An 11 year-old child suffered burn injuries in a warehouse in Hithadhu, Seenu Atoll.
Police reported that 33 per-cent of the child’s body was burned during the incident.
The incident occurred while he was alone in the warehouse, reported police.
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(0)The Islamic Ministry has said that Rf600,000 of its Zakath fund will be allocated Quran classes, reported Haveeru.
Haveeru reported that the funds will be divided only among Quran classes that are operated by ministry scholars.
According to Haveeru, the Islamic Ministry said that all Quran classes have the opportunity to be taught by scholars of the ministry.
Haveeru reported that more than 80 Quran classes would be funded using the money.
(0)Dislikes(0)Civil society organisations in the Maldives are weak, according to Vice President Dr Mohamed Waheed Hassan, “and their ability to influence public policy is weak, if not nonexistent.”
Speaking at a seminar organised by the High Commission of Bangladesh in the Maldives titled “Democracy, Enterprise Building, Strengthening of Civil Society and Contributions of Expatriate Bangladeshi Workers in the Maldives”, Dr Waheed noted that NGOs in the Maldives “do not lobby for positions to change legislation or to influence public policy.”
Upholding democracy could not be left only to political and economic interests, he warned, suggesting that the government and international development partners needed to help civil society organisations strive towards independence.
Dr Waheed’s comments echo those of UN Resident Coordinator and UNDP Representative in the Maldives, Andrew Cox, in an interview with Minivan News last week.
“The UN can give out a grant of US$20,000 [to an NGO], and what they’ll do is buy a computer, pay for some travel and training and so on, then it’s gone and that’s it. What happens then?” Cox asked.
“This is a very important question that a lot of civil society organisation managers are thinking about – or at least I hope they are. Because in the end, international funding can’t be assured for anybody over time.”
Civil society organisations had “proliferated” in the Maldives in the last few years, “but now they need to move beyond that start up phase and become a bit more secure.”
Outside assistance could only go so far, he suggested, “and in the end civil society will only be strong if Maldivians embrace their own civil society and start paying for it. Some of that is about government funding, but much more of it is local philanthropy and gift giving – and earning the organisation that you’re associated with.”
It was imperative that civil society be healthy and self-sustaining, he noted, “because it gives you way of getting important things done in a manner separate to the politics.”
Ahmed Irfan from the Maldivian Democracy Network acknowledged that Maldivian civil society was weak and struggled for support, but noted that “on the other side, it is growing.”
“Local NGOs on many of the islands are actually supported quite well,” he observed, “but people aren’t used to the idea of funding nationwide NGOs. These groups, particularly those advocating human rights and democracy, are seen as being involved in partisan politics – people don’t understand that they’re not.”
Fathimath Nelfa from the Raajje Foundation, an NGO working to strengthen civil society in the Maldives, agreed that perceptions of partisanship were an issue, “especially for those NGOs promoting democracy and human rights, because these things were strongly promoted by the Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP).”
“Today a lot of civil society organisations are very critical of the government,” she said, adding that mistaken association with NGOs promoting these same values was “human nature” and would take time to fade.
“The more civil society is active, the more people will understand,” she said. “It will take time for some people’s perceptions to change – it took 4-5 years for people to know what democracy and human rights meant.”
Maldivian civil society “as a group” is not weak, Nelfa said, “but it needs resources, funding and especially technical assistance, such as more people trained in how to handle funds, write good proposals and liaise with donors. They don’t lack implementation.”
International organisations were “very important for this funding and technical assistance, particularly since the Maldives lacks the human resources,” she said.
For its part, civil society needs to proactively implement greater monitoring, financial auditing, evaluation of projects and reporting to donors, Nelfa suggested.
“Civil society organisations must become more disciplined,” she said. “If an NGO is disciplined and good at evaluating projects, then they should be able to use past donors as a reference.”
There were thousands of civil society organisations registered in the Maldives, but only a few were active in the media, she noted.
“Something like the bill on disability was very well discussed with civil society, and the media focus really publicised these organisations,” she said.
Correction: The Maldivian Detainee Network is now called the Maldivian Democracy Network. This has been amended.
(0)Dislikes(0)Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) MP Ahmed Hamza has claimed the constitution of the Maldives gives too many powers to parliamentarians, and accused them of ”demolishing” it.
MP Hamza said the constitution narrowed both presidential power and the power of the judiciary in favour of parliament.
”The powers are split into three so one power can compel another to act with responsibility,” MP Hamza said, ”but today we are seeing something different – we see the parliamentarians trying to take over the presidential powers.”
MP Hamza said the constitution very clearly stated the responsibilities of each power.
”However, the parliamentarians are trying to narrow the presidential powers,” MP Hamza said, ”for instance, some parliamentarians are trying to take the power of proposing names and appointing people for independent commissions, which actually is a power of the president.”
He said that the power of appointing people for the government’s media and Civil Service Commission (CSC) was also sought by the parliament.
