by Azra Naseem
A deviation today from the usual focus on Maldives’ insane politicians: the spread of revolutionary Islamist thought in the Maldives, and some of its regional implications. This week I went to a conference in New Delhi about culture as a factor in regional cooperation in South Asia. These are some of my thoughts and observations from the conference.
by Azra Naseem
Despite State of Emergency, situation in Maldives remains calm and normal. There are no restrictions for visitors to travel to Maldives
— MFA-Maldives (@MDVForeign) November 4, 2015
On 4 November 2015, President Abdulla Yameen Abdul Gayoom declared a State of Emergency in the Maldives, suspending along with other laws seven different fundamental rights guaranteed by its democratic Constitution. Even as his Attorney General announced the executive decree, the Foreign Ministry led by Yameen’s niece, Dunya Maumoon, was reassuring the world everything was ‘calm and normal’ in the Maldives. Cognitive dissonance between simultaneous announcements and a world of difference between things said and things done, have been hallmarks of Yameen’s regime. The state of emergency is the latest development in a month during which the leader’s paranoid, perhaps even schizophrenic, delusions and hallucinations have become the lived experience of the Maldivian people. For now, the world is looking at the developments, aghast. Soon, however, its attention will wonder, and details of this extraordinary time in Maldivian history can easily be forgotten. This series will record some of the details for posterity, before the Gayooms re-write history as they have a habit of doing. This part discusses events along the road to the current state of emergency. Accounts of later developments will follow in shorter posts as events unfold.
On 28 September 2015 an explosion went off on President Yameen’s speedboat, Finifenmaa [Rose] as she cruised in to dock at the official presidential jetty in Male’. The President, his wife Fathmath Ibrahim, and an entourage of about twenty aides and associates were on board. The first couple were returning from Hajj (as all local media accounts of the incident were careful to note and repeat endlessly). The precise location of the explosion, as investigations later revealed, was right under the President’s usual seat. For whatever reason, it was First Lady Fathmath Ibrahim who took the President’s seat that day. Consequently, the President escaped unscathed. Lady Fathmath, however, remained in hospital until yesterday, reportedly nursing fractures to ‘bones connected to the spine’. 
At first visited by many admirers, some of whom queued outside the hospital for hours with a white rose each to catch a glimpse of her, she was soon relegated to the back benches of national consciousness as events became progressively more dramatic with each day following the blast.
For several days after the explosion, there was silence from the president. The public was given no official explanation. The matter was being investigated, and there would be no comment. The people, along with the media, were left to speculate. Selected bits of information fed to the people included news of forensic teams arriving from the FBI, Sri Lanka and Saudi Arabia to ‘assist Maldives Police Service with the investigation’. They reportedly stayed on the president’s retreat on the island of Aarah, and collected samples from Finifenmaa. The main theory, fed by Presidential Affairs Minister, Mohamed Shareef, suggested the blast was an accident caused by an electric or mechanical failure.
An alternative narrative, suggested on 1 October 2015, came in the form of a blog post, ‘The man who wasn’t there’, written by a Dr Kharusath. It not only suggested the blast on Finifenmaa was deliberate, it also pointed the finger at Ahmed Adeeb, Yameen’s Vice President, as having planned and plotted the attack with the intention of killing Yameen. The writer suggested the young Adeeb’s failure to be at the airport to greet the President marked him as a guilty man. The post suggested that young Adeeb—a former model and footballer who has since put on a few stones and is known as a material boy who likes the finer things in life—had bought an expensive suit in anticipation of being sworn in as the new President that afternoon. At first the blog post went largely unnoticed.
On 7 October, 10 days after the blast, Yameen’s Spokesperson, Ibrahim Muaz Ali [or TV Mwah as he is called unofficially on social media], summoned the media for an extraordinary press conference at 1:00 in the morning. He showed reporters a video of the blast in slow-motion and officially, dramatically, declared the blast to have been an attempt to assassinate the president. No one was allowed to ask questions.
