[Gangs who Gayoom had politicized to do his
bidding have become radicalized, too, and Wahhabist extremists are mirroring
the flags and rhetoric of the Islamic State. Nasheed says more than 200
Maldivians are now fighting with IS in Syria and Iraq. Hundreds marched through
Male in September, calling for hardline shariah. "To hell with
democracy," one placard read.]
[Gangs who Gayoom had politicized to do his
bidding have become radicalized, too, and Wahhabist extremists are mirroring
the flags and rhetoric of the Islamic State. Nasheed says more than 200
Maldivians are now fighting with IS in Syria and Iraq. Hundreds marched through
Male in September, calling for hardline shariah. "To hell with
democracy," one placard read.]
 |
| An aerial view of Maldivian capital Male |
LONDON: Three years ago, Mohamed Nasheed had
the dubious honour of appearing on David Cameron's guestlist for a hypothetical
"dream" stag weekend. After naming Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and
Nicolas Sarkozy during a magazine Q&A, the PM added: "My new best
friend is the president of the Maldives. He's great. That's a weird mixture,
isn't it?"
Weird, perhaps, but indicative of the
standing of the leader of one of the world's smallest nations (Croydon is more
populous than the Maldives, an archipelago of more than 1,000 islands and
350,000 people off southern India). With an eye for headlines and oration that
made Obama look amateurish, Nasheed had elevated a sinking country to the top
of the global climate change debate.
A year after his 2008 election, he convened
an underwater cabinet meeting to sign a document demanding cuts in carbon
emissions before the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen.
A year after his 2008 election, he convened
an underwater cabinet meeting to sign a document demanding cuts in carbon
emissions before the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen.
"This is what will happen to the
Maldives if climate change is not checked," he warned world leaders as
parrotfish and TV cameras circled. The stunt made front pages everywhere,
fuelling Nasheed's battle to save a nation. He travelled to Copenhagen with a
film crew who made an award-winning documentary — "The Island
President". Asked while still in scuba gear what would happen if the
superpowers failed to commit to emissions targets, he replied: "We are
going to die".
Fast forward to last month and Nasheed sits
alone in the small courtyard of a borrowed house in Male, the Maldives' crazy,
cramped capital. Walled by the rising Indian Ocean, the booming city of 150,000
people is only half the length of its own runway, which forms an artificial
island to serve the tourists who transfer to luxury resorts (none of them take
the public ferry to Male). Two protection officers guard the unmarked door to
the house, where Nasheed has retreated after his office was firebombed in
September.
"I get a death threat almost every
week," says Nasheed, the leader of the Maldivian Democratic Party, which
is now in opposition. "They say they will kill me, they will kill my
family and sometimes they go into graphic explanations of how they will do
it." He holds out his phone. "It's not very reassuring to wake up to
a text saying that someone's going to murder you, but that's what we've been
living with."
What went wrong? How did a feted president
once compared to Nelson Mandela go from Cameron's guestlist to a safehouse in
Male, and what does it mean for his country's perilous position in the race to
slow down climate change? To answer these questions, I came to meet the former
president as well as journalists and activists who warn that politics and
religious extremism are not only threatening democracy and lives here but, as
one editor puts it, "forcing the environmental issue on to the
fossil-fuelled back burner".
I would then travel to a resort to join
ministers and big brains in ecology and economics at an unusual conference.
Hosted by an eccentric old-Etonian and a former Swedish supermodel, and chaired
by the renowned environmentalist Jonathon Porritt, the 'barefoot symposium'
would put the environment on the solar-powered front burner. In a paradise
nation propped up by luxury tourism, where oceans divide the dream and the
reality, its incongruity would be very Maldivian.
As a young journalist and pro-democracy
activist during the 1990s, Nasheed was repeatedly detained and tortured by the
state at an island prison. Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, an oppressive, religious leader,
was halfway through his 30-year rule. Nasheed's stunning victory in 2008, in
the first democratic elections, prompted the Mandela comparisons. However, his
doomsaying and Western embrace gave new ammunition to old enemies, who depicted
him as un-Islamic and unpatriotic. In February 2012, he resigned "at
gunpoint ... had I not done so I would have been mobbed and in the process we
would have lost at least 100 lives," he says.
Nasheed, who is 47 and has a degree in
Maritime Studies from the former Liverpool Polytechnic, plays tennis most
mornings and is still free to travel. He gives speeches and receives awards for
his environmental campaigning. The democratic framework he helped to build
remains, too, but now he says it is teetering.
Gangs who Gayoom had politicized to do his
bidding have become radicalized, too, and Wahhabist extremists are mirroring
the flags and rhetoric of the Islamic State. Nasheed says more than 200
Maldivians are now fighting with IS in Syria and Iraq. Hundreds marched through
Male in September, calling for hardline shariah. "To hell with
democracy," one placard read.
