:: Dhivehi Observer :: Peoples Press ::

Mao ZeDong and Maumoon Gayyoom - the insanity of dictators

by a DO correspondent - 17 November 2004

Mao Zedong

Mao one of the world's most lethal dictators. He had a dream of bringing development to China through continual revolution, and as quickly as possible. But there was a paradox. The only way to abolish government and prevent its re-emergence would be to eliminate all people like landlords, financiers, bureaucrats, political activists, and other 'criminal' types. Mao believed this could only be accomplished by imposing a total dictatorship with himself as the leader. So the path to a government-free utopia began with total domination by Mao's government.

The 'Great Leap Forward' was a revolutionary policy initiative intended to invigorate China's fledgling economy and establish it as the world's largest steel and grain exporter. Announced in 1959, Mao's brainchild involved three major endeavours:
1. Double the country's annual food production using only half the manpower.
2. Apply most of the surplus labor to steelmaking.
3. Apply the rest to national infrastructure projects.

No one had ever suggested to Chinese farmers that they could double or triple their crop yields by simply plant their seeds closer together. This new Mao-blessed technique failed miserably; the seedlings crowded each other and prevented any of them from receiving adequate sunlight and soil nutrients. But everyone was afraid of Mao's temper, and so no one told him that his idea was worthless. Instead, his underlings reported bumper crops although the opposite was actually the case.
Another of Mao's agricultural tips fared almost as poorly. He decreed that farmers make a concerted effort to hunt down and kill every sparrow. The birds were seen as pests eating the farmers' crops. However, the sparrows were eating insects which lived on the crops. So the farmers were slaughtering one of their few allies in the battle for pest control.

And then there was the steel industry. Whereas a logical person might have taken a hundred thousand idle farmhands and assigned them to work in a few steel mills, Mao's plan was something else entirely. He directed the farmers to stay home and wait for the bumper harvests to arrive. In the interim, they were to construct and operate backyard furnaces for smelting steel. They were given production quotas, an din order
In order to meet the quotas, the ignorant peasant’s resorted to melting down whatever metal stuffs they had lying around: hinges, doorknobs, utensils, tools. It was all converted into useless slag and dutifully turned over to the government. This steel found its way into public works, like bridges and dams. Not surprisingly, many of these poorly-engineered structures collapsed dramatically or were abandoned.

So the Great Leap Forward was an unqualified failure. It became a great leap backwards, but nobody wanted to tell Mao that. He believed himself to be infallible, and had a history of making life uncomfortable or killing anyone who dared question his policies. Which is why his lackeys waited months before telling him about the famine which killed an estimated 43 million Chinese.

The development policies for Maldives under Gayyoom have been similarly lopsided, misrepresented and unquestioned. Most of the government's development efforts have gone into the tourism industry, while the vital fishery and agricultural sectors have been undermined by ignorance and neglect. The islands have been used as a source of cheap labour for the tourist resorts and fish exporters, and the country's malnutrition has been hidden and even denied by government officials. Gayyoom's cabinet ministers and other members of the People's Majlis have almost never seriously questioned the orders of president Gayyoom, nor are they willing to let the people's voice be heard.

Maldives experienced extreme famine during Ameen Didi’s era (1944-1953) and half the population died of hunger. Starving Maldivians were eating tree bark, leaves, and weeds. Gayyoom pretends that Ameen Didi was a great leader, and has actively censored any attempt to tell the truth about his disastrous rule. Gayyoom is the leader of the same Male' party group that supported Ameen Didi, and in many ways he is continuing Didi's irrational policies and mirroring Mao's, by starving the population in the name of progress.

When the population of China's rural Hunan province could not meet their production quotas in 1959, the local government declared that the farmers were hiding their harvests and denounced the citizenry as enemies of the people. Military patrols were sent to locate these hidden caches of grain. The soldiers beat families who failed to supply the food they were assumed to have hidden. When winter arrived, the peasants had nothing to eat but tree bark and grass. The officials smashed the families' cooking pots to prevent them from cooking grass soup.

In a final effort to retrieve the mythical hidden stores of food, thousands of Chinese peasants were tortured and murdered by Mao's government. Military forces patrolled train stations and roads to block any escape. The people filled their stomachs with whatever they could find: leaves, weeds, leather, straw, feathers, dirt. When they had run out of anything else, they resorted to cannibalism. People dug up freshly buried corpses. When somebody died, it was common for family members to hide the body for their meals.

By 1961, Mao had no choice than to relent. He swallowed his pride and bought grain on the world market. He was forced to disband the communes and return to proven farming methods. The backyard steel efforts were abandoned. In political terms, the failure of the Great Leap Forward was a stunning personal defeat for Mao, and critics inside his own government began to gather momentum.

Mao's Little Red Book

Gayyoom's Man for All Islands

During the next five years, Mao studied public relations. His 'Little Red Book' was published, containing pithy quotations about the nature of struggle and other forgettable dross. A cult of personality was born, just as Gayyoom attempted with his unreadable biography 'A Man for all Islands'.

In August 1966, Mao launched 'The Cultural Revolution' - an effort to purge the country of all dissident thought by bashing to death all dissident thinkers. Mao used children and his army to do the dirty work. Many of China's historical artefacts were destroyed. Historians claim it was the worst cultural vandalism in China for over 2,000 years. Using his newfound popularity among the easily fooled youth, Mao called for students to abandon their studies and form militia groups and help the army to find and kill undesirables. The foolish youths happily complied. More than 11 million schoolchildren joined the Red Guard and travelled to Beijing to await further orders. Mao's defense minister told the mobs that their mission was destroy all traditional culture and philosophy.

The Red Guard began by murdering teachers and school administrators. Then they destroyed the Tibetan monasteries; next were artists, scholars, and intellectuals. And whenever Mao denounced one of his former comrades, the Red Guard made it their mission to eradicate the offender. When they ran out of enemies to torture and kill, the various Red Guard factions turned on each other, resulting in armed street warfare.

In Gayyoom's Maldives, there is zero tolerance for dissidents regardless of how positive the changes they call for. There are many media campaigns in Maldives promoting hatred for anyone having dissident thoughts. They are branded as threats to national security, Christians and/or Islamic extremists. Anyone opposed to Gayyoom is arrested and tortured by his NSS. Many talented Maldivians have fled overseas. Brainwashed and ambitious young men and women conduct Gayyoom's campaigns, and they are often well paid for their lies. Teachers, businessmen and scholars are tortured without any credible reason apart from Gayyoom's hatred.

Gayyoom has suppressed all understanding of the history of Maldives, and his national vandalism has been on par with Mao's own cultural revolution.

Five years after Mao's death from Parkinson's disease in 1976, the Chinese government issued a declaration condemning the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. The document 'Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People's Republic of China' included this terse indictment of Mao Zedong:
'Chief responsibility for the grave leftist error of the Cultural Revolution, an error comprehensive in magnitude and protracted in duration, does indeed lie with Comrade Mao Zedong... far from making a correct analysis of many problems, he confused right and wrong, and confused the people with the enemy'.

Herein lies the Chinese people's tragedy, and it is a lesson Maldivians are learning too from the bloodstained results of Gayyoom's own stubborn insanity.