Murdering music

When former MDP chairman Mohamed Nasheed launched his campaign for the party's presidential nomination, he chose to call it "Thaahiru Dhiriulhun" or "Hygienic Life". While Anni may officially take hygienic existence to mean being able to afford ice cream every month, no one can fail to notice the right wing connotations in the phrase. It shouldn't, therefore, come as a surprise that Anni describes his party as a centre-right party. 

The largest political party in the Maldives has long allowed itself to be ruled by right wing ideals, particularly the religious right. When MDP's assistant secretary-general Aishath Aniya received death threats for questioning the need to wear the buruga, or the headscarf, from conservative Islamists within and outside the party, neither Anni nor Munavvar uttered a word to condemn the threats or to defend Aniya's right to the freedom of expression. 

Now, both these 'reformists' have openly gone against Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, by publicly saying Maldivian citizens can only practice Islam. MP Ibrahim Ismail or Ibra, head of the officially unrecognised Social "Liberal" Party, has also repeatedly said that the country can only have Islam as its religion. As a member of the UN, the Maldives should in theory support its declarations; unfortunately in practice the UDHR is not binding. In 2005 the Maldives, under pressure, signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political and Rights or ICCPR with reservation against Article 18, which regards the freedom of religion, thought and conscience. Dictator Gayoom, in his last terms in office---and let's hope they are his last---signed any international treaty he was asked to sign, but continues to violate them at will.

Meanwhile, the religious right has bullied its way into the Maldivian way of life, by infiltrating its every facet. From the media to education, from family life to politics no institution has been spared. When a man was slashed and burnt severely on the island of Himendhoo in Alif Atoll, allegedly by its religious militants, police dismissed the case as one of self-infliction. The Adhalath Party had earlier advised them to practice extreme caution in its resolution.  Today, we're so scared of the religious right that even  marriage between "Haaby" adult males and underaged girls are failing to register public protest. 

Earlier in the year, when MDP members proposed an ammendment to the new constitution to bar women from running for presidency, its leadership failed to distance itself from the motion. Notable 'reformists' like Mohamed Shihab MP voted for it, while the 'liberal' Ibra abstained. Abstinence in this case can only be interpreted as siding with the misogynists, an accusation Ibra has repeatedly fail to address. Paradoxically, it was due to Gayoom's much criticised unelected members that this particular right of Maldivian women will now be preserved in the new constitution. 

And now, the religious right are targeting the arts. A recent meeting by former pop singer Ali Rameez's NGO Jamiyyathu Salaf, with representatives from the MDP and the government's supreme council for Islamic affairs, proclaimed music as "haraam", or prohibited in Islam. Ali Rameez, who made a fortune singing hundreds of songs to tunes stolen from Bollywood, is a success story in the religious right's infiltration of popular culture. The right wing organisation held the meeting in a reaction against the emergence of more liberal interpretations of Islam, especially by Dr. Afrashim Ali, who holds a PHd in Fiqh or Islamic jurisprudence.

Failing to challenge Dr. Ali in public debates, the religious right have resorted to character assassination and, even, physical assault. But what is disturbing about these developments is the part played by MDP's 'reformists' in the systematic rubbishing of liberal views. Believing Dr. Ali to be a stooge of Gayoom because of Information minister Nasheed's backing for him, the opposition has effectively joined forces with the likes of Ali Rameez, and the odious and hyprocritical Mohamed Rasheed Ibrahim, to stem the spread of liberal interpretation of Islam at a time when the country most needs it. 

Liberal scholars quote from Verse 2:256 of the Quran, and other texts, to argue that Islam prohibits Muslims to force any person into Islam. Interestingly, Dr. Hassan Saeed, in a book he co-wrote with his brother, "Apostasy in Islam', takes a similar position. In his manifesto, his first priority appears to be to strengthen Islam in the Maldives, but through moderate and liberal teachings. But Dr. Saeed has not come forward to defend liberal Islamic interpretation, suggesting that he intends to take a less risky road for his presidential campaign.