He condemned a bill proposed to the parliament by Independent MP Mohamed Nasheed, which he claimed was trying to take over the power of appointing people for senior posts in the armed forces.
Deputy leader of the Dhivehi Rayyithunge Party (DRP) Umar Naseer said that what Hamza said was ”certainly true.”
”But he does not mean that DRP MPs, he was speaking about MDP MPs,” Umar said. ”There are such bills proposed by MDP MPs recently, but I can’t recall them immediately.”
Umar said that the presidential powers should be narrowed “because when a sword is given to a silly person, people should establish ways to manage it.”
(0)Dislikes(0)Former principal of Lale Youth International School, Serkan Akar, appeared in the criminal court yesterday and denied assault and battery charges made against him made by the Prosecutor General’s office.
In the court hearing, Akar denied the accusations and said charges against him were baseless, which included strangling and whipping a child with a belt. The charge sheet noted that two employees witnessed the shoving and heard the child being whipped, during the incident last Ramazan.
Akar’s defense lawyer Abdulla Shair told the judge the charges had many issues, such as no mention of a specific date on which the incident took place.
Deputy Prosecutor General Hussein Shameem said the PG had asked the court to summon the two witnesses.
The Human Rights Commission of the Maldives (HRCM) is currently compiling a case concerning abuse and other activities at Lale, which were reported by Minivan News last month. Akar has since tried to leave the country twice but was detained by immigration officials, who confiscated his passport.
President of HRCM Ahmed Saleem told Minivan News the Lale case was “very strange” and a “high priority” for the commission. A press conference concerning findings on the matter is imminent, Minivan News has been told.
The acting principal of the school Suleyman Atayev has told Minivan News that he is confident any allegations against the principal will be proven false.
Atayev was also critical of HRCM’s investigation: “They are refusing to tell us the nature of the complaints they are investigating. They are supposed be about human rights but they are not respecting ours.”
The Criminal Court of the Maldives had not responded to Minivan News at time of press.
(0)Dislikes(0)Ibrahim Waheed wears his many hats lightly, writes Jagdish Prasad in the Star of Mysore evening daily.
He is currently the Election Commissioner of Maldives. He is also the Prem Chand Fellow of the Sahitya Academy in Delhi. In between, he has been a musician with his own band (of course) when he was studying at the International University of Beirut in the late 1970s. He is also an acclaimed poet and a writer. He speaks several languages and best of all; he has travelled from Kerala to Delhi on a motorcycle in 21 days !
Star of Mysore met him at Dhvanyaloka on Bogadi Road here, at a fellowship organised by the Regional Sahitya Academy and The Literary Criterion Centre. Ibrahim Waheed is young, all of 49, portly and like all portly men (and women), light on his feet with a sense of humour.
Ibrahim Waheed begins tongue-in-cheek, “It is refreshing to come here where I am not recognised. In my country I am always recognised. In introducing me, you have labelled me as a writer. Now that is an honour for me… and a problem for you!” (he smiles and gently laughs).
(0)Dislikes(0)Independent MP Ibrahim Muthalib has forwarded a no-confidence motion against Education Minister Dr Musthafa Luthfy to parliament.
MP Muthalib presented a petition to forward the motion against Education minister, which was signed by five independent MPs, three Dhivehi Rayyithunge Party (DRP) MPs and two People’s Alliance (PA) MPs.
On May 19, MP Muthalib announced he would file a no-confidence motion against Education Minister Dr Musthafa Luthfy over the ministry steering committee’s recommendation to make Islam and Dhivehi optional subjects for grades 11 and 12.
A crowd of people who did not claim to be representing any political party or NGO conducted a series of protests over the decision outside Education Minister Luthfy’s house.
Luthfy told Minivan News that he had not officially received the news yet.
”I also heard that a such motion was presented to parliament, but the parliament has not affirmed it,” said Luthfy.
”I heard that there were three issues highlighted in the petition, ” he explained.
”The first issue they claimed was that Kulliathul Dhuraasathul Islaamiyya school was dissolved, which is literally not true,” Luthfy said. ”The school was not dissolved, rather we planned to place it under the Maldives College of Higher Education when it becomes a university.”
Luthfy said the second issue was a claim that it was his fault that Arabiyya School’s walls fell down.
”The third point was because the Education Ministry has decided to make Dhivehi and Islam optional at A-Level,” he said, ”but this was just a suggestion made by the ministry’s steering committee.”
Muthalib recently said that if the education system implemented the steering committee’s recommendation, students would be moved away from religion and their mother tongue.
”I cannot support such a curriculum that discourages the use of our own culture and language,” he said.
The government meanwhile launched a spirited defense of the Education Minister.
“This is a part of DRP’s plan to pick off ministers one-by-one,” he said. “First they plan to try and bring down the education minister, and if that succeeds they will then go after other ministers. This no-confidence motion is a shallow attempt to destabilise the government and the country,” said the President’s Press Secretary, Mohamed Zuhair.