VIDEO: The explosion and the fire it caused in normal speed and slow motion. @Raajje_tv pic.twitter.com/VwN4TvgfpP — raajje.mv (@raajjemv) October 6, 2015
With confirmation that Yameen was investigating the blast as an attempt on his life, @Karusathey’s blog and its accusations against Adeeb began to take on more prominence. By then three members of the Maldives National Defence Force (MNDF), two of them with access to the state armoury, had been arrested. Two members of Adeeb’s security detail were also suspended indefinitely. The soldiers taken captive then are still under military detention.
Adeeb appeared on Sangu, a television channel he funds, to defend himself and declare his unchanging loyalty to Yameen. “I will stand wherever Yameen tells me to.” Yameen allowed Adeeb to feed some cake to the increasing number of Saudi officials in the Maldives, then decided the best place for Adeeb at the time was China. On 13 October, two weeks after the ‘Finifenmaa Blast’, off he went to Beijing to represent Maldives at an investment forum to which no one came.
On the same day Adeeb left for China, Yameen fired his second Defence Minister, Ex-army General Moosa Ali Jaleel, who was appointed to the post after Yameen’s first Defence Minister Mohamed Nazim was sentenced to 11 years in jail for planning to overthrow the government. Both Nazim and Jaleel were part of the events that prematurely ended former President Mohamed Nasheed’s government. Jaleel was also a close associate of Adeeb. Jaleel was fired but escaped jail, the fate of all others who cross Yameen. As it happens, he is a close family member of the Lady Fathmath. This, in Yameen’s court, is called due process.
While Adeeb was in China, Yameen gathered members of his ‘coalition’ together in what was said to be a ‘top secret’ meeting. It was akin to Don Corleone gathering The Family together. Phones were not allowed in, for confidentiality reasons. But, members of this family being Maldivian, proceedings were reported to the media almost verbatim by some participants as soon as they left Mulee Aage, The PPM’s Family Home. Some of what was said was meant to be ‘leaked’, like Yameen’s claim he had “500% trust” in his Vice President.
Some other matters were perhaps not meant to be revealed: like Yameen’s assertion that moneys MPs had been receiving [in envelopes outside of their hefty pay packets] came from his own stash and not Adeeb’s. In other words, the bribes they had been receiving came from Yameen and not Adeeb; the young Mr Vice President had merely been the Middle Man. MPs were assured their payments would continue—as long as they publicly declared, and proved, their loyalty to Yameen. All who had been copying up to Adeeb would do as Yameen asked–a majority of Maldivian MPs follow where the money leads.
As is customary for Yameen, his words and actions were far removed from each other. He declared 500% trust in Adeeb but immediately after the statement, started raiding the homes and offices of Adeeb’s closest family members and associates. Among the most high profile searches were a police and army raid on the house of super-rich business man Hamid Ismail—or Hamid Seytu [Hamid from the corner shop] in common parlance—a member of Adeeb’s extended family. He was later arrested in Malaysia, and deported to Male’ against Malaysian laws. Hamid is now in jail; as is a man who took a picture of him arriving at the Male’ International Airport. Similar raids were conducted of the office of the Maldives Marketing and Public Relations Company (MMPRC) and of the home of its Managing Director Abdulla Ziyath, who is also now in jail. By then it was obvious Yameen’s so-called 500% trust in Adeeb was actually 500% percent suspicion. Nobody was surprised when Yameen decided to have Adeeb arrested on suspicion of involvement in the blast on the Finifenmaa.
On the eve of Adeeb’s early morning return from China on 24 October, Maldives Police Service closed off access to the so-called Green Zone—where protests and mass gatherings are banned for ‘security reasons’. The boundaries of this area is often fluid, moving according to whims of the security forces and have, at times, included the airport. The idea behind raising security levels in the Green Zone was supposedly to ‘protect Adeeb’ from an alleged threat to his life. It was another among hundreds of lies to the public by the government and security forces since the Finifenmaa saga began.In reality it was intended to stop Adeeb’s supporters from congregating at the airport, or at the jetties in Male’, to welcome him back. The police need not have bothered.
