The Maldives’ Games of Thrones

Fans of liberal democracy had little to celebrate in 2018. But its recent and unexpected resurrection in the Maldives, reversing a half-decade decline into authoritarianism, gives cause for some cheer.

The architect of democratic deterioration, President Abdulla Yameen, lost elections on September 23 despite near absolute capture of all independent institutions, including the elections authority, security forces, and both the judiciary and its watchdog body. For much of his tenure the opposition was either jailed or forced into exile over sham charges of terrorism, to be joined by many allies fallen out of favor. Yameen himself was mired in corruption scandals, including a 2016 Al Jazeera investigation alleging his involvement in a money-laundering racket thought to be worth over $1 billion. He wielded his parliamentary majority to recriminalize defamation, while media critical of the regime found itself slapped with heavy fines.

Islamist gangs roamed the capital city of Male, unmolested by the police, while those who did find themselves in court were swiftly released by pliant judges. Buoyed with confidence, these gangs enjoyed impunity to pursue their own agendas: A journalist with the Maldives Independent was kidnapped at knifepoint in 2014, never to be seen again, while in 2017 the country’s most famous satirist was stabbed to death outside his front door. There was, Yameen told his home minister at the time, “no need to be overwhelmed by [the] case.”

Disgraced at home, belligerent toward former ally India, and increasingly a pariah on the international stage, the Maldives found itself abandoned by all but Saudi Arabia and China – which seized the opportunity to ensnare the country in a crippling debt trap as part of its Belt and Road Initiative. By mid-2018 the EU appeared on the cusp of imposing sanctions after three members of the European Parliament sneaked into the country and met secretly with the opposition.

Such was the extent of Yameen’s grip on the Maldives that few foreign governments even bothered to send observers to September’s elections. Monitoring had usually been the prerogative of the Commonwealth, but Yameen unilaterally announced the country’s exit from the international body in 2016 after it failed to recognize his “achievements in cultivating a culture of democracy in the country and in building and strengthening democratic institutions.”

The elections commission, “strengthened” with Yameen’s cronies and headed by the former chief of his own political party, rejected the candidacy of his principle opponent: exiled former President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP). Foreign journalists were all but banned from even entering the country, turned away under a spurious and kafkaesque new visa scheme demanding bank statements and medical certificates.

The opposition coalition by this point included almost every Maldivian politician other than Yameen. This included his half-brother, the aging dictator Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, who had ruled the country for 30 years prior to begrudging the arrival of multiparty democracy in 2008. Yameen had fallen out with his older sibling in February after imprisoning Gayoom’s son. The resulting struggle for control of the judicial system saw a state of emergency, the storming of Parliament by the military, and half the Supreme Court bench thrown in jail – including the chief justice. He was swiftly joined behind bars by Gayoom, who took the opportunity to style himself a prisoner of conscience without a hint of irony.

Nasheed had been a prisoner of conscience, chained to a hot generator in a tin shed by Gayoom’s regime before winning the 2008 vote. He had also been sent back to prison on terrorism charges after the regime’s embittered remnants deposed him in a coup in 2012, and was released into exile only after the glamourous intervention of human rights lawyer Amal Clooney. Nasheed seemed to decide the MDP had few options other than to play Yameen’s game of democratic pageantry, and withdrew from the running.

In his stead, the MDP fielded the quietly-spoken Mohamed Ibrahim “Ibu” Solih. A close, if rather more temperate, ally of Nasheed’s, Solih had kept the party running during its years in the wilderness but otherwise seemed content to remain in the background. He appeared little threat to both Yameen and the MDP’s ambitious new fair weather friends.

Astonishingly, Solih won with over 58 percent of the vote.

Yameen was caught completely unaware. Stacking the elections commission with party cronies appeared to have also stripped it of the competency needed to credibly rig the vote. The security forces, confused and blindsided, pledged to uphold the result – whatever the courts decided it to be. The courts, ever Yameen’s loyal allies and which had intervened repeatedly in the 2013 vote to bring him to office, wavered. Maldivians collectively held their breath – history after all had shown democratic restoration wasn’t up to a vote, but a court verdict.