The new president, who has now ruled for a
year after Nasheed narrowly lost disputed elections, is Abdulla Yameen,
Gayoom's half-brother. Nasheed believes Yameen is at best powerless to stop the
rise of extremism, which he says is infiltrating the police, military and
government. "It is likely that they might actually take us over," he
says.
"If they don't do it now, they're going
to do it tomorrow or next month." What will happen to him? "Well,
they will murder everyone, that's what they do. But we we will stay here until
it's all over and done with."
He would die rather than flee? "I'll stay
here," he says. "I can't go, there's so much expectation on me. We
must stick our ground."
But for how long will that ground survive? A
view out of a plane window reveals the beauty and madness of Maldivian
geography. Its islands, some of which barely break water, are horribly
vulnerable. The highest point in the country is just 2.4 metres above water.
Dolphins can leap higher.
Global sea levels have risen by 20cm since
records began in 1880, buoyed by melting ice and water expansion caused by
rising temperatures. The worst predictions of further rises are just under two
metres by the end of this century — game over for the Maldives and coastlines
everywhere.
Small nations can only adapt or shout at the
people with the power to cut global carbon emissions. By shouting so powerfully
as president, Nasheed focused the minds of world leaders on a nation with a
death sentence. Now, as upheaval here threatens that influence, the islands
continue to act as a microcosm of global threats. Yet leaders including Cameron
and Obama still address climate change at their political peril — or not at
all.
Despite Nasheed's efforts, Copenhagen failed.
"If countries are bogged down with Islamic radicals or little conflicts as
the preoccupation of humanity, then you are unable to get a view of the core
problem," he says. "How will this planet survive?"
Palm trees and black magic have become
unlikely symbols in this fight. As a child, Nasheed remembers reaching his
friend's house from his own home by climbing between trees, one of which
survives in the courtyard where he now sits. But the city's population has
boomed and Male is now a tight grid of choked streets.
"The mango trees went first, then the
breadfruit trees, and the fig trees," Nasheed recalls. To restore a glimmer
of green, his administration planted dozens of roadside palms. Last month, they
were hacked down. The government accused Nasheed's party of having used them to
curse President Yameen, who had been ill. "They decided that our fortunes
were linked to the growth of these trees," Nasheed says. "They
realized they couldn't suppress us, so they cut them down."
If not always superstitious (black magic is
part of sufist Muslim belief here) the current leadership is routinely
suspicious of anything linked to Nasheed or his administration. The former
president and activists on the island identify a pattern of anti-Nasheedism,
which therefore inspires anti-liberalism, a challenge to democracy,
isolationism and, to some extent, a denial of climate change in a place where
it should be impossible to ignore.
A short walk from Nasheed's temporary office,
Dan Bosley and Zaheena Rasheed work on the top floor of a non-descript
building. The young journalist from Cheshire and his Maldivian deputy edit
Minivan News, an English-language website ('minivan' means independent in
Dhivehi, the Maldivian language). "Future stories" are scrawled on a
whiteboard — "whale shark research", "gang rape",
"scooter stats". Next to it, by the unmarked door, a
fingerprint-scanning lock is about to be installed.
In September, a gangster left a machete
buried in the door of the old office, forcing the team to move. One of Bosley's
reporters received a text that day: "You will be killed or disappeared
next".
A month earlier, a Minivan News reporter
disappeared. Ahmed Rilwan had been working on stories about corruption and
extremism. A private investigation by a Scottish agency, commissioned by the
Maldivian Democracy Network, found evidence that he had been abducted by
radicalized gangs.
"This exposes so many things," says
Bosley, aged 30, who has taped the fingertips on his left hand to stop him
pulling out his beard — a result of stress. He has lost hope of seeing Rilwan
alive, he says, or of the authorities doing anything meaningful to investigate
his abduction. "It shows a lack of accountability, potential complicity,
lawlessness — and that anything like this could happen at any time."
Violence and intimidation now occur with
alarming regularity, and extremism links them. On the day we meet, Rasheed,
aged 27, has been interviewing an activist who has been beaten up by a gang
after they forced him to give up the password for his pro-democracy Facebook
page. Government ministers have been photographed alongside gang members at
public events.
"They have nothing to show for one year
in power," says Rasheed, who has been threatened herself. "They need
something as propaganda and the strongest tool they have is Islam. But if
they're unable to pacify the Islamists or keep them on-side, this government is
going to fall as well."
In the meantime, the environment is becoming
a secondary victim. One of Rilwan's last stories was about the prospecting for
oil and gas in the Maldives by a German research vessel. When Nasheed was
president, he pledged to make the country carbon neutral by 2020. Now the
government talks openly about drilling into the reefs.
