Democracy and climate risks as Maldives President Nasheed resigns

The Maldives' President Mohamed Nasheed resigned on Tuesday (6 February), after months of unrest, which escalated after the arrest