Swearing-in ceremony of President Nasheed in 2013
Source: Alchetron
There is only one way to describe the events and developments in Maldives during 2016 and it’s this: Maldives-2016 was the ‘Year of Yameen’. It was so the previous year, too, in a way, yet 2016 alone consolidated the ‘gains’ of 2015 for President Abdulla Yameen. The same, however, cannot be said of Maldives as a nation, per se.
The year for Maldives is marked by two major developments, one in domestic politics and the other in foreign policy. The former related to the split in Yameen’s ruling Progressive Party of Maldives (PPM), with his half-brother and former President, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, splitting away. The latter, and even more important, relates to Maldives quitting the Commonwealth. Both centred on Yameen’s moves and/or decisions.
True, before Gayoom and the PPM faction led by him, criticism and protests against Yameen had commenced with the Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP), the official Opposition led by former President, Mohammed ‘Anni’ Nasheed. Nasheed made more news in the previous year than this one. Where he was in the news, Nasheed left Maldives for the UK for ‘medical treatment’, and sought and obtained ‘political asylum’ there. He could not have helped Yameen more, as he ceased to make any more news even as the year wound to a close.
Where Nasheed and the MDP made news, it was in the context of their high-profile ‘last-ditch’ battle of the year, when he sought to identify the Gayoom faction with his own efforts to return home on his terms, and to become President. The ‘old fox’ of Maldivian politics would have none of it, and made his first major move only after the Nasheed efforts, based out of neighbouring Sri Lankan capital of Colombo, had bombed — and he himself had denied any link.
It suited Yameen immensely, and for two reasons. One, it meant that there was no imminent threat to his leadership. Two, in turn, it meant that he had enough time to consolidate his power and position even more than already. Ultimately, the Gayoom split went nowhere. If anything, two of the PPM parliamentarians who had sided with Gayoom returned to the Yameen fold even before the dust had settled down on the split.
Yameen is thus as cosy as the day he commenced the presidency, after weeks of controversies over the 2013 poll process, and months of uncertainty over his possible election. If anything, he might be better placed than earlier, but then that’s all there is to it. He needs to win the presidential polls, due in November 2018, and the clock has started ticking towards the deadline, whether or not for his presidency in electoral terms.
Otherwise, Maldives’ quitting the Commonwealth was nothing like any foreign policy decision that the nation had taken ever. Even at the worst of times, Gayoom, who also got lampooned by the Commonwealth on the one hand, and the UK leader of the erstwhile British colonial grouping on the other, had not considered the move — leave alone deciding the way Yameen did a decade or less later. Even Nasheed, who felt cheated by the Commonwealth-overseen ‘National Inquiry’ into his exit in February 2012, did not promise or propose anything of the kind.
In the 21st century, the world started looking at the Indian Ocean archipelago owing first to the ‘democratisation’ process and the preceding protests in the first decade. Alongside, the first democratic President Nasheed made global headlines in his fight for the environment through his eye-catching initiative in holding a Cabinet meeting under water.
Nasheed and his MDP thus became the centre-piece of whatever media-attention that Maldives got through the period — and in a way, since then. True, his predecessor President Gayoom was the first to raise his voice as far back as the late 1970s about the threat of the archipelago-nation ‘going under the sea’.
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