Adeeb’s ‘supporters’, who had deemed no burden too heavy to carry for their man, and seemed to number in their thousands at the height of his popularity—when he drove around town on motorbikes of various sizes with pockets full of money and bagfuls of swag—abandoned the VP before his plane touched down. Hundreds of t-shirts printed with his face, were dumped on the streets, cast aside like Adeeb himself.
@NooshinWaheed I’m gonna leave this picture right here. pic.twitter.com/3tlrbwJOih
— MushfiqueMohamed (@mushfique_) October 24, 2015
‘Adeeb’s Babes’, a bevy of carefully groomed young women who framed themselves in pink to declare their support for him, never made it out on the streets in solidarity. Some stayed home with their t-shirts on and, shortly after, left the country altogether. And like many MPs who represent them, several hurried to delete all evidence of their support for Adeeb from the public sphere and began anew their efforts to cuddle up to Yameen instead.
The morning of 25 October brought the first public appearance of Abdulla Yameen Abdul Gayoom since the “assassination attempt.” It was a sour-faced, arrogant rant that lasted 45 minutes; a tirade in which he attempted to defend his track-record as a president who got rid of two Defence Ministers and two Vice Presidents in two short years of being a president. According to him, they all betrayed his trust and conspired against him. The last thing he wanted to do was get rid of them, but their betrayals left him with no choice. He accused Adeeb of colluding with MDP, failing to cooperate with the investigation into the blast, and also failing to side with police and military in their suspicions and activities against Hamid Ismail and Ziyath. Former Defence Minister and coup-maker Mohamed Nazim had tried to get members of the military to stand against their Commander in Chief.
The first former Vice President, Mohamed Jameel Ahmed who wallowed knee-deep in pink with Yameen during the presidential campaign, had been totally incompetent, according to Yameen. [The Vice President, who fled the country ahead of impeachment, has been living in London. He married for the third time while in exile, and seems to have spent his honeymoon and all the days since Tweeting 140 character messages absolving himself of all the blame for unlawful actions taken by a government of which he was an integral part. All the while, he defines himself as ‘Former Vice President’ – to the man he is making all these accusations against.]
#Maldives Yameen clearly failed to manage a tiny population.He must not be allowed to destroy the paradise nation pic.twitter.com/lRx51tzNXe — Mohamed Jameel Ahmed (@MJameelAhmed) November 4, 2015
With former Vice President Dr.Jameel in London. Emmehaa Rayyithunnah varah vedhun dhannavaa. pic.twitter.com/BXFJSdqyvl
— Mohamed Maleeh Jamal (@maleehjamal) November 5, 2015
Yameen also assured in his speech that ‘youth associations’—which many took to be a euphemism for violent gangs with whom both Yameen and his VP are known to have intimate connections—will continue to get their moneys due through an alternative channel in the absence of Adeeb. He had never spoken at such length to Maldivians before, and thus had never before revealed the true extent of his paranoia and suspicions, or the level of his disgust for conventions and values of running a democratic government. Throughout it all he maintained he did not want to fire his Vice President, but had been left with no choice. Perhaps his own words below can paint a more accurate picture of his feelings:
The gist of Yameen’s speech was that while the Vice President had been his closest ally, and had forced a Constitutional amendment to make Adeeb his deputy, he hadn’t a clue what the younger man had been up to. Everything wrong in the country since Yameen came to power was Adeeb’s doing. Yameen was as white and pure as a drop of coconut milk.
What followed the above is a week in which several bombs were found, lost, disposed of, transported live across Male’; forensic science was deemed hocus pocus; a State of Emergency was declared; MDP responded with an Emergency Tea Party; and a Sri Lankan fish buyer was arrested on suspicion of being an assassin. All this and more in The Yellow Brick Road, Part II.
by Mushfique Mohamed
As news of socio-political turmoil forces the world to shift its eyes away from the pristine beaches of its beautiful tropical islands, Maldives is losing its untainted image as a luxury tourist destination with more exposure of its appalling track record on human rights. This article looks closely at the lack of both compassion and adequate law enforcement in the Maldivian society’s (mis)treatment of the South Asian expatriate community. It highlights not just the plight of the many Bangladeshi labourers but also the increasing number of South Asian women who are becoming victims of the corrupt and prejudiced criminal justice system of the country.
