Nasheed’s party and seized control of the state broadcaster.

Soldiers fired tear gas at the police and demonstrators who besieged the military facilities, many of then chanting the name of Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, the former President who served for 30 years and whom Mr Nasheed beat in a 2008 election. A number of reports have suggested the military persuaded Mr Nasheed to step down.

Last night, the country’s Vice-President, Mohamed Waheed Hassan Manik, was sworn into office. It is expected he will oversee a coalition administration until elections are held.

Mr Nasheed was apparently in protective custody, something disputed by his brother, who told the BBC he was being held against his will.

Mr Nasheed could not be contacted. But a source close to the former President told The Independent that police had taken control of all television and radio stations and that officials who worked for Mr Nasheed were not being allowed to leave. “It’s a coup. Elements of the former regime brought down the country’s first democratically elected President,” said the source, who asked not to be identified.

Read more

Likes(0)Dislikes(0)

Maldivian couple held three months in Indian jail over visa issue

A Maldivian couple have been detained in India over a visa issue for more than three months, reports Haveeru.

The paper reported the couple’s son as telling the paper that his parents had asked another Maldivian woman to renew their visa when it was about to expire, and that they had stayed on relying on the documents that were handed to them by the woman. The documents were subsequently identified by Indian police as counterfeit.

The Foreign Ministry told the paper that officials at the Maldivian Embassy had visited the couple. Their case was currently in court and that they could not return to the Maldives until the court concluded the case, the Ministry said.

Likes(0)Dislikes(0)

Salafists taking root in Maldives amid toxic politics: Reuters

Few of the million or so tourists who visit the Maldives each year would catch even a whiff of the troubled politics or growing militant threat roiling the islands of one of the world’s most renowned get-away-from-it-all destinations, writes Bryson Hull for Reuters.

“Taking a page from the book of Gayoom, Nasheed ordered [Chief Judge Abdulla] Mohamed’s arrest and defied a Supreme Court release order, sparking more than three weeks of sometimes-violent protests by opposition parties that scented a chance for their own Arab Spring in the Indian Ocean.

The reason, Nasheed says, is because the judge, like the other 200-odd criminal court judges, was illegally sworn in for a life term and has blocked every attempt to bring multi-million-dollar corruption, rights abuse and criminal cases against Gayoom’s allies and relatives.

“Gayoom is running the judiciary,” Nasheed said. “When he lost the presidency, he was clever enough to carve out a territory and hide there, or get protected there. And none of the cases are moving.”

So to make good on his electoral promise to enact a new constitution and establish an independent judiciary, Nasheed says he has acted outside of it.

“You have to push everyone to the brink and tell them ‘You do this or we all fall’,” Nasheed told Reuters in an interview at the presidential bungalow in Male, the capital island.

“I think it would be so wrong of me not to tackle this simply because I might fall or simply because people may raise eyebrows.”

And it has done just that, drawing private diplomatic rebukes from Western nations which backed his ascendancy to lead the archipelago of 1,200 islands out of 30 years of Gayoom’s rule, which was widely criticised as dictatorial.

“It’s just indefensible. It’s almost like Nelson Mandela coming out and locking up all the white people,” a businessman based in Male who works with a government-linked company told Reuters, asking not to be identified.

But while the political fray goes on with all eyes on the 2013 presidential election, Maldivian intelligence officers and Western officials say hardline Salafist and Wahabist groups are gaining political ground in the more distant atolls and making a beachhead in Male.

The capital island is home to almost 200,000 of the Maldives’ 330,000 people, all Sunni Muslims. It is also home to the majority of the estimated 30,000 people on the islands who are addicted to heroin, according to UN estimates.

“It’s potentially a tropical Afghanistan. The same forces that gave rise to the Taliban are there – the drugs, the corruption and the behavior of the political class,” a Colombo-based Western ambassador who is responsible for the Maldives told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

“The Salafists are taking over atoll after atoll. They work on the ground and it is insidious. Nero is definitely fiddling while Rome burns.”‘

Read full story

Likes(0)Dislikes(0)