Democracy Under Water

‘Dictatorship is coming back to the Maldives and democracy is slipping away’

Decca Aitkenhead, The Guardian

Sunday 1 April 2012 13.03 EDT

Nasheed is no stranger to high drama, but even by his own standards the past two months have been quite extraordinary. Born into a middle-class Maldives family in 1967, and educated in England, on graduation Nasheed – known as Anni – returned to a country in the grip of what many regarded as a dictatorship under Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. Nasheed set up a magazine, began publishing articles accusing the regime of corruption and brutality, and was promptly arrested, imprisoned, held in solitary confinement and tortured. Jailed 16 separate times, he missed the births of his two daughters and became an Amnesty International Prisoner of Conscience, before fleeing into exile in 2003.

But after 30 years in office, in 2008 Gayoom yielded to pressure and held the country’s first democratic elections, which swept “the Mandela of the Maldives” to power. Quickly claimed by David Cameron as “my new best friend”, the young president became an international folk hero, and the face of a nation that, as he warned the UN, will be underwater “before the end of this century” unless the world acts now on climate change.

The Maldives’ transition to democracy was, however, ominously incomplete. According to Nasheed, elements still loyal to Gayoom were undermining reforms, and in response to repeated constitutional crises many opposition MPs and officials were arrested and detained during Nasheed’s administration. In January, frustrated by the judiciary’s attempts to thwart his reforms, Nasheed ordered the arrest of chief justice Abdulla Mohamed. Protesters loyal to the old regime took to the streets, supported by factions within the police, and on 7 February, after weeks of unrest, Nasheed was confronted by armed military officers. “There were guns all around me and they told me they wouldn’t hesitate to use them if I didn’t resign,” he told reporters that evening. It wasn’t a resignation, he says simply, but a coup d’état.