Paul Moocraft, author of Inside the Danger Zones: Travels to Arresting Places, on how religion was used to depose Mohamed Nasheed, 'Asia's Mandela', as president of the Maldives.
[caption id="attachment_5096" align="alignright" width="300" caption="The future president, centre, with young human rights activists, facing riot police (credit Paul Moorcraft). "]
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The Maldives used to be a paradise for tourists but not its inhabitants. Honeymooners went there to explore each other, not the country. Until 2008 it was ruled by the longest-surviving dictator in Asia. Then a diminutive but charismatic human rights activist, Mohamed Nasheed (known to everyone as ‘Anni’), defeated the old dictator, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, in the country’s first free elections.
Just 41, the young president was compared with Barack Obama, though Mohamed Nasheed – let’s call him Anni, now he’s no longer president – told me of his respect for Mahatma Gandhi. I got to know Anni when he was an opposition leader who had been imprisoned multiple times, sometimes in solitary confinement by the Gayoom regime. He was tortured not least by being continuously chained for weeks at a time to a radiator, next to a loud generator, and being fed scraps laced with broken glass.
I made a number of TV documentaries about him and his beautiful country, an archipelago of over 1,200 islands, although only 200 are habitable. Surprisingly for a 99 per cent Sunni Islamic country, it also had one of the highest divorce rates in the world.
Still, for a hack who had spent too much time in dry Islamic countries, under Sharia law, it was possible to get a beer, not in the capital, but in a tourist hotel on an island a few minutes’ launch trip away.
I was always being promised by assorted warlords, guerrilla chiefs and dodgy politicians that I would get the first interview in the presidential palace should the hopeful contenders ever make it to the top. Anni had duly promised he would give me the first TV interview on his first day in power – but only when I comprehensively overwhelmed his modesty and asked him to imagine the day.
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This new president kept his word, however. At just after 9 o’clock on his first day as president, we chatted in his office, with furious ambassadors from major states pacing outside. The islands are strategically placed amid major (oil) shipping lanes, of interest now particularly to India and China. That’s why the Brits colonised the island in the first place. So I particularly enjoyed seeing the British High Commissioner fidgeting impatiently outside the door.
‘Not many Islamic countries have had free and fair elections to form a multi-party democracy,’ Anni said. Despite his own brutal mistreatment he preached forgiveness to the old regime, because it was an Islamic principle and practical politics. He said that Nelson Mandela and the Truth and Reconciliation process were his inspiration.
The previous regime had emptied the treasury. ‘Our finances are in bad shape,’ he admitted. ‘We can’t consolidate democracy if we can’t pay wages.’
I did point out that the cash-crunched ex-colonial power, Britain, had precious little money to extend a pay-day loan.
I’d got a scoop, but I still stuck my neck out further. ‘Before you sack your police chief, please order him to take me tomorrow to the island where you were imprisoned, so we can film your cell and the conditions in the prison,’ I asked.
The next day that all happened. I asked a female friend to tag along. She had been a local journalist who had been tortured in the same island prison. I took her with me as a catharsis for her and to make sure none of the jailors pulled the wool over our eyes.
Anni would have trouble keeping his head above water ─ literally. He faced not only a huge task of rebuilding his economy, but his country was also sinking beneath him. Anni became a green icon world-wide, not least because he held one of his cabinet meetings – underwater – with his ministers wearing scuba gear to publicise the dangers of global warming. He talked to me about eventually relocating his 350,000 citizens to Sri Lanka, India or even Australia – as his country sank beneath the waves. ‘I don’t want my grandchildren living in a tent in a refugee camp,’ he said.
The president’s victory in 2008 was a beacon to the Islamic world. Free elections and multi-party democracy, without a drop of blood spilled, and not a single Western soldier swaggering around: an interesting lesson for the regime-changers of Iraq, Afghanistan and now Iran and Syria.
So why was such an inspirational leader deposed this week?
His supporters claim he was ousted in a military and police coup-cum-mutiny, although it was not that simple. The main issue was that he won the presidency but his reformist party was in a minority in parliament – Gayoom’s supporters were in the majority. As in France or the US, ‘co-habitation’ (like coalition) is difficult. Also the judiciary, largely composed of ill-educated placemen appointed by the old dictator, was often at loggerheads with the new president. Tensions came to a head in the last month when the army detained a senior criminal court judge.
Economic factors were also in play – like Obama, the new president created a crisis of expectations. Job prospects, especially for the young, did not suddenly improve when he took over. Even some reformers felt that the human rights activist of old was being heavy handed with his political (or family/clan) opponents. In such a small community family spats became mini civil wars. The previous president, Gayoom, had proclaimed the importance of family, but in this case it meant his family – much of the tourist revenue had poured into his family and cronies’ coffers. Externally, Gayoom used to tell the West that he was a bastion against Jihadism. He played the secular moderate card. Internally, Gayoom warned that all opposition meant an invasion of Christian missionaries (even though all opposition people were all 100 per cent Muslims). Domestically, he relied upon his knowledge of the Koran to appease the bearded crazies.
So Gayoom’s supporters encouraged the Islamist right-wing to attack Anni as far too secular (even planting booze in Anni’s home, just after he was taken away). The Islamist parties had never achieved much in electoral terms, but they were influential – as the increasing use of the veil indicated. And even foreign intelligence agencies fretted about Jihadist growth in some of the outlying islands.
Street protests in the last few weeks were met by police crackdowns, and then old-regime elements of the police joined the protesters. Anni explained that his only recourse was to call in the small and divided army, or resign. It was a bloodless coup because Anni refused to rule with an iron fist – that’s what he went in to politics to stop.
Ex-President Nasheed may decide to fight in the forthcoming election or not, but the forces of the old regime led by Gayoom, an Egyptian-trained cleric, in alliance with the fundamentalists, could defeat the more secular reformists. At present the deposed leader is under effective house arrest, enjoying the ‘protection’ of the army.
Anni became a world icon not least for the environmentalists. Cameraman Irwin Armstrong and I contributed a little of our riot footage to a stirring movie about his achievements, The Island President, which recently won awards at the Sundance and Toronto film festivals.
Perhaps the visionary leader became more popular abroad than at home; a sad comment on a man who promised so much. Lesser men are likely to replace the icon.