:: Dhivehi Observer :: Peoples Press ::

Some are calling for multi-party democracy, others want rights, justice and accountability, but what are the pro-reform meetings really saying?

OPINION by a Male' contributor - 14 July 2004

Some things just don’t go together: Rukkuri and Rihaakuru; Adolf Hitler and compassion; and Maumoon Abdul Gayyoom and democracy.

The dictator’s recent spin about the need for democratic reform, after 27 years of unfettered nepotism, is sad really. People don’t change overnight when they’re 70, and everyone knows that Gayyoom, despite efforts to silence his younger brother Abdullah Hameed about his age, has now completed more than the average lifespan of Maldivians (anywhere between 65-70 years, depending on your source).

But what I want to say does not really concern Gayyoom's imminent demise, although I can’t deny that the thought gives me a certain pleasure. What I want to discuss concerns a pair of video cameras.

The TV Maldives cameras at the pro-democracy gatherings are clearly there to help the dictator’s national security service officers to draw a list of people to harass but, in the process, they are also performing another duty of utmost national importance: showing Gayyoom what people really think of him.

Gayyoom for decades has held his own meetings in which government officials are forced to sit patiently while he grandly states things like: “water is liquid” and elaborates for hours on it. The mainly semi-comatose audience at those meetings and the crowds filmed at the pro-reform gatherings couldn’t be further apart. And, thanks to Sammarey's spy cameras, Gayyoom for the first time in his life is getting a genuine feedback.

It seems to me that while some very powerful and convincing criticism of Gayyoom's system of governance has been made, the large majority of what is being said at these meetings can be summarised as a belated, tongue-in-cheek, humorous, and very Maldivian response by the people to all that the dictator has said and done in his 27 years in power.

If I were Gayyoom watching the tapes in the palace, I would not find it hard to interpret what the people are really saying: “We’ve seen through you, you cheap despot, you can bugger off now!”