In addition to the Maldivian population of approximately 330,000, there are 200,000 expatriate workers living in the country, of which a quarter does not have legal status in the country. The Maldives’ treatment of migrant workers is degrading enough for it to be called ‘modern-day slavery.’ The trade generates over US$ 123 million in illegal profits in the Maldives. Last week two Bangladeshi workers, Shaheen Mia and Kazi Bilal were brutally killed bringing to the fore, in tragic circumstances, the unheard voice of the subaltern in today’s Maldivian society.
The government on 25 March banned a planned protest against the deplorable treatment faced by expatriate workers. The protest was planned to highlight the resurgence in violent crime against the South Asian workers. The government of current President Abdulla Yameen Abdul Gayoom’s brother; Asia’s longest serving leader until August 2008, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, also criminalised a planned protest following similar racially motivated assaults in August 2007, threatening expatriates with deportation.
In addition to silencing their voices and denying them agency, the criminal justice system, primarily the Criminal Court and law enforcement authorities perpetuate injustices against the marginalised. The violation of their fundamental rights is facilitated through certain judicial actors who are untrained, uneducated and corrupt. These judges do not pay any attention to the Constitution or domestic laws or international legal instruments the Maldives has ratified. Increasingly women are becoming victims of the system.
An Indian woman was arrested night before last on allegations of infanticide and attempted suicide, raising concerns that she could be subject to the same judicial torture as Rubeena Buruhanudeen who was kept under pre-trial detention for over four years. The New Indian Express reported that Rubeena was part of a procedure known in India as ‘Malékalyanam’ in which impoverished girls from the Indian state of Kerala are married off to Maldivian men. Rubeena, married off to a Maldivian man under this procedure, ended up in pre-trial detention in the Maldives for over four years, accused of killing the child she had with her Maldivian husband.
Fareesha Abdulla, a Maldivian lawyer who took the case in 2012 on a pro-bono basis, emphasised that the investigation and remand hearings were not conducted with interpreters. “She [Rubeena] can’t understand Dhivehi, but the entire investigation was carried out without an interpreter. Maldives’ police wrote down a statement in Dhivehi and she signed it,” said the defence lawyer. “Infanticide is a serious allegation but when she requested legal aid before I took on the case, the Attorney General denied it,” Fareesha Abdulla explained further.
Before Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power, the Manmohan Singh government’s Minister for External Affairs also urged Maldives to repatriate such detainees. Modi was scheduled to visit the Maldives last month but with international concerns growing over the arrest of former President Mohamed Nasheed on 23 February 2015, took the Maldives off his tour of Indian Ocean island nations. Soon after the diplomatic brushoff, Rubeena was repatriated to India in early March.
Aminath Zara, a Nepalese woman who was fighting for custody of her child with a Maldivian succeeded only after a yearlong legal battle at the Family Court. Zara arrived in the Maldives initially in October 2009 as Tasi Telisa to work at a beauty salon as a beauty therapist. She converted to Islam in 2010. She then left the country in September 2011 and returned after marrying a Maldivian in Sri Lanka in December 2011. When the baby was three, her husband demanded Zara to go back to work; she was the sole breadwinner at times. According to Zara, the marriage came to an end due to her husband’s infidelity while she was away working.
The couple filed for a divorce at the Guraidhoo Magistrate Court in September 2013, but the proceedings and documents were all in Dhivehi, and an interpreter was not offered. The magistrate decided “disobedience” by the wife was sufficient grounds for divorce. As a result Zara became a homeless – and soon to be illegal – single mother. She filed a complaint at the Gender Ministry because her ex-husband was threatening to deport her and gain full custody of the baby. A Maldivian lawyer, Lua Shaheer, who was providing pro-bono legal assistance, said that Zara’s husband repeatedly told her “you are a foreigner, you will have no choice but to leave this country without the child.”