On October 22, the five-man Supreme Court threw out Yameen’s claims of invisible ink and secret ring-shaped pens, and upheld the result. Maldivian democrats exhaled, and Solih was sworn in as president on November 17. India, which had foolishly and bizarrely recognized the 2012 coup as a legitimate transfer of power, sent Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the inauguration, keen to secure the diplomatic goal that had rolled into its net despite its best efforts.

This background to the Maldives’ present circumstance might sound like a political telenovela, but it very much colors the present. Political memories in the Maldives are short, and until recently there was strikingly little information about the country available – excluding brochures for resorts, which are so different from the inhabited islands as to functionally be a separate nation. Under Gayoom, media was tightly controlled, freedom of expression did not exist, and foreigners were all but banned from visiting islands other than resorts. The separation of these worlds was deliberate as well as geographic – the Maldives styles itself as “100 percent Islamic,” with Maldivians constitutionally mandated to be Muslim and subject to societal, judicial, and sometimes existential retribution as apostates should they assert themselves as anything else (or, for that matter, be caught on camera holding a glass of wine). It is a unique achievement in tourism marketing that a country world famous as a hedonistic romantic paradise should also impose a penalty of 100 lashes for the crime of extramarital fornication. Couples flock to the country for its beauty, privacy, and sense of isolation, while the capital city of Male is a candy-colored concrete metropolis of 160,000 people squeezed into a 5.8 square kilometer island – one of the most congested pieces of land on the planet.

These contradictions have proved difficult for diplomats, journalists, and international delegations. Pitching visits to their superiors often draws jibes over the presumed indulgence in hammocks and pina coladas. Alcohol is criminalized on “inhabited” islands and scarcely available even as a black market commodity – a bottle of vodka retails for upwards of $120. Tourists are stripped of their booze at the airport before transferring to their resorts. Compounding the lack of credible information is the fast-evolving politics of the Maldives and the chameleonic character of the many former regime officials now rushing back into power, which makes deciphering the country’s politics challenging from the outside.

With the ruling coalition united only by their desire to strip Yameen from power, this is more critical than ever. Parliamentary elections are slated for March 2019 and old patterns are sure to resurface, making the present calm something of a honeymoon period.

The MDP – still an activist democracy movement at its core – and now-President Solih are inclined toward progressive politics, but many of its coalition partners are anything but fellow democrats. These include Gayoom, an alliance with whom has inspired a queasy sense of political vertigo among the grassroots of the MDP, many of which survived torture and imprisonment under his rule – not to mention the 2012 coup that brought his regime back to power. Other odd bedfellows include Mohamed Nazim, defense minister under Yameen, who rallied the police and military to mutiny in 2012 and held the megaphone ordering Nasheed to step down. This did not inspire a sense of trust in his future boss. Already predisposed to paranoia, Yameen explosively fell out with Nazim in 2015 and had him jailed on charges of smuggling weapons and plotting assassination. Freed on a court order in the lead up to Solih’s inauguration, Nazim immediately announced his intention to re-enter politics and join the Jumhoree Party (JP) of resort tycoon Gasim Ibrahim.

Gasim was finance minister during the latter years of Gayoom’s regime (the position came with veto power over the state-owned Bank of Maldives, explaining Gasim’s capacity to loan himself 32.4 percent of the bank’s entire capital during his three-year tenure). His ambition for the presidency is as boundless as his fabled generosity to those politicians who choose to serve under his party’s banner, so much so that even Yameen had cause to worry. Gasim’s maneuvers saw Yameen use his parliamentary majority to amend the constitution and lower the maximum age for the presidency, excluding the 68-year-old polygamous tycoon from running. This hardly discouraged him, and it wasn’t until the courts resuscitated old corruption investigations, froze the tycoon’s bank accounts, and eventually convicted him for bribery – in absentia – that he deigned to join the opposition alliance. Freed in October – on bail, naturally – he returned to acquire the speaker of Parliament seat as well as most of the former MPs of Yameen’s Progressive Party of the Maldives. One of his parliament’s first acts was to repeal the presidential age limit.