"Because Nasheed became such a climate
hero, the government refuses to talk about it," Rasheed says. "They
see it as Nasheed scaring off investors, and tarnishing the country's reputation.
You can't have the debate about climate change in such a polarized
country."
Before my journey to the Slow Life Symposium,
Bosley agrees to show me two more islands off the tourist map. Gulhi Falhu, a
£400m "Global Green City" designed to ease overcrowding on Male, is a
strange place. Funded by a UK development company and piped into existence by a
Dutch dredger, it lies just 6km west of the capital. Nasheed came here in 2011
to launch the second phase of what he called a "showpiece development",
and dozens of families have put deposits on the first flats. But now the
government has shut down the project.
Wathsala Thelisinghe, the manager, takes us
on a tour of the deserted island. Four-storey blocks of flats make up its first
street. The one completed block has been painted a garish pink and green.
Outside, the Maldives' only fairground, a collection of rides imported from
China, lies in silence beside a shuttered burger bar. A man strolls past in the
heat, one of 200 mostly Sri Lankan staff who live here. "He's the imam for
our new mosque," Thelisinghe says. "He is waiting for people to come
here. We are all waiting."
Raj Manivannan, a Sri Lankan from west London
and chief executive of the investment company, has flown in for crisis talks
with the Government. He says they have not explained their refusal to allow the
homes, which have been built at three metres above sea level, to be inhabited.
Manivannan has already pumped more than £30m into a would-be ghost island.
"Male is overcrowded," he says.
"People are taking turns to sleep because there is no space and rents are
sky-rocketing. All we are doing is trying to build a sustainable
community."
The next island in Male's atoll is also
artificial. Claimed from the sea in the early nineties to serve as a waste
island for the nearby capital, Thilafushi has expanded since to become a
rubbish volcano. Black smoke rises permanently from its centre, blocking the
sunset in Male as Bangladeshi migrants sort and burn waste from the resorts and
capital.
Rubbish spills into the sea at the dump's
edges, like toxic lava. The Government had signed an agreement with an Indian
company to develop a modern waste management system, but in October it tore it
up. "This is typical," Bosley says on a boat as we float between
scraps of plastic. "MDP [Nasheed's party] projects are becoming
renegotiated or cancelled, or there's just this big silence."
Thilafushi, as much as Male now, symbolizes
what seems like the basic unsustainability of the Maldives, a beautiful constellation
of vanishing sand smudges. "Islands are eroding and running out of
water," Rasheed says at the Minivan office. "Farmland is going dry,
over 90 per cent of our food is imported, our economy is on the brink and the
fishing industry is suffering. It's as bad as it gets." And still the
waters rise. Nasheed, who has two daughters, insists the Maldives can function
and survive, but not without major change here and globally.
He is now campaigning for "climate
justice", and the planning for a forced, mass migration to higher ground,
a future he says the government is not facing up to. "We are talking about
our grandchildren," he adds. And if the Islamic coup he fears happens
first? "Then the country is held by a far more extreme group of people who
wouldn't even believe in the science."
In the 1960s, a UN development team visiting
the Maldives declared it unsuitable for tourism. There was no infrastructure,
fresh water or electricity. Yet paradise beckoned and in the 1970s the first
resorts opened with salt-water showers and rooms of coral and thatch. Today, a
million visitors each year descend on more than 100 resorts, many staying in
villas built on stilts. Tourism accounts for almost a third of the Maldivian
GDP, overtaking fishing as the country's biggest earner.
It has brought prosperity to many, but also
amplifies the pressures on the islands.
Sonu Shivdasani, a British-Indian son of a
merchant, came here in the 1970s while studying in Britain. He followed the
same Eton-Oxford path as his contemporaries, Boris Johnson and David Cameron,
but his leadership potential would later focus on an uninhabited island more
than 100km north of Male. Soneva Fushi, the resort he opened in 1995 with his
wife, Eva Malmstrom, a Swedish model, still sets the standard for luxury in the
Maldives. Madonna and Sir Paul McCartney feature in its guestbook.
However, Shivdasani also ditches convention
as part of what he calls his "slow life" ethos. Shoes are banned and
in 2010 he hosted the first Slow Life Symposium, an annual, barefoot conference
on environmental sustainability. Chaired by Jonathan Porritt, the writer,
campaigner and former director of Friends of the Earth, it has convened
scientists, business leaders (Richard Branson), NGOs, celebrities (Daryl Hannah,
Ed Norton) and, while he was president, Mohamed Nasheed.
Now in its fourth edition, the three-day
event this year considers the role of capitalism in saving rather than ruining
the planet — or at least ruining it less. Obama's ambitious carbon-cutting agreement
with China days earlier shocked environmentalists — in a good way — but decades
of dithering, oil addiction and empty promises (think Cameron's huskies, or
Yameen's trees) have shamed governments everywhere as, at best, inept guardians
of the planet.
