JJ Robinson

The Maldives is known for its white sand beaches and blue lagoons, extensive reefs and luxury resorts, but there are still politics happening in paradise. In 2008, the Maldives held its first democratic election and ousted Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, who had been president since 1978. The victor,  Mohamed Nasheed, resigned in early 2012; “at gunpoint" as he said the next day. He was replaced, via a controversial election, by Abdulla Yameen, Gayoom’s half-brother.

The Maldives is strategically located between the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean proper; it also stands astride important maritime oil shipping routes, drawing the attention of China and India, as well as Saudi Arabia.

JJ Robinson – former editor of Minivan News, the first independent news service in the Maldives, and author of Maldives: Islamic Republic, Tropical Autocracy (2015) – spoke to The Diplomat recently about politics in paradise.

Recent developments in the Maldivian parliament underscore just how turbulent the country's politics have become. The government has lost its majority and legislators have swung to the opposition. What is the origin of this turbulence in Male?

The vast majority of the political, economic and social turbulence afflicting the Maldives can be traced to subversion of the country’s recent democratic transition. This transition began in 2003 with a political awakening sparked by the murder in custody of a young inmate, leading to a series of democratic concessions from the reigning autocrat of 30 years; Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, of the Hosni Mubarak school of governance, was by this point Asia’s longest-serving dictator.

A new and reasonably progressive constitution in 2008 defanged the executive and gave primacy to parliament, and the free and fair election soon after of a former political prisoner, Mohamed Nasheed, led to many comparisons with South Africa. But the former regime hadn’t disappeared; it entered opposition and retained a degree of genuine support from those who preferred the quiet compliance and paternalistic consistency of autocracy to the street protests and family-splitting polarization of the new multi-party democracy.

The regime retained its control of the judiciary, and quickly seized control of the “independent” oversight bodies introduced by the new constitution. Judges protected the regime from corruption and human rights abuse cases, and in return constitutional requirements for the purge and reappointment of judges to modern democratic standards were dismissed by these bodies as “symbolic.” Control of the judiciary allowed the regime to maintain the pageantry and facade of democracy when it ousted Nasheed in a coup in 2012, and repeatedly dismiss the results of subsequent elections until the deck was sufficiently stacked in its favor. The international community, to its discredit, continued to accept the regime’s insistence that the judiciary was independent until it was far too late. The current president, Abdulla Yameen, incidentally Gayoom’s half-brother, retains absolute power over these institutions. While the Maldives has now largely fallen from international grace, any criticism is met by the government with token belligerence and appeals to sovereignty.

Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, the country's original autocrat for 30 years, has found common cause with Mohamed Nasheed, the ousted and exiled pro-democracy former president. How tenable is their pairing in opposing Abdulla Yameen's government?

President Yameen has systematically alienated, jailed, or driven into exile all those who helped bring him to power, including several cabinet ministers. With the opposition effectively unable to function, hold rallies, or even attend parliament, they have fled abroad and formed a bizarre alliance of convenience with the other exiles. Many of these people were directly responsible for ousting Nasheed in the 2012 coup and toppling Maldivian democracy – and now he has allied quite literally with the man holding the megaphone calling for him to resign under duress. You could be forgiven for thinking Maldivian politicians have short memories. There is no common cause among this group beyond a desire to be rid of Yameen.

The president’s falling out with Gayoom was particularly surprising, given that old political loyalties mean the former dictator takes with him much of the government’s genuine support base among the population, thought to be around 30 percent. Local council elections earlier this year showed over 50 percent still support Nasheed’s Maldivian Democratic Party (endemic vote buying suggested the loyalties of the remaining 20 percent were somewhat malleable). I suspect the goal is to try and embrace the discarded and irrelevant to present a united front, but the other exiles, members of Yameen’s government purged in various political witch hunts, bring nothing to the table. Long-term Maldives watchers find it absurd to see former jailers now adopting the language of human rights activism and promoting themselves as prisoners of conscience.

India has historically been a close partner of the Maldivian government and has provided ballast at times of political instability. Given that the ongoing democratic decline appears to have distanced New Delhi, is China poised to benefit?

Much is made of the India-China rivalry over the Maldives, particularly in the Indian media, but I think the reality is a little more nuanced than two powers vying for the islands’ favor. India intervened in the 1988 coup attempt, sending paratroopers to the aid of the Maldivian military when LTTE mercenaries tried to topple Gayoom’s regime. It was therefore very surprising that India, the regional democratic superpower, was then the first to acknowledge and legitimize the return of the regime the day after the 2012 coup. Other countries with less of a diplomatic presence in Male took India’s lead on this, making that decision instrumental to the regime’s legitimizing its return to power.