For musicians and artists who hold genuinely liberal views, the immediate future looks bleak. As democratic ideals and human rights get buried under pop-politics, and music overtakes the buruga as the latest target of choice of the religious right, it is becoming all too clear that Maldivians can expect little help from the self-proclaimed 'liberals', 'reformists' or 'human rights activists'.

Anni's "Hygienic Life" could well mean a life clean of democracy, human rights, and music.

Ibra for president

Ibrahim Ismail, high-profile MP and leader of the Social Liberal Party, early this morning mass-texted Maldivians to announce his intention to run for the country's top job. Ibra is making the announcement less than a week after a parliamentarian committee he is chairing grilled police commissioner or "chief torturer" Adam Zahir over the treatment of detainees, particularly the custodial deaths of Hussain Solah and Muaviath Mahmood.

Ibra has been trying to address issues and bring change from within the framework of the parliament and the constitutional assembly, and has a high-level of support among discerning Maldivians. Moreover, he is easily the best orator amidst the "reformists" and "politicians" that have cropped up in post-Eavan Naseem Maldives. 

Ibra beat Munnavar and Zaki to become MDP's first president, but was later  isolated within the party due to differences with its chairman and populist trends.  Some have commented that Gayoom's two ex-ministers cajoled Anni into making things so difficult for Ibra that he was eventually forced to leave. 

But Ibra's commitment to human rights, particularly gender equality, has been questioned. When an MDP member introduced a bill banning women from running for presidency, Ibra chose to play safe by voting neutral. People who have worked with him claim that he considers women inferior to men; he has reportedly remarked to people that he believes women are unsuitable to be the leader of a country because they are "easier to manipulate". 

Ibra has also repeatedly opposed the freedom of religion. Islam, he has publicly stated, must remain state religion, and the country's growing and, largely, closeted non-Muslims are understandably concerned about such attitudes coming from a leader of a party that calls itself social "liberal" party. 

But with the right campaign, Ibra could well win the hearts and minds of a population not only disillusioned with Gayoom's dictatorship, but fed up of its fragmented opposition.

Teaching torture: from one Zahir to another

Systematic torture, ranging from petty torment to gruesome murder, characterises Maumoon Abdul Gayoom's three decades of dictatorship, and the detention centres of Dhoonidhoo, Atholhuvehi and Maafushi prison have a notoriety, in the Maldives, that is equal to Abu Ghuraib or Quantanamo Bay. While sources leaning towards the Maldives Democratic Party or MDP tend to credit the commissioner of police Adam Zahir with much of the torture that goes on in those places, its foundation may have been laid much earlier, by another Zahir.

Old Gayoom faithful Umar Zahir, an ex-cabinet minister who held every portfolio under the sun, might have been the single-most important influence in the making of the monster we now know as Adam Zahir or the chief torturer. When the younger Zahir was a student at Majeediyya School, the older Zahir was its headmaster and the generation that went to school then has a host of stories about Umar Zahir's sadism.

Now widely regarded as a corrupt crackpot, Umar Zahir, as headmaster, would go round Male on his bicycle, to sniff out Majeediyya students violating their curfew. The next day, he would make them undress and wear gunny bags, and subject them to cruel public humiliation.  Young boys also had to endure extensive detention at school, sometimes for weeks, in an era strangely reminiscent of a Charles Dickens novel.  The little we know of those days is enough to illustrate that the young Adam Zahir would have witnessed, perhaps even have been victim of, systematic torture, at an impressionable age, by a master sadist. 

