Claims that the islands’ new leaders are a threat to democracy don’t stack up.
Mohamed Nasheed rightly claims that “the Maldives stand on a knife edge” (A footnote in our history, 19 September). But it is him, not the current unity government, who threatens the future of the island’s “hard-won liberal democracy”. I should know: I served as a special adviser under both him and President Mohammed Waheed, and have witnessed at first hand Nasheed’s efforts to topple the government by direct action.
Nasheed is popular with the international media, has been a vocal champion of the climate change cause and has friends in high places, notably in the Conservative party. He is extremely close to the foreign secretary William Hague, and just before his fall from grace, David Cameron reportedly described him as his “new best friend”. Nasheed has often stated that he was tortured and illegally imprisoned under the former President Gayoom. Yet when in power he behaved in exactly the same way when he illegally arrested the chief judge after he passed a ruling he did not like.
In his article Nasheed repeats the claim that he was forced from office by a coup, and that a bunch of extremists “orchestrated February’s overthrow of the Maldives’ first democratically elected government”. Unfortunately the facts do not bear out this assertion. An exhaustive report by the Commonwealth last month found there was no coup, and that in fact Nasheed resigned voluntarily. The inquiry took six months to compile and interviewed nearly 300 witnesses who gave more than 200 hours of statements.
Nasheed’s accusation of a coup was reported around the world, but when the evidence didn’t stack up, large sections of the media chose to ignore an inconvenient truth. Crucially, at the time the report was published, its conclusions were also accepted by Nasheed.
In a recent speech to the Royal Commonwealth Society he claims that there was a “cover-up”. If so, the cover-up includes a professor of constitutional law from Canada, a senior judge with 25 years of experience from New Zealand, and a retired supreme court judge from Singapore, all of whom were on the inquiry panel.
When it comes to hyperbole, Nasheed is in a league of his own. A large pinch of salt is need when considering his article’s claim that “Numerous members of parliament from my party, the Maldives Democratic party, have been taken before pliant judges and stripped of their seats”, or previous claims that he was “forced to resign at gunpoint”.
The facts are that on 7 February 2012, confronted with serious unrest over his illegal arrest of the chief judge, Nasheed resigned on his own volition and then, belatedly realising what he had done, tried to claim it was a coup in order to court international sympathy and media coverage. This leaves a lot of unanswered questions about his judgment as a person, suitability as candidate, and credibility as a politician.
Nasheed states that he doesn’t want the Maldives to “once again become a police state, and our cherished democracy relegated to a footnote in the history books – a one-off experiment that failed”. I agree, and would ask him now to work with the unity government to bring peace back to the streets, so that next year we can have free and fair elections.
This article originally appeared on The Guardian website on 25 September 2012.