The Gender Ministry provided Zara with temporary accommodation for three months. At the end of the three months she moved back to the island of Guradhoo but could not stand the abuse she was subjected to. With nowhere to live, her former lawyer Lua Shaheer took Zara in to her own home. She is now represented by another lawyer, Fathmath Sama, whose firm took the case on pro-bono.
The husband was represented by Ibrahim Riza, an MP for Gayoom’s Progressive Party of Maldives. The main argument in court was that “the mother is a Buddhist, the mother’s family is Buddhist, and the child would be deprived of a Muslim upbringing.” Zara’s husband also accused her of “abandoning the baby for monetary greed.” Shaheer testified in court that Zara is a practicing Muslim. Even though Zara won custody, the verdict states she cannot leave the country without the ex-husband’s permission if she decides to leave with the baby, effectively leaving her stranded in the Maldives without a place to live.
According to the Indian High Commission in the Maldives, an Indian woman named Manyama Orsu was charged with pre-marital sex and abortion. According to the new penal code, abortions after 120 days of pregnancy are illegal, but a pregnancy caused by rape is an exception to the 120-day rule. Orsu was charged before the new penal code came into effect. The court proceedings against her went on for two and a half years. She confessed to the first charge, and the State dropped abortion charges bringing an end to her arbitrary detention, facilitating her repatriation in late March this year.
There are also reports of other foreign women held at Dhoonidhoo Island Detention Centre on allegations of prostitution, abortion and drug trafficking. Some of these women are victims of sex trafficking and trafficking in persons. But without a systematic mechanism to identify victims, or the mentality to view such individuals as victims, Maldives’ authorities exacerbate psychological and physical trauma suffered by human trafficking victims.
Two foreign women identified by police as sex trafficking victims in 2008 were provided temporary shelter before being repatriated with the help of their home country’s diplomatic mission in the capital Malé. Due to the lack of investigative infrastructure based on the problem of Trafficking in Persons, nobody was prosecuted for the crime, and the case was dropped due to “lack of evidence.”
There are other instances where lack of legislation, and lack of enforcement, have hindered any efforts to tackle the problem. In 2009, a Bangladeshi man was chained inside a small room for weeks; the chains were removed only when the man was put to work. The employer was released after merely four months’ imprisonment due to lack of anti-trafficking legislation at the time.
The Maldives’ government passed anti-trafficking legislation only in 2013, motivated only by the fear of threatened international sanctions. The Bill had been in Majlis since 2011. However, expatriate workers from South Asian countries continue to be victimized under forced labour conditions notwithstanding the legislation. The US State Department’s Report on Trafficking in Persons states that ‘the [Maldivian] government does not have procedures in place to identify victims of human trafficking.’ As a result trafficked persons are further victimized by the corrupt criminal justice system. At the same time, the legal system remains highly inaccessible to foreigners, especially in relation to criminal law.
Transparency International’s local chapter provided over 560 expatriate workers with legal aid in 2014, mostly with regard to cases that consist of forced labour indicators. ‘We believe that migrant workers are the most vulnerable community in the Maldives today, they do not have access to the legal system due to the language barrier,’ Transparency Maldives’ Senior Project Coordinator for its Advocacy and Legal Advice Centre, Ahid Rasheed, has said.
‘Maldivian society in general views Bangladeshi expatriates as lower class non-citizens; harassment against them has been completely normalized. The authorities view them as the problem and not victims of discriminatory attacks and human trafficking offences.’ Highlighting a history of institutionalised xenophobia, Rasheed said ‘the latest word from the government we heard – regarding the protest – questions basic rights afforded to migrant workers, similar to how all previous governments neglected migrant workers’ grievances.’
