A crisis is brewing in the paradise islands of the Maldives.The government, led by the nation’s first ever democratically elected president, is said to be undermining the freshly minted constitution, while there are fears that Muslim extremists might insinuate themselves into power. The judiciary is said to be under pressure from the government.
The country also faces dangers of a different nature, most notably global warming and the rising sea levels that threaten, literally, to drown this nation of 350,000 people. There are more than 1,000 islands, of which just 200 have people living on them, and none of them rises higher than 2.3 metres above sea level at its highest point. That is lower than the men’s world high jump record of 2.45 metres.
On a happier note, the people of the Maldives pay no income tax; the government generates revenue by selling fish and leasing land to the tourist industry instead. And the language, unique to the islands, has no word for ‘hello’, ‘goodbye’ and ‘please’ – everybody knows everybody else, so there is no need for formality.
So what has precipitated the current political situation, which some say is threatening the rule of law in the country?
The country’s president, Mohamed Nasheed, has been in office since 2008, the year that a new constitution was ratified separating the legislative, judicial and executive branches of government. Nasheed, dubbed by some the ‘Mandela of the Maldives’, was a prisoner of conscience under his predecessor, president Gayoom, and was widely expected to be a model defender of the new spirit of democracy.
Critics of his regime, however, suggest that his government has deprived parliament of information, ordered the arrests of opposition MPs, and connived in attacks on the judiciary.
Dr Hassan Saeed visited the Law Society to draw all this to my attention. Saeed was the attorney general when Gayoom was president and when the current president, Nasheed, was repeatedly jailed for political dissent. Saeed was also an unsuccessful presidential candidate in the 2008 elections, and is the leader of a political party opposed to president Nasheed’s Maldivian Democratic Party.
Saeed would like an independent delegation of UK lawyers to visit his country and report on what is happening there. British and Commonwealth lawyers and academics helped draft the Maldives’ 2008 constitution. They should share his indignation, he says, at what he claims is the government’s wilful undermining of that constitution.
So far, so convincing – except what does the present attorney general of the Maldives, Husnu Suood, have to say about this? He was in London last week and I was able to speak to him at the Maldives High Commission.
Suood’s version of events was very different from that told to me by his predecessor. Suood told me president Nasheed is frustrated at every turn by the opposition parties in parliament, who are in the majority and block his every policy. ‘They want the government to fail to deliver what it has promised. It’s only through president Nasheed’s failure that the opposition will ever regain the presidency,’ Suood said.
Muslim fundamentalists are exerting an increasing influence, with the result that parliament is bringing a vote of no confidence against those ministers of state who have made Muslim studies at school optional (rather than compulsory), and who have normalised relationships with Israel. They are also angered by the privatisation of the airport because, they reason, Israel would now be able to use it to launch bombing raids against their Muslim neighbours. ‘Some of us are better at geography than that,’ Suood said.
Suood said there were ‘teething problems in the new democracy, but he was ‘optimistic that the rule of law will win through in the end.’
My final question was to ask Suood what the international legal community could do to help the Maldives. ‘We would like a delegation of lawyers, led by the Law Society of England and Wales, to visit the Maldives and report on the situation there,’ he said.
So it seems that Suood and his predecessor at least agree on one thing. Perhaps international lawyers should take them up on their offer and find out the facts behind what appears to be trouble in paradise.
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