The former president Ibrahim Nasir eventually wised up to what was going on and relieved Umar Zahir, widely suspected to be a psychopath, of his duties. But in Maumoon Abdul Gayoom's government Umar Zahir found ways to continue his exercises in tormenting young boys. In his years as home minister, he established a culture of abuse on deprived boys in a reformatory. Directly under his supervision, well-documented incidents of child sexual abuse, horrific punishment, and even death due to negligence occurred there. Umar Zahir appointed a known sadist and paedophile to supervise the reformatory, and had tiny cells built to lock up boys for durations of over a month, in solitary confinement, for minor offenses. During this period, one boy "fell into the water tank" and died while another's short life ended in a lorry accident in which the driver employed by Umar Zahir didn't have a license. The abuse and the deaths were never criminally investigated and when things hotted up Gayoom just reshuffled Umar Zahir. 

Even as sports minister, the sadist devised ingenious ways to torment. He famously refused to allow a top footballer on the field because he would not cut his hair to the length prescribed by the minister. He would also detain athletes inside sports ministry compounds, threatening them with bans if they didn't do as he ordered.

Less known are Umar Zahir's actions as a supervisor overseeing the building of Kurumba Village, the first tourist resort in the Maldives. A waiter, tending to newly arrived guests, accidently split water on them in Umar Zahir's presence. The ex-headmaster ordered the young man to kneel down on the beach in full view of all the guests for hours, only pardoning him when flabbergasted guests begged on his behalf. 

Umar Zahir may no longer able to practice torment on the scale he enjoyed. But he's left a legacy that is being followed by a faithful student. Of course it's a bit simplistic to assume that the commissioner of police learnt his craft from his former headmaster. 

I'm just introducing an idea here and hope readers with information will post their views and stories in the comments.

Coming out of the closet

When MDP's official press Minivan News announced that Mohamed Nasheed, or Anni, was quitting as chairman of the party to enter the presidential rat race, nobody was surprised. It's well known that Anni was always a closet presidential hopeful and, as the only thing keeping his disintegrating party together, this may be the right and inevitable move. Unfortunately, Anni is not the exciting political upstart he was in the early 1990s and his speeches and tactics no longer resonate with the populace as they did, say, even three years ago.

He is, of course, a better choice than Munavvar or Zaki, but Hassan Saeed and Ibra?

Hassand Saeed is courageous in the way he stands up to the religious right, genuinely seeming to embody liberal views, but he is yet to come clean on his part in Gayoom's crackdown on dissent. Ibra is charismatic, and a great orator, but as the founder of a party that calls itself the social "liberal" party, his lack of support in the constitutional assembly for gender equality leaves much to be desired.

Anni should be credited with much of the change taking place in the Maldives now. He played a crucial role in mobilising international intervention against Gayoom's atrocities, his courage and fighting spirit have been an inspiration for the younger generation, and he may be the sole force holding together the country's largest opposition party.

But his inability to take criticism, his patronising attitude towards people, and his distortion of the truth for political convenience need to be taken into consideration. His lazy responses to questions regarding MDP policy, or the lack of any, are also a bit of a joke. "Get Gayoom out" seems to be his policy for everything. 

It's taken Anni a long time to come out of the closet. Ironically, in that time, he may have grown more like the man he wants to get rid of.

The Maldivian hunt for an Obama is still on.

 

Gayoom's Nasir complex

People can't have failed to notice that Gayoom has a Nasir-complex. 

Ibrahim Nasir, the second president of the Maldives was a man of vision and didn't hanker after attention like Gayoom. Much of the wealth achieved by this country, that Gayoom takes credit for, was in fact due to Nasir's far-thinking economic policies and implementation. 

Unlike Gayoom, Nasir knew when he had outlived people's support and exited gracefully, paving the way for the Egypt-educated young(er) man. When Gayoom gleefully assumed power, illegally it seems, if his own admissions of having carried a firearm to the swearing in are to be believed, he inherited, amongst other things, an international airport, a tourism industry, and a high-quality fish processing plant that were already earning huge foreign revenues. 

The narcissistic Gayoom, on the other hand, was more interested in showing off his supposed intellectual abilities to his ignorant brothers-in-law and a horde of cronies, all of who played on his gigantic conceit for personal gains. It is said that Gayoom would gaze at the night sky and quote the distances between the earth and the moon and the stars, which enormously impressed his barely-literate audience. Gayoom's love for trivia-dropping now mostly manifests itself in the Heyyambo riddles, an avenue for the fast-deteriorating dictator to still feel he has something of an intellect.

