White sand, crystal water, surreal sea life: that’s why people from all over the world visit Maldives. How about repression, corruption, abduction and political murder? Tourists at pristine resort enclaves may come away completely oblivious to complex political and social struggles played out behind the scenes in the island republic. They may not know, for example, about decades of despotic and dissent-stifling rule by President Mamoon Abdul Gayoom, temporarily reversed in 2008 through election of Mohamed Nasheed, leader of the reform-minded National Democratic Party (NDP), as president. Nasheed had spent many stays in prison, where he suffered repeated torture at the hands of Gayoom’s goons, for daring to speak out against both the dictatorial political order and its creepingly Islamist social agenda. Visitors today can scarcely miss the head scarves worn by all women working at the airport.
For more than three years, Nasheed presided over a sharply divided nation. Gayoom’s cronies resented his efforts to investigate and prosecute corruption and human rights abuses. Religiously fervent citizens judged Nasheed weak on protecting Islamic values and culture. Things boiled over in early 2012 when Nasheed’s government arrested the chief criminal court judge for obstructing prosecution of corruption and human rights cases. Calling the arrest unconstitutional, Nasheed’s opponents took to the streets in protest. Police declined to intervene against the protesters. Nasheed resigned from presidency, but subsequently claimed he was forced to do so in a military coup led by his vice president, Mohammed Waheed, who immediately assumed the presidency.
Amnesty International observes that police carried out “beatings, arbitrary detentions, attacks on the injured in hospitals and torture”, in connection with this change in government. Later that year, Waheed arrested Nasheed and charged him with ‘terrorism’ in arresting the judge. Terrorism’s definition in the pertinent law was more or less what you would expect: nothing there about arresting someone, even illegally. But the court found Nasheed guilty for an act of kidnapping and sentenced him in 2013 to 13 years in prison. Another presidential election later that year yielded more first-round votes for Nasheed than for any other candidate. International election observers pronounced that round free and fair, but the Maldivian supreme court annulled it, alleging irregularities. Two of the MDP’s rival parties then formed a coalition to elect Abdullah Yameen, Gayoom’s half-brother, as the new president.
[pullquote]Political skullduggery in Maldives these days may extend well beyond routine repression and corruption, all the way to forced disappearance and murder[/pullquote]
Yameen’s reign looks a lot like a restoration of Gayoom’s: dissident politicians and journalists in jail, accelerated Islamism as the social agenda. The wider world is taking notice. In a detailed study running over 100 pages last fall, the United Nations Working Group for Arbitrary Detention pronounced Nasheed’s conviction lawless and politically motivated. Last autumn, the European Parliament passed a resolution urging the European Union to impose asset freezes and travel bans on Maldivian officials and their leading business community supporters unless Nasheed and other political prisoners gain prompt release. In January, United Kingdom Prime Minister David Cameron announced that his government might impose targeted sanctions, perhaps like those the European Parliament recommends, on Maldives if it fails to revoke Nasheed’s jail sentence and free other political prisoners. In February, the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group called for release of political prisoners and reforms to secure an independent judiciary. In April, the United States Senate followed suit with a unanimous resolution denouncing due process failures in Nasheed’s conviction and calling for release of the former president and other political prisoners.
Those other political prisoners include Sheikh Imran Abdulla, leader of the major Maldivian Islamic political party, convicted earlier this year of ‘terrorism’ for leading an anti-government rally in May of last year. The U.S. State Department characterises Abdulla’s trial as “seriously flawed”. Another political prisoner, arguably, is Yameen’s former vice-president Ahmed Adeeb. He sits in jail under investigation for purportedly attempting to assassinate Yameen in an incident last September of an ‘explosion’ on the presidential yacht. Yameen was unhurt, but came up accusing Adeeb of sponsoring placement of a bomb. Video of the incident shows a burst or flare in the yacht that looks to me like an electrical short-out, not like a bomb and hardly something you could even call an explosion. The interesting question might be whether Yameen staged the whole incident so as to provide pretext for arresting Adeeb, a potential rival, or merely took advantage of an electrical short or similar mishap to accomplish the same purpose. With Nasheed, Abdulla and Adeeb all behind bars, Yameen stood well along toward wiping rival and opposition leadership off the board. Early this year, in a smart public relations move, Yameen authorised Nasheed’s ‘temporary’ release to visit the UK for treatment of his torture-afflicted back. Nasheed promptly applied in the UK for political asylum, which was granted him in May. Problem solved, from Yameen’s standpoint.
