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Gangs and NSS deployments increase dictator's election options in Maldives
DO report - 3 December 2004
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Addu
people gather at island office complex
after Indian medical staff resign en masse
from Hithadhoo hospital |
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Gang
member arrested by citizens in Hithadhoo |
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Photo
above and two photos below: |
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Young Addu men discuss action against gang members |
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Hithadhoo
door window smashed by gang members |
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Hithadhoo
child injured by broken glass after house
door is smashed by gang members last night |
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Civil unrest is continuing in Maldives' Addu atoll where the NSS is refusing to take proper action against drug-addicted gangs organised by
Gayyoom and his brother Trade Minister Yameen.
The head of the NSS police section, Brigadier General Adam Zahir has clear instructions from Gayyoom and Yameen not to arrest any gang members until the 31 December People's Majlis elections are over.
Adam Zahir and NSS chief of staff Brigadier General Mohamed
'22' Zahir are willing and well-paid participants in this plot, which has been in planning since the end of 2003 when only massive vote fraud in the
referendum enabled Maumoon Gayyoom to keep the presidency. The night of
that referendum, the NSS cut electric power to Male' for an hour and carried suitcases full of prepared votes into the counting room. After the power was restored, Gayyoom's win was announced.
During
2004, eyewitnesses in Male' have reported continual late night meetings between Yameen and senior NSS officers. In the capital and the rest of the country, gangs of criminals were operating with impunity. In Maldives, Islamic law allows citizen's arrest but when robbers and assaulters were subdued and handed over to the NSS, they were immediately released.
In the past year, many businessmen and women have contacted
Dhivehi Observer complaining about NSS inaction.
Today,
Gayyoom ordered 250 NSS officers into Addu. Conveniently, the movement of NSS into the south was already underway before the latest events in Addu, beginning two days ago on December 1, when hundreds of Hithadhoo islanders arrested known gang members and demanded the NSS take action against them. The islanders were enraged after gang attacks, including rape, drove the Indian staff at the vital Hithadhoo hospital to resign en masse.
Six doctors from
the hospital have arrived in Male' on their way out of the country, and Gayyoom has been forced to fly two replacement Maldivians into Addu - Dr Solih and Dr Shifan. The Indian medical staff
in Hithadhoo includes nurses and a paediatrician (specialist baby doctor), and they have not been allowed to leave Addu. All are on contracts with the Gayyoom government and their passports are being withheld.
Only
some gang members were arrested the first night, and others who were seized, have already been released again. They are trying to flee the islanders who were hunting them but meanwhile their attacks on the Addu population continue.
These violent young men have publicly vowed to kill the people who arrested them. Last night a person was slashed with a cutter knife and car vandalised, and the glass window of a door was smashed. A young child inside the house panicked and injured her foot on the broken glass.
Gayyoom will use the NSS to subdue and intimidate the
Hithadhoo population, and prevent action against gang members until the election is over. He also has the option of creating enough civil unrest to cancel the elections altogether.
Gayyoom has used this tactic on Maldivians throughout his rule, creating poverty, crime and food shortages in any island or atoll that dares to oppose or offend him in any way. The heavily populated north and the south of the country have been chronically neglected.
In Addu, Gayyoom has been promising for over twenty years to build a resort development on Vilingili island, east of Gan. Gan has one of the best British military airfields ever built outside UK, and for fifteen years international airlines have expressed interest in landing on Addu as a stop-over for their Indian Ocean flights.
Gayyoom
stopped the latest resort proposal for Vilingili when he fell out with
ex-minister Ibrahim Zaki and ex-attorney general Mohamed Munavvar after the Maafushi jail torture death and shootings, and subsequent Male' riot in September 2003. The people of Addu now realise they will never see the development of their atoll under Gayyoom's regime.
Gayyoom's neglect of the north and south is due to greed and callous vindictiveness. The Male'
families who support him are allied with a small number of officials and businessmen/gangsters.
They do not want to share resort profits with other islands and atolls and they are not prepared to decentralise government departments and the fish export business away from the capital.
Gayyoom's regime accepts bribes to waive taxes
and secure contracts. Democratic and legal
reforms are a direct threat to this cosy
arrangement.
Education and health services are kept to a minimum outside Male'. Islanders are constantly told the government does not have the money to improve the economies in their islands, but Gayyoom has found hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on himself, his NSS and his cronies.
There have been many atoll representatives who have challenged Gayyoom over the lack of development outside the capital and they have all been answered, like Munavvar and Zaki and the other reformists, in the same way
- with threats, faked charges, beatings, imprisonment and torture.
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