Category: Executive

One hundred days of sorrow: missing moyameehaa

“You run back and forth listening for unusual events,
peering into the faces of travelers.
“Why are you looking at me like a madman?”
I have lost a friend. Please forgive me.” – Rumi

Rilwan

by Azra Naseem

Sunday will be the 100th day since Ahmed Rizwan (Rilwan) Abdulla, @moyameehaa, was abducted. Time has dragged, weighted down by the burden of not knowing. Between then and now much, yet nothing, has happened. The posters brightening a thousand walls with Rilwan’s smile have faded with the sun and dissolved with the rain. Five thousand men and women put pen to paper, ‘Good Sir, kind Madam, please find Rilwan,’ they begged. At least as many thousand Tweets have echoed round the world: ‘#Findmoyameehaa, #Findoyameehaa.’ Hundreds of friends and supporters have marched on Male’s streets with the question: ‘Where is Rilwan?’ Scores have met many miles away in Melbourne and in New York, asking the same question.

Rilwan’s mother has said, to any ears that would listen, ‘I am poor, but my love makes Rilwan a priceless treasure. Please find him for me.’ Hundreds have felt her tears roll down their faces. ‘He is alive,’ Rilwan’s father has insisted. His mind has been far from the assorted fruits and vegetables he sells at the local market. ‘How do you know?’ ask customers who have stopped to listen. Without batting an eyelid he has said, ‘I asked a clairvoyant.’

It may seem odd, approaching a clairvoyant to look for a son abducted in this technologically advanced twenty first century. But when the natural world makes no sense, the supernatural often appears the only consolation. In its investigation into Rilwan’s disappearance, Maldives Police Service (MPS) has been more than negligent; it has been willfully perverse. In hundred days the MPS has given almost as many excuses for making zero progress in the search for Rilwan: nobody was abducted; it was a woman who was abducted; it was not an abduction, it was a rape; Rilwan ‘disappeared himself’; Rilwan is an apostate, not worth looking for; Rilwan is playing an elaborate joke; Rilwan is writing his own missing persons reports; Rilwan was abducted by gangs, there are no gangs in the Maldives; we have arrested someone, we have let him go; Rilwan was abducted by violent extremists, there are no violent extremists in the Maldives; Rilwan is not missing, it is all a political drama; no comment; Rilwan who?

Rilwan the journalist who examined the many maladies of Maldives. Rilwan the teenage blogger who gave a damn about the poor and the wronged. Rilwan the ex-radical who understood the extremist mindset better than all official strategists. Rilwan the story-teller whose #FerryTales shortened the distance between Male’ and Hulhumale’ more than any bridge can. Rilwan the well-mannered young man who respected the elderly. Rilwan the friend who listened. Rilwan the writer who inspired. Rilwan the aspiring poet who read Rumi and Neruda. Rilwan the thinker who sought spiritual succor in meditation, Nusrat Fatah Khan and the Quran. Rilwan the friend who laughed; the brother who baked; the uncle who played; the son who loved. Rilwan the Maldivian who cared.

The reasons why Rilwan’s friends, family and supporters want him found are the very reason the authorities want him to remain missing. What Rilwan abhorred in our society, our rulers cheer loudly.

Rilwan wanted a society free of corruption; our leaders revel in it. He wanted to see Jihadist ideologies become less attractive to young Maldivians; our religious clerics encourage it while the government turns a blind eye. He wanted gang violence to have less power over society; senior government officials outsource authority to favoured gang members. Rilwan wanted equal justice for all; our rulers want judgement and punishment to be arbitrary, wielded by them how and when they please. He wanted a society where citizens shared its wealth more equally; our rulers want all wealth to be their own.

Rilwan wanted us all to think more deeply about how to live a more meaningful, spiritual and equal existence; it is the antithesis of all that our rulers desire. For the moment we begin to think more deeply is the moment we begin to regret voting them in. It would be the beginning of our demand for change, the precursor to saying: ‘Enough. I will not let you rule me anymore.’

If the past 100 days has made anything clear, it is that this government will do all it can to stop Rilwan from being found. It is in its interests to do so. The past 100 days has also made something else very clear: we must do all we can to find out what happened to Rilwan. It is in our interests to do so. Our pursuit of a more just, equal and democratic society, as dreamed of by Rilwan, cannot begin if we forget Rilwan’s abduction and the government’s role in it, either by taking him or covering it up.

Let’s not stop our pressure on the authorities to #FindMoyameehaa. We owe it to Rilwan, and to our future.

The Madness of Maldives

Source: The Chive

By Azra Naseem

There is a small island of about two square kilometres, called Male’, in the Indian Ocean. It  is capital of the Maldives, a 1200 island archipelago inhabited by about 300,000 people known as Maldivians. If there was a psychiatric facility on this earth that could section a generalised population, Maldivians would be among the first to be locked away for life. Frequent electric shocks and, wherever possible, lobotomies, may be recommended.