“The DRP is claiming the government is trying to ‘undermine Islam,’ because an Education Ministry has floated the idea of making the study of Dhivehi and Islam, along with all other subjects, optional for school grades 11 and 12,” he said.
“DRP, led by its dubiously elected leader Thasmeen Ali, has demonstrated time and again that they will do and say anything to try and damage the government”, Zuhair said.
“There are some good, intelligent and responsible people in the DRP. Sadly, under the current leadership, these people have been marginalized and the hot heads have taken over the party.
“The DRP have no policies; they have no vision; they have no substance. It seems their sole guiding principle is to oppose anything and everything that the government is trying to achieve.”
He further accused the concerned parliamentarians “of using Islam as a political tool.”
”I think despite being an Independent MP Muthalib acts in the parliament with the spirit of an opposition MP,” he added.
(0)Dislikes(0)Deputy leader of the main opposition party Dhivehi Rayyithunge Party (DRP), Umar Naseer, has said he is confident of surviving any no-confidence motion put forward to terminate him from his post of party leadership.
Daily newspaper Miadhu reported that a DRP member as claiming that a no-confidence motion to remove Umar Naseer from his post had been presented to the party’s council.
Naseer said he had also heard rumors of a no-confidence motion brewing against him.
”But then I clarified it with [party leader] Ahmed Thasmeen Ali, and he assured me that no such motion was planned or discussed,” Naseer said. ”So it was just a rumor being circulated.”
He acknowledged, however, that a no-confidence motion to sack him was ”very likely to happen”.
For such a motion to succeed however, a two-thirds majority would be needed, and Naseer said he was confident that such a majority could not be reached in order to sack him.
Prior to the DRP Congress Naseer was very vocal about the need for primary elections within the party to select its presidential candidate, however the party opted to retain its system of automatically putting the party leader forward as a candidate.
”There have been no internal splits in DRP,” Naseer said, ”but as we are a large political party, we do have some disagreements over some issues between different people.”
”The biggest disagreement between us is the issue of primaries,” he explained: ”I want to hold primary elections six months prior of the next presidential election.”
He said that there were “lots of people” who supported the primaries.
”I did not discuss this with [Thasmeen], I do not know what his side is on this,” Naseer said. ”During the last congress, he said he did not support holding primaries.”
Naseer said he wanted the DRP’s presidential ticket open for every member, which he believed would increase popular support for the party.
”Many prosperous people would join the party if we kept the party’s presidential ticket open, that way we can strengthen both our financial position and political position,” Naseer explained.
He said that an issue of unpaid salaries to some DRP staff members was ongoing, but added that it was an internal issue he did want to share with the media.
”The biggest issue for me, being the deputy leader of DRP, is the challenges I am being faced by the government,” he said, adding that this included ”torture, tear gas being arrested. ”
He said that while he would try to make the party’s presidential ticket open to everyone, “I have not decided yet whether or not to run for the next presidential election myself.”
(0)Dislikes(0)The Local Council Elections Bill, adopted by parliament on May 4, will potentially exclude one fourth of the population from voting unless it is amended, according to a statement from Transparency Maldives (TM).
The bill, which has been sent back to parliament by the president and is now being reviewed by committee, required people to vote in their home constituency and contained no capacity for remote voting. With many islanders working in the capital Male and other locations around the Maldives such as resorts and industrial islands, TM warned that nearly 55,000 people could be restricted from voting.
“Our basic concern is that 25 percent of the voting population will lose their right to vote unless this bill is amended,” said Aiman Rasheed from TM.
People had the option to travel, he acknowledged, “but pragmatically speaking that is not going to happen. If everyone in Male’ left to go vote, entire operations would shut down.”
DRP MP Ahmed Nihan explained that the sheer scale of the Local Council Elections, with potentially upwards of thousands of candidates across the many island councils, was a logistical and administrative challenge the independent Elections Commission (EC) would be unable to deal with.
“I strongly believe the EC does not have have capacity to conduct such an election with thousands of candidates. Their budget for holding elections in 2010 is around Rf 22 million,” he said.
“We are genuinely concerned about this election because our constitution says we have to hold it – on July 1 last year – and we are far behind. If government is genuine, we should do everything to make it as inclusive as possible.”
Nihan noted that the government had put forward the bill at the same time as the decentralisation bill, and criticised the ruling MDP for miring it in “many other amendments”. DRP had passed the Local Council Elections Bill “just as the Attorney General sent it.”
MDP MP Eva Abdullah observed that “MDP proposed an amendment but DRP shot it down because they had the majority at the time. Now the opposition has conceded the voting issue, we are hoping this will be quite speedy.”
Nihan however said “it was a DRP idea to make it more inclusive.”
Rasheed from TM said he would not comment on the politics of the bill, but noted that “Both major parties want to remove the restrictions on people’s ability to vote.”
“We understand the administration and logistical challenges, but there are alternatives like postal ballots. During previous elections the EC has been proactive in finding a solution,” he said.
The EC said it would not comment, other than to say it was “prepared to run the election however the Majlis decides.”
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