by
freemaldives2003@yahoo.com
It seems ages ago that people
used to stop for paying their respects at the mausoleum of
Abul Barakat-ul-Barbari, next to the once powerful
Velaanaage, now under deconstruction; where now commuters
stop only for the traffic light, before accelerating their
Honda Waves towards the Sultan park, where the palace stood
that once housed the country’s absolute monarchs, but now
home only to their pickled remains in a neglected museum
overlooking the Grand mosque in the old Ibrahimi Maidhan
where, ages ago, an unruly crowd lynched Mohammed Amin, the
first president of Maldives. Things have changed.
Forty years ago, when Prime
Minister Nasir gave orders to
shoot and kill unarmed citizens in Thinadoo, our public cheered him on, the same way
they cheered his Sifain as they
blew open innocent skulls leaving the mangled brains for
crows, before razing the island to the ground and carting
off the men to the infamous jail where they were tortured by
unrepentant guards and died unheard and unwept, in sharp
contrast to today’s pangs of guilt that gnawed at the
conscience of young and educated NSS
officers, like Aswan, prompting then to put their own
careers on line, writing critical reports of human rights
abuses in custody, and more surprisingly, actually eliciting
some positive responses from the higher ups, long before the
untimely -or timely -death of a convicted drug addict
sparked jail riots that ended in a massacre, outraging the
citizens of Male and resulting in spontaneous peaceful mass
street protests. Attitudes have changed. Today’s
Maldivians are keenly aware of their rights.
After sweeping Evan Naseem under
Sattar Commission’s carpet, washing one’s own small hands
with all the oceans of the world and dabbing it with all the
perfumes of Arabia, the smell is still there; but it’s not
Evan’s corpse rotting. It’s the sweet fragrance of
freedom. Freedom is in the air.
If you thought you had seen it
all –Shamsuddin III ascending to the throne in 1903 in a
ceremonial ‘darubaaru’, the likes of which history will
never see, and reigning unchallenged as an absolute monarch
till 1936, only to be forced to abdicate by a public
chanting the new word ‘constitution’, Mohammed Amin
concocting a republic to gain absolute power in January
1953, only to be deposed by a bloody revolution barely 6
months later, Nasir finding ‘accountability to parliament’ a
convenient ploy to undermine and subvert Prime Minister
Ibrahim Faamuladheyri Kilegefaanu, later finding a second
republic another convenient ploy to get rid of King Farid
and becoming an absolute despot, Gayoom building a brutal
dictatorship on the back of a ruthless NSS and a docile
made-to-order constitution that took a record 19 years to
make, only to be forced to publicly acknowledge torture and
reform the authoritarian constitution; you are yet to see a
lot more –opposition parties demanding accountability,
public debates on government performance, opposition
rallies in artificial beach, velvet revolutions…
Sitting in a miniscule parliament
house gifted by a country that has never seen democracy, the
big mouthed brother of the small sized man thinks he is
succeeding in holding the floodgates against the tide of
democracy, only because he is oblivious of the storm boiling
to a gale outside, fanned by a new generation of Maldivians
ready to take up their places in the affairs of their
nation, only to be blocked by an old guard, completely out
of tune with a new Maldives on the fast track to modernity.
Unless he releases pressure, and soon, the gates will
burst.
The days are gone when Hassan
Farid banned English education and Beru Dhohotthu could only
protest with a hat and a cat on a leash, when people who
could barely read became ‘ustazs’, when Zahir Hussein could
fire Farooq Ibrahim Didi only for daring to protest against
a second rate education for islanders, when students
depended exclusively on foreign donated scholarships for
higher education. The Maldivian of today is not the same
person who respectfully took all tyranny from despots like
Nasir.
Today we may laugh at Hassan
Fareed for declaring that Maldives needed only one clause in
its constitution, ‘the will of the ruler of the day’, only
because we are unaware that it was absolutely true not only
in the 1930s, but also true during the rule of Nasir and
continued to be true for the first twenty years of Gayoom.
Now he is learning the hard way that it is no longer true.
We may have thought it OK, when
Rannabaeyri Kilegefaanu sitting in Bandeyrige considered all
government revenue as his personal property, when even while
living abroad for years as king-elect he continued to
receive that revenue, when Mulee Ibrahim Fulhu and Meedhoo
Azeez were jailed for questioning government budget in
parliament, when Gayoom contemptuously walked out of the
Majlis each year after presenting the budget without waiting
for member’s questions, but generation next will not think
so. They will question Theemuge budget up to the ultimate
need for taking Gayoom’s extended family on extensive
foreign tours, from which when they return TV crews are told
not to show them on camera. In future they can’t hide their
secret extravaganza from the media.
On returning from his studies broad, what impressed the
young Gayoom most about Nasir, as he tells Royston Ellis in
his biography, ‘Man for All Islands”, was the atmosphere of
fear Nasir generated in Male, a fear about which he tells
Ellis he never thought he would get a chance to do anything,
but actually got the chance to perfect it into a terrible
tool to perpetuate his power, though of course he would not
reveal this bit to Ellis. But now it could be some one
else’s turn. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
end................ send comments to
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