Repression of Maldivian dissent shows no signs of abating. Last November, Yameen declared a 30-day ‘emergency’ authorising extraordinary police powers, just on the eve of a planned anti-government rally. He relinquished the emergency decree when mass public discontent seemed to subside. Critics contend that 1,800 political prisoners currently languish in Yameen’s jails. Yameen recently ordered closure of the only opposition print newspaper in Maldives. Some 84 percent of journalists report having been threatened. The opposition complains of ongoing threats against civic groups. Late last year, the legislature passed an ‘anti-terrorism’ law even more draconian than the one used to convict Nasheed and Sheik Abdulla. Besides continuing to define ‘terrorism’ very broadly, it allows the president to declare any organisation a terrorist group, and thereby threaten any member with up to 15 years in prison. Authorities can prosecute anyone giving a speech deemed supportive of ‘terrorism’, along with anyone in media who reports on such a speech. Suspects can be held for four days without a court hearing and can meet with their lawyers only with police present.President Yameen now stands under heavy suspicion of corruption. A February audit exposed embezzlement of some $80 million from the state-owned Maldives Marketing and Public Relations Corporation. Though Yameen calls his jailed former vice-president Adeeb the chief thief, critics accuse the president of complicity and financial benefit in that crime and others, pointing to his frequent trips to Singapore as his mechanism for laundering pilfered funds through banks.
Political skullduggery in Maldives these days may extend well beyond routine repression and corruption, all the way to forced disappearance and murder.
Ahmed Rilwan, a journalist with an online opposition outlet called ‘The Maldives Independent’ (formerly ‘Minivan News’), vanished from view one night back in August 2014, possibly at the hands of knife-wielding gang members, according to sketchy eyewitness accounts. A big theme of Rilwan’s reporting had been murky intersections among politics, criminal gangs and Islamic extremism. Official investigation of Rilwan’s disappearance dragged on inconclusively until this past April, when police finally announced findings that Rilwan had been abducted by members of the Kudu Heinveiru gang, including figures named Alif Rauf and Mohamed Suaid. Suaid had been arrested early in the investigation but was later released.
Authorship and motive for the crime may never come clear. Was it simply criminal vendetta for unflattering media exposure? Was it in part anti-secularist jihad from an increasingly Wahhabi criminal underworld? Last but not least, was Yameen somehow involved? The dilatory police investigation may bespeak official footdragging. More than a year after Rilwan’s disappearance, Yameen’s home ministry announced
a person of interest in the investigation—you guessed it: deposed vice-president Adeeb, who appears increasingly as a donkey on whom can be pinned all tales, if you can pardon the pun. The purported motive was that Rilwan was supposedly investigating corruption involving Adeeb.
[pullquote]Tourists at pristine resort enclaves may come away completely oblivious to complex political and social struggles played out behind the scenes in the island republic[/pullquote]
Earlier, the home ministry implicated Aslif Rauf, brother of Alif in the Kudu Heinveiru gang’s leadership, with respect to another notorious crime: the brutal 2012 machete murder of Dr. Afrasheem Ali, a member of parliament. Though a member of Yameen’s political party, Ali was also an Islamic scholar increasingly disenchanted with Yameen’s alleged underworld connections. Was he also a critic of the Wahhabist agenda? Police picked up Aslif as a suspect soon after the murder but released him, supposedly for lack of evidence.
Arrested, convicted and ultimately sentenced to death for the murder was Hussain Humam, a thug with a history of violence and mental instability. Yameen’s government insisted early on that Ali’s murder was politically motivated, but no political or other motive has ever been pinned on Humam, other than that someone possibly paid him. He confessed to the murder during police ‘interrogation’, then retracted his confession at trial. Further confession and retraction ensued with increasing signs of mental illness during the course of his appeal. He now stands to be the first Maldivian to be executed in some 60 years. Prior to trial, Humam’s main alibi witness turned up dead in a park. Critics castigate Humam’s trial for grave due process deficiencies, including failure to allow testimony from defense witnesses and inattention to inconsistencies among government witnesses. If Humam was not intellectual author of the murder, who was? Yameen’s government must count as a suspect, along with the Kudu Heinveiru gang, possibly harboring some kind of Wahhabi motivation.
After an apparent rejection of his criminal ways, Aslif later became a public convert to Wahhabism. He left Maldives early this year with some gang buddies, purportedly to join ISIS fighters in Syria, where he may have been killed in a mid-May firefight. His brother Alif may have trod the same path. According to informed observers, some 200 Maldivians have to date joined jihadi forces in Syria, ominously marking the islands as fertile recruitment territory. In background to this, the Saudi and Maldivian governments seem increasingly bound up with each other’s agendas. Over the past two years, Saudis have opened an embassy in Maldives for the first time and Yameen has paid three visits to the prophet’s homeland. Earlier this year, the two governments signed agreements, whereby the Saudis would finance mosque-building and imam-led religious instruction in the islands. The Saudis have pledged $1.2 million for mosques, and $1.5 million for hospitals and other healthcare infrastructure, along with $1.0 million for the Islamic ministry’s charitable fund. In May, Yameen announced that a new international airport terminal would be built by the Bin Laden family firm. Rumor has it that the terminal, perhaps even the whole airport, will be named after the family.
(For tourism’s sake, maybe the name should be the ‘Not That Particular Bin Laden International Terminal’.) Also in May, Yameen renounced 40-year-old diplomatic ties with Iran, citing the Shi’ite republic for threatening peace and security in the region. This, of course, follows the Saudi renunciation of relations with Iran earlier this year. As liberal-minded Maldivians recoil in dismay and disgust, cynics contend that Yameen holds no patriotic concern for Maldives whatsoever and will depart when his Singapore bank accounts grow fat enough. Calling Riyadh.