The Maldives enacted the Employment Act in 2008, and as a Member State of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the Act harmonises domestic law of the Maldives with the principles and standards prescribed by the organisation. Independent institutions such as the Employment Tribunal and Labour Relations Authority were established through this Act. ‘Forced labour’ is prohibited and broadly defined to be any instance where there are elements of undue influence, threat, or intimidation with regards to employment. The Act also addresses discrimination at the work place and ensures both local and foreign employees right to freedom from discrimination based on race, religion, social standing, political beliefs, marital status, gender, or family obligations.
It is a common misconception that ‘human trafficking’ or ‘trafficking in persons’ requires illegal entry, similar to ‘human smuggling.’ Human trafficking sometimes begins as smuggling, can end up as exploitation and trafficking, but not all trafficking involves crossing-borders.The United Nations (UN) defines ‘trafficking in persons’ as the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation or the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labor or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.
The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) Convention on Preventing and Combating Trafficking in Women and Children for Prostitution was ratified by the Maldives in May 2003; a legal instrument recognizing the importance of establishing effective regional cooperation for preventing trafficking for prostitution and for investigation, detection, interdiction, prosecution, and punishment of those responsible for such trafficking.
The ILO defines the following as elements of forced labour: withholding payment and identity documents; abusive working and living conditions; debt bondage; restriction of movement; excessive overtime; deception; isolation; physical and sexual violence; and intimidation and threats. All of which are daily grievances faced by most low-skilled expatriate workers in the Maldives.
A report by the Human Rights Commission of the Maldives (HRCM) in February 2009[8] states that Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan and Indian nationals are detained at the Malé Immigration Detention Center, managed by the Expatriate Monitoring Center under the Department of Immigration and Emigration. Ordinarily detained for not holding a valid passport, visa or work permit. HRCM urged the Maldives to become a member of the International Convention on the Rights of All Migrant Workers (ICRMW). The national human rights committee’s report recommended development and implementation of systematic procedures for government officials to identify victims of trafficking among vulnerable groups such as undocumented migrants and women in prostitution, who are human trafficking victims. It also urged identified victims of trafficking to be provided necessary assistance and not be penalized for unlawful acts committed as a direct result of them being trafficked.
The US State Department has consistently raised the issue of increasing debt bondage among South Asian migrant workers under its annual Trafficking in Persons report. According to its most recent report, migrant workers pay agents around US$2,000-4,000 to work in the Maldives. There have been reports that some of the 200 registered agents bring migrant workers to the Maldives under terms of employment that amount to criminal acts of deception or fraud, entangling employees in a vicious cycle of debt. The report also recommends that Maldives accede to the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons.
The government has failed at implementing enacted laws, and it appears to be using the rise in violent crime to militarize the police service, and enact legislations that strip away the protections, freedoms and liberties enshrined under the Constitution that introduced democratization to the Maldives. As the focus remains on suppressing dissent from citizens who oppose the regime, the plight of the subaltern stays at the political periphery. The Maldives has yet to fulfill the minimum standards required to eliminate human trafficking.
Human trafficking victims are regularly penalized for acts that are the result of being trafficked; excluded from the legal system; and viewed as offenders. Maldivian authorities are known to detain such victims under inhumane conditions. The real perpetrators of trafficking such as employers, officials, recruitment agents or firms are rarely brought to justice, giving full impunity to these powerful offenders who have connections to transnational organized crime. The insularity observed among majority of Maldivians is reinforced on an institutional level by denying inalienable rights that are to be afforded to all citizens and non-citizens indiscriminately. Sex trafficking, forced labour, debt bondage and other forms of exploitation do not end with enacting legislations or acceding to treaties in order to be accepted as a member of the international community. A stipulation under law is only powerful to the extent to which it is realized, and for the subaltern – without the qualification to even speak – those rights are continually denied.
Mushfique Mohamed is a practising lawyer at Hisaan, Riffath & Co., and also works as a consultant for Maldivian Democracy Network.
Main Photo: primecollective.com, Rubeena Buruhanudeen, Minivan News