Porritt, a former chair of the Green Party,
describes Cameron's "folding at every serious point on the green
agenda" as "deplorable and disgraceful". In 1996, he co-founded
the Forum for the Future charity to explore the potential for enterprise to do
better. "Scepticism then was pronounced," he says on the beach.
"Businesses are not set up to rescue the world from the idiocy of our own
behaviour — that's not what their shareholders expect — but there is
recognition now that working with business is more positive."
If corporate boards and presidents cannot
value our environment for its own sake, would they behave differently if, say,
a coral reef were given an actual value? Controversial phrases such as
"natural capital" circulate, while many NGOs and aid agencies are
becoming more businesslike. To further the cliche, don't give a man a fish, or
even teach him to fish, but create a market for his fish — and sell him a rod
for profit.
The arrival by seaplane of government
ministers brought this argument home, to the axis of religion, capitalism and
the environment. Soneva lies in the Baa Atoll, a haven for whale sharks and
manta rays that Unesco designated a World Biosphere Reserve in 2011. In 1998,
the warming El Nino weather event bleached coral reefs across the tropics,
reducing many to shattered graveyards. Fish are crucial to the recovery and
survival of the reefs because they eat the seaweed that would otherwise
dominate.
However, now they are protected, fishermen
must motor beyond the biosphere, and pay for tracking devices. The European
Union has given their exports duty-free status in recognition, but Mohamed
Shainee, the Minister of Fisheries and Agriculture, told the conference that
Brussels had threatened to stop this if the Maldives continued to outlaw
religious freedom and homosexuality. "We don't care if the fish marry the
same sex, or what religion they follow," he says. "This has nothing
to do with sustainability."
I sit down with Thoriq Ibrahim, the minister
for the environment and energy in President Yameen's year-old government.
Wearing a floral Hawaiian shirt and eating a pastry, he admits that the
Maldives has retreated from the global debate that Nasheed fuelled, but rejects
the accusation of climate-change neglect or denial.
"We depend on our environment, so we
have to take care of it," he says. But will the government limit religious
extremism? "We are cautious about it but I'm sure there are no incidents
of it," he says. Isis flags do not concern him. "That is flags, in
other countries, they are active and doing harm." He says Thilafushi will
be cleaned up, but demurs when asked about the stalled Gulhi Falhu project.
Longer term, mass migration will not be necessary. "I'm confident we will
be here in 100 years," he says.
Others, including Nasheed, are less
confident. The final day of the conference features local environmental groups.
Thanzeela Naeem and her husband Hassan Ahmed live on Villingili, the smallest
in the sorry chain of islands that link Male, the airport, Gulhi Falhu and
Thilafushi. Formerly a prison, then a beach haven for residents of the capital,
Villingili is now being developed as an annex of Male. "You used to see
turtles and sharks every day," Ahmed, aged 27, recalls.
The couple launched the "Save the
Beach" movement, organizing awareness days, litter collections and reef
transplants. "We have done surveys in Villingili and most people say,
'Nothing will happen to us — God will not do such a thing'," Ahmed says.
Back at the office of Minivan News, Zaheena
Rasheed is reflective. She grew up in Male, where her father converted his
fishing boat into a cargo ferry. "You had a population living in peaceful
existence with nature, and within the space of 20 years we have this," she
says, gesturing outside the window. "In any large, global event, the ones
who are most vulnerable always fall before the world acts. Unfortunately we are
in that position, and it's too late to save the Maldives as we know it."
She echoes Nasheed's demands for what she
calls "dignified migration". In the meantime, journalism here is
about more than reporting the menacing, blurred lines between the authorities,
extremists and gangs. "In some ways it's about creating an archive,"
she says. "How we lived, what people loved — the sounds, smells, memories
of growing up. What was it that made us Maldivian?"
The Maldives: 1965 to the future
1965
The Islamic sultanate and British
protectorate of more than 1,000 islands gains independence.
1978
President Maumoon Gayoom begins 30-year rule,
crushing dissent. Tourism boosts the economy.
2008
Mohamed Nasheed, a once-imprisoned democracy
campaigner, wins first free elections.
2009
New president stages underwater cabinet
meeting to galvanise world leaders over climate change threat.
2012
Nasheed resigns in what he calls a coup.
Vice-president sworn in.
2013
Abdulla Yameen, Gayoom's half-brother,
narrowly wins disputed elections, depicting Nasheed as un-Islamic and
unpatriotic.
2014
Now in opposition, Nasheed and activists warn
that politics and religious extremism threaten progress on climate change.
2100
According to current worst predictions of
global sea-level rises, the Maldives disappear.