The regime repaid this favor by seizing and nationalizing the airport refurbishment project that had been granted to Indian infrastructure giant GMR, at the time the single largest foreign investment ever made in the Maldives. The company was informed it would not be paid compensation as its contract was “invalid from the outset,” and given a week to pack and leave. It is fair to say that India’s sleepwalking through the Maldives’ democratic decline has been instrumental to China’s current advantage in the country.

In May, Minister of Economic Development Mohamed Saeed traveled to Beijing to participate in the Belt and Road Forum. Of what significance is the Maldives' participation in Beijing's Belt and Road Initiative?

China is currently constructing a bridge in the Maldives connecting the congested capital Male to the suburban spillover island of Hulhumale. This is naturally being presented as a great infrastructure achievement by the current government, but it is worth noting that most large infrastructure developments in the Maldives are foreign-funded. The roads and seawall protecting the city were built by Japan, the parliament by Pakistan, the Grand Mosque by Saudi Arabia, the main public hospital by India, the national museum by China. The reality of Chinese influence in the Maldives is a little more opaque: tourism. Chinese tourists accounted for 27 percent of arrivals in 2016, the Maldives’ top market by volume. The vast majority of these are on package tours, provided by operators extremely sensitive to state travel advisories. In the past, the Chinese government has shown it can cut of these arrivals like a tap. With the 70 percent of the Maldivian economy indirectly reliant on tourism, China needs few other tools of control.

Why is China interested in the Maldives? It is an under-acknowledged fact that the country is one of the world’s top chokepoints for maritime oil shipping, with 17 million barrels of oil traveling from the Gulf and passing through one of two channels between the Maldivian atolls every day. China, Japan, South Korea – this is how Asia gets its oil. There are no overland alternatives; a pair of submarines could halt Asia’s energy supply. Notably, the American military base on Diego Garcia is located 450 miles to the south. 

Earlier this year, Saudi King Salman visited the Maldives, reportedly with the intention to make major investments and even to lease land to help with the country's Vision 2030 plan. What is the extent of Saudi involvement in the Maldives today?

Saudi Arabia has long funded the building of mosques in the Maldives, as well as scholarships for the training of imams and scholars abroad. The country also receives an annual shipment of dates, this year distributed by the first lady in the name of her own charity. As an unstable, import-dependent tourism-based economy with an over-valued and unexchangeable local currency, the Maldives has also relied on outside financing. Having alienated most of its former donors in India and the West, the Saudis have filled the gap as a financial sponsor and are now directly propping up the government. Support includes $150 million for loan repayments, $100 for airport redevelopment, $80 million for infrastructure, $50 million for military housing, $20 million in budget support, and $1 million for a feasibility study into a potential port development in the country’s north.

The influence of Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabist ideology on the Maldives has been profound. The Maldives is constitutionally mandated to be “100 percent Sunni Muslim.” Maldivians are compelled to be Muslim or face charges of apostasy; alcohol is banned outside the resort islands (these are deemed “uninhabited” for administrative expedience); the legal system defaults to Islamic Sharia; and fornication outside marriage is subject to 100 lashes and banishment to a remote island. Moreover, lawmaking and freedom of expression are constitutionally “subject to the tenets of Islam,” giving great political power to those who presume to interpret these on behalf of the rest of the country. As a result, the Maldives has shifted from its relatively relaxed traditional interpretation of Islam toward extreme Saudi-style conservatism in less than a generation, experiencing near-total cultural assimilation. 

The Maldives and its politics escape notice for many Asia watchers. Do you see the trends shaping politics on the islands as part of broader regional themes?

Tourism and environmental issues tend to top the list when people think of the Maldives, but the religious and resource politics could potentially have a much more profound impact on the region. Local fundamentalists have taken it upon themselves to abduct and murder journalists and bloggers, and up to 200 Maldivians are believed to have traveled to fight alongside ISIS and al-Nusra in Iraq and Syria, with indifference if not complicity on behalf of the government. These individuals may now be returning as the war winds down, with potentially dire consequences for an economy entirely dependent on hedonistic Copacabana-style Western resort tourism. Totally reliant on imports for food and energy, the Maldives’ present indulgence of extremism risks it becoming a failed state almost overnight. As a major chokepoint for oil travelling to Asia from the Gulf, there are significant ramifications for shipping and energy politics in the wider region.