The official story of Maldives starts with a sea monster that convinced a population of Buddhists, meditating in spectacular natural beauty, to give up their quest for inner peace in this life for the beautiful afterlife that Islam promises. That was back in 1153. Come the 21st Century and the Maldives has become a place where religion, ideology, greed, ignorance, astounding natural beauty and hope against all hope combine to form a life lived on a precarious balance between madness and civilisation.

It is very much a society organised top-down, and the top—where the creme de la creme of the strange have risen—is a good place to begin examining it from.

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The present Maldives is ruled by a man who did not know how to smile until he became The Ruler. Now that he is president, he smiles as widely—and with the same disconcerting effect—as The Joker.

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His 2013 presidency campaign and party colours are a deep pink for ‘Asuruma’ or the Four O’clock Flower, and his presidential victory convoy comprised a pink top-down convertible in which a man stood behind him jiggling ‘breasts’ made from painted coconut shells. His party is known as the Progressive Party of Maldives (or Pee-Pee-Em). This kind of ‘progressive’ would be hard to find anywhere else in the world.

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The confounding thing is that the people behind The Ruler are the same people who would also support the Islamic State. Even more astounding, if possible, is the fact that the ordinary Maldivians who proudly stand behind The Ruler in his pink convertible, Joker grin and coconut-titted cheer-leaders supporters are the same people who would hang (or preferably, these days, behead) someone like, say Conchita Wurst, ‘to protect OUR MALDIVIAN ISLAMIC PRINCIPLES!’. A man with coconut tits in a pink convertible hailing the new president is somehow ‘progressive’; Conchita is not.

In the hierarchy of life on this island, after the President come the security forces: the Maldives National Defence Force (MNDF) and the Maldives Police Service (MPS). There are some close resemblances and stark differences between the two men who lead the institutions. Mohamed Nazim, who heads the MNDF was a key player in the coup that was not a coup; Hussein Waheed who leads the MPS, meanwhile, slept through it all. Both men love adulation. Nazim is like The Wolf in Pulp Fiction—he fixes everything. He was called in to ‘fix’ democracy before it was broken on 7 February 2012; he fixed US-Maldives bilateral relations real good; he hooked Maldives up with China even as India looked on with her mouth open; he fixed the airport and the GMR saga, Nexbiz, IGMH, the transport sector; and he ‘fixed’ Minister Shakeela.

While Nazim is The Fixer, Hussein Waheed is The Waster. Policing in the Maldives has never been this dismal. It is as if Mr Waheed is sleeping through his job, like he slept through the coup. The less psychotic among the Maldivian population have been mourning, for 63 days now, the unexplained disappearance of one of its sanest citizens: Moyameehaa, Ahmed Rilwan (also known as Rizwan). The police, under Waheed have not answered a single question about his abduction in the two months that have gone past. Whatever arrests they have made, they have done reluctantly, and released with eagerness.

The MPS is a different kind of police force, with an approach to policing quite unique in this century. For instance, among the things it has been busy doing while ignoring all serious crime include: holding workshops all over the country talking to adolescents—or in their words ‘children of marriageable age’—about ‘being prepared’ [for what, it is not known]; ‘creating awareness about police work among pre-school children’; arresting and immediately releasing drug-delaers; ‘apprehending an individual possessed by six bottles of fish paste’; charging a man who committed an act of terror with ‘stealing a CCTV camera’ and letting him go straight afterwards; and lifting a man sleeping under a coconut tree back to safety under his own roof.

The Best of MPS (and the Maldives criminal justice system in general) came last week when the top dogs [Top Polis Ahmed Athif, Prosecutor General Muhuthaz Muhsin, Deputy Attorney General, a High Court judge and some businessman] went to Los Angeles to share their knowledge on [wait for this] ‘Using Intelligence to Assure Public Safety’—at the Oracle OpenWorld 2014. Of course, the entire saga was played out on social media, courtesy of polis Athif, who goes by @Hammettz 

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Intelligence was nowhere to be found as pictures soon emerged of The Boys hanging out some where totally surrounded by alcohol. Nothing wrong with this except that these Boys have made it their life’s work to jail for years the Maldivians who do the same thing back home on the island.

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As for public safety, it was not long before The Boys—who went on an ‘LA road trip’ after an Aerosmith concert [seriously, who does that??]—were robbed of all their possessions, including their laptops and mobile phones, which they had left in the backseat of the car. Maldivian law enforcement abroad.

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Through it all, CP Waheed travels the length and breadth of the archipelago strutting like a cock, expecting devotion and finely cooked chicken from pseudo Island Chiefs and Pee-Pee-Em supporters in their pink shirts [barely recognisable sans the coconut tits].