Some of Solih’s cabinet appointments have raised eyebrows – particularly among more progressive Maldivians keenly aware of the consequences of being labelled irreligious in a society insistent on enforcing absolute Islamic homogeneity. Sheikh Mohamed Imran, head of the coalition’s religion-focused Adhaalath Party, gained the distinction of becoming the first Maldivian to be simultaneously convicted of encouraging terrorism and appointed to the position of home minister. While the charges related to a speech made to a protest under Yameen and were widely considered spurious, Adhaalath was only up to its usual tricks. The party played a key role in setting the moral stage for the 2012 coup; as political Islamists they attracted few votes, but by publicly moralizing with an outsize voice they were swift to label opponents as laadeenee (“heretical”) – including, for much of recent Maldivian political history, Nasheed and the MDP. Imran was released from prison and his conviction overturned in November; his plans for police reform remain rather uncertain.

Another former cellmate, Yameen’s disgraced vice president and tourism minister Ahmed Adeeb, has yet to benefit from the judicial system’s sudden magnanimity – at least, beyond the commuting of his 33-year jail sentence for corruption and terrorism to house arrest. Evidence on his three gold-plated iPhones formed the basis of an investigation in September by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which accused him “of a system of bribery and influence-peddling, backed by threats of violence, that stripped the country of almost $80 million.”

Infamously describing himself via text message as “boss of all the gangs,” Adeeb was widely considered to be Yameen’s money-man – at least until he was accused of trying to blow up the presidential yacht in all ill-fated 2015 attempt at the big chair. Keen to re-enter politics and no doubt thoroughly rehabilitated, he has launched his new party from prison: the “Maldives Third-Way Democrats.”

Meanwhile, despite no doubt eyeing exile abroad (many former Maldives regime officials seem to have deep roots in Singapore and Malaysia), former President Yameen himself remains free. As Nasheed remarked to an incredulous audience at a public talk in London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in October, where exactly would he go on trial?

That question goes to the heart of the steep challenge facing Solih – one in which he will need as much international support as he can muster. It is hard to fathom why the MDP, with the largest genuinely democratic support base in the Maldives by an overwhelming margin, seems intent on resuscitating the political careers of ardent adversaries rendered politically irrelevant under Yameen. As demonstrated by the history of its Parliament, more akin to a football transfer market than a legislative body, political loyalties in the Maldives are not so much bought as rented. Some moves, however, have been truly bizarre – such as Solih’s presenting the “Diamond Pen” award for service to journalism to none other than Gayoom himself, the author of press criminalization in the Maldives.

Why the indulgence and cautious sense of unity? The answer has much to do with the judiciary. Installed under Gayoom as the rubber-stamp wing of the executive, half the bench have grade-seven education or less, and a quarter have actual criminal records (ranging from sexual misconduct to embezzlement). Occasionally their “kompromat” leaks on Maldivian social media networks: One particular video of a rotund Supreme Court judge engaged with a prostitute in a Colombo hotel room led to protesters adopting large white underbriefs as a symbol of judicial reform. Constitutional provisions to reform the judiciary in 2010 were sabotaged by the former regime and its cronies on the judicial watchdog, keen to retain their immunity in cases concerning corruption and human rights violations. The whistleblower who leaked the process only narrowly survived after being stabbed three times in the back in broad daylight.

“Root and branch” judicial reform is paramount if the Maldives is to avoid a repeat of its history. There is political willingness, but the window will close as political tensions within the coalition rise and the temptation of wielding the judges against opponents grows stronger. Even during the current political “ceasefire” such reform will most likely require outside assistance, and given the extent of the problem, probably foreign judges temporarily appointed to the bench. The current state of the judiciary has ramifications not just for domestic political stability and justice, but also for foreign investment and security of contracts – there is a long list of foreign investors who have been suddenly and arbitrarily run out of the country.

The Maldives’ willingness to re-engage with India, the Commonwealth, and Western democracies – and their willingness to reciprocate – means the outlook is still very promising. Recent moves include the U.K.’s decision to open an embassy locally (most countries base their Maldives representation in Sri Lanka), $10 million in aid from the United States, and the prospect of India helping mitigate the Chinese debt trap built up under Yameen, thought to range from $1.5-3.2 billion. If it is also supported to pursue successful judicial reform, then the Maldives will entrench its democratic gains and remain as one of 2018’s much needed pieces of good news.