Although Gayoom was initially all praise for his predecessor who, in fact, helped him get the top job, he soon started using the nation's resources in an attempt to lower the status of a man he obviously felt inferior to. Using people who would do anything for money and power, Gayoom launched a massive campaign to undermine people's admiration for Nasir. Stories of the ex-president's supposed  pilfering of the nation's wealth, manufactured with the help of Gogo Latheef, co-founder of the MDP, who is said to have got a resort for his trouble, resulted in a threat of lawsuit by Nasir's lawyers. 

Gayoom's government was forced to stop the circulation of stories about Nasir's thefts, so it commissioned cheap cartoons, mostly drawn by Chiliya Moosa Manik, and low-grade music albums to spout abuse on the former president. Abbas Ibrahim was instrumental in the production of this cheap culture for Gayoom, and it's no coincidence that no significant cultural creation has emerged during Gayoom's dictatorship.

Gayoom also commissioned songs, articles, and books praising himself, to cover his increasingly apparent lack of vision and innovation. The president's office would fund government schools like CHSE to send congratulatory cards to Gayoom. It is said he even wrote a few songs himself. 

Nasir has survived despite Gayoom's many attempts to character-assassinate him. Look at Nasir's photo and you can understand why he is regarded as an enigmatic leader, a man of integrity, and the person who laid the foundation for the wealth Gayoom and his cronies are today pocketing for themselves. Look at Gayoom's photo and you see a practically decomposing dictator struggling to still be valid in a country and a world that can't wait to see the back of him.

Gayoom may have succeeded in demolishing Velaanaage, Ibrahim Nasir's property in the centre of Male, but he will always pale in comparison to the his predecessor.

MDP double standards

One of the reasons MDP may not have been able to draw on the considerable opposition to Maumoon Abdul Gayoom in post-Eavan Naseem Maldives is their own double standards.

When Hassan Saeed and co resigned from Gayoom's government MDP suporters, who had only the day before heckled them at a debate organised by the newspaper Haveeru, couldn't hold back their joy. But when Saeed's growing popularity became a threat, MDP members began to call for Saeed to publicly apologise for his actions while he was part of the regime, a demand they never bothered make on their own president and vice-president.

Mohamed Munavvar and Ibrahim Hussein Zaki in their time with Gayoom opposed all democratic reforms and, less than a week after police murdered inmates of Maafushi prison, supported the dictator, then also head of police, in his bid for a fifth term in office.

Accusations of corruption leveled at the two have never been answered satisfactorily and it should be noted that Munavvar is the architect of the flawed constitution currently taking so much resources and time to ammend. To my knowledge neither have said sorry in public for anything they've done while with Gayoom. After Sandhaanu Zaki dramatically shouted at Munavvar, at his MDP leadership campaign, that he was responsible for the online editor's years of torture and suffering, the former attorney was forced to come up with with a half-hearted explanation. Apparently, Gayoom forced him to do all the bad things he did in office, while he was fully responsible for all the good things. In a laughable early speech at an MDP rally Munavvar blamed Gayoom for the constitution but took the credit for himself for creating the law school.

Unlike the New Maldives trio, the Old Maldives duo did not resign from office. They joined MDP when they were sacked by Gayoom and had no other option.

When the two made their way into the inner workings of MDP, the party had an indisputable command over the vast majority of Maldivians. But under their power, that command has diminished, the party has lost many of the key persons who helped to set it up, and MDP today is a fragmented entity given to emulating Gayoom tactics on the populace of the Maldives. The latest, the ridiculous Arumaaz trips, are a case in point.

That MDP couldn't come up with a decent opposition figurehead of its own to lead Maldivians into a post-Gayoom era has meant they have over-relied on the dictator's discards, which may have cost the party irreparable damage.