This is the cream of Male’s society today. Along with them come the MPs with their grossly inflated salaries equivalent to those in Sweden and their total refusal [except for a handful of MPs] to stand up for the people whom they are said to represent. Over 5000 Maldivian people signed a petition and submitted it to the Majlis asking it to seriously examine the police’s inability to investigate the abduction of Rilwan. The petition has been ignored. PPM MPs, in fact, obstructed any parliamentary oversight in the matter. The leader of PPM’s Parliamentary Group, Ahmed Nihan, has far more pressing matters to deal with, like the phenomenon of going grey overnight. Since the change which seems to have occurred a few full moons ago, he has ben unable to stop taking selfies, posing with an endless stream of other narcissistic members of the clan whose enormous egos [among other things] fill the computer screens of anyone on social media.

 

What is left to say then when we leave the cream that has curdled to top and come to the ordinary citizen? These people at the top, they represent the majority of Maldivians. 51 percent, if we must be specific. That 51 percent must be happy; they laugh along anyway. They clap in adulation and genuflect with glee. Of the remaining 49 percent a substantial number proudly declare themselves ‘colourless’/apolitical/disinterested/’citizens of good etiquette’. In other words, they won’t do a thing to change a thing.

That leaves a minuscule minority who, for being different among such madness, come to call themselves [or be called] insane; and live with the constant fear that any moment now they would be bundled on to a Maldivian Narrensciff that sails the ocean in the middle of the night, and be made to disappear—perhaps never to return.

#FindMoyameehaa to find ourselves

FindMoyameehaa

42 days and 15 hours since Rizwan (also known as Rilwan), a young man in his twenties, disappeared without trace from the small island of Hulhumale’. Despite some factual inaccuracies elsewhere in the article, the UK’s Independent newspaper was right on target when it described Rizwan’s disappearance as an illustration of a darker, less seen Maldives. It is now very clear to anyone in the Maldives with a thinking mind that either top-level people in the government, the security forces, or both, have a hand in Rizwan’s disappearance.

On the night Rizwan was last seen, two witnesses came forward to say, they saw a man being forced into a red car at knife-point from outside Rizwan’s apartment. They immediately contacted the police who arrived on the scene, took notes—even recovered a fallen knife—and went off on their merry way. Despite the eye-witnesses, police said on Tuesday this week (after 39 days) that there is no connection between Rizwan’s disappearance and the abduction from outside his apartment on the night of his disappearance. It beggars belief that the police cannot even tell us who, if not Rizwan, was kidnapped in the middle of the night from Hulhumale’. No one else’s family has come forward to report a missing person.

If not Rizwan, who was abducted from outside his apartment? Where is Rizwan? How can a Maldivian disappear without trace from a small island? Why are the police spreading disinformation? Why are they trying to plant rumors that the abducted person was a female? Why are they trying to deceive? Who is behind Rizwan’s disappearance? If police cannot answer any questions related to the disappearance of a law-abiding peaceful citizen with no history of violence or criminal activity, what is their purpose? Who is the Maldives Police Service (MPS) ‘protecting and serving’ if not citizens?

There have been many previous examples of police incompetency or complicity in major crimes. On all such occasions there are combined religious/political motives—or, as Minivan News put it—‘an unholy alliance’—of radicals and violent gangs (often sponsored by the state) behind them.

In June 2012 Hilath Rasheed the first (and still only) openly gay Maldivian blogger advocating for LGBT rights was brutally attacked near his home. His throat was slit from side to side causing the neck to open like a widely yawning mouth. Seeing the gaping hole, a nurse at the hospital fainted.

“No one thought I would make it,” Hilath said. I met him in Sri Lanka a month after the attack. His voice was still gruff, like it every word he spoke was an attack on his vocal cords. His hands shook, and he kept turning around to double-check he was not being attacked from behind. “They wanted to kill me,” Hilath said looking me in the eye. His shock was still palpable many painful weeks after the attack. CCTV footage exists of the attackers approaching him from both sides in the lane-way to his family home in Male’ in the early evening shadows. Hilath was certain he gave, and police collected, enough evidence to identify who the attackers were. Yet, there has been ‘no progress’ in the investigation. Hilath, who feared for his life, sought shelter elsewhere. The police took it as an opportunity to say they could not continue the investigation as the victim was not there to pursue the matter further. As if an attempted murder is merely a crime against an individual and not the entire society itself. Hilath has, understandably, chosen to remain in exile rather than seek answers or battle for justice in the Maldives—it is a place where questions remain unanswered, crimes remain unsolved and justice remains undelivered.

Before that, in January 2011, was the attack against Aishath Velezinee, then a member of the Judicial Service Commission (JSC). She was stabbed in the back in broad daylight. Hilath spoke out for gay rights; Velezinee spoke out against judicial wrongdoing and crimes against the State and Constitution. The man who stabbed her aimed for her spine—paralysis could easily have been the outcome. It was a narrow miss.

The police, after weeks of ‘investigation’, identified someone as the attacker. But it was, if they were right, so clearly the hired would-be assassin rather than the persons (or forces) behind the attack that Velezinee insisted the police dig deeper and find the person who commissioned the attack. They did not. In the end, the police did not pursue even the culprit they had themselves identified. Once again it was ignored that grievous bodily harm or attempted murder are crimes against society to be pursued by the public prosecutor on behalf of the people of Maldives rather than a dispute between two individuals that can be ignored if the parties involved are not pursuing each other.

The most brutal case—so far—has been that of MP Dr Afrasheem Ali who was hacked to death on 2 October 2012 at the foot of the stairs leading up to his apartment. At the risk of sounding like the late blogger Dr Haulath who conjured up ‘evidence’ and anonymous sources to make wild allegations against people, I will recount what I have been told by a wholly reliable—yet necessarily anonymous source—who was until recently privy to national intelligence: Dr Afrasheem was murdered by hired foreign mercenaries. Those who commissioned his murder are now in top positions in government. Dr Afrasheem offended some; he was also standing in some people’s way of political progress; his religious views offended some others. For many powerful people, Dr Afrasheem was better dead than alive. He was right in the middle of the ‘unholy alliance’ between corrupt politicians, religious extremists and ‘born-again’ gang-members. The clean-up afterwards involved millions spent on silencing the family, the murder of a Bangladeshi expatriate who knew too much, and speedy dispatch of the murderers back to their own countries. With this investigation—unlike the attacks on Hilath and Velezinee—the police put up a pretence of investigating. When the US offered to help with by donating services of the FBI, there was no choice but to accept. Reports from inside say the FBI team with so much obstruction and obfuscation from within the MPS they left in disgust. So far, the truth remains totally hidden.

President Abdulla Yameen who heads the current government has many allegations of corruption against him that date back years. This includes the alleged wrongful acquisition of US$800 million when he was in charge of the State Trading Organisation (STO) during his half-brother Maumoon Abdul Gayoom’s 30-year dictatorship. Nothing has ever been proven against him, of course, which is the reason for—and the end result of—his power. Yameen became president partly by successfully cultivating deep ties with ‘the youth’—the substantial percentage, anyway, of whom that are involved in the narcotics trade and gang-violence. Despite having run for presidency on a youth ticket, he was callously unconcerned with the news that Rilwan had disappeared from Hulhumale’. Rizwan was a youth taken without trace from the island the ‘youth President’ intended to develop into a dedicated ‘Youth City.’

Days later the very president, who had ‘No Comment’ about Rizwan because—in his words, not mine: a President cannot comment about ‘anything and everything’—was happy to order the police to stop taking down the ‘huts’ or ‘shelters’ that Male’ gangs use in various areas of the island city to congregate and plan their various nefarious activities from. Not one word, though, has President Yameen had to spare to comfort Rizwan’s grieving family, his persistent friends who persevere in seeking answers, and the shocked people of Male’ city and its ‘suburb’ of Hulhumale’. Not a single word. It is a silence that speaks volumes. It is a silence which has given the police license to ignore Rizwan’s disappearance, unlike the gangs and their huts. ‘We will stop taking down the [gang] huts because the President has said so,’ the police said.

Are the police failing to investigate Rizwan’s disappearance because the President has not ordered such an investigation personally? Is that what it takes to instigate a police investigation in this so-called ‘democracy’? Under the leadership of Yameen, are the functions of the security forces so arranged that unless he gives a direct order no crime can be investigated?

Once again today, friends and family of Rizwan—like every Friday since his disappearance—are out trying to keep his disappearance in public consciousness. This is a Herculean task in a society held captive by materialism and is in thrall to money. It is nigh on impossible in a society where a general decline in civil values, morals and principles are increasingly hidden behind a veil of claimed religiosity. For each Maldivian shocked by the fact that a young man who has never caused any living person—or creature—any harm can be made to disappear without a trace from a small island with a population of just thousands, there are three who could not care less or are willing to denigrate Rizwan for not sharing their puritan principles or narrow-minded worldview.

The case of Rizwan is, like Azim Zahir said yesterday, also about the future of the Maldives. If we do not want it to be a society of people who care not where their money come from as long as it lines their own pockets; who care not about injustice as long as they (and their own) are free; who care not if there is no security in society as long as they (and their own) come to no harm; who mind not about the disappearance of a young man as long as he is not their child, brother, husband or friend then we must all look for Rizwan.

If we do not want to lose ourselves, we must all come together and make sure the authorities #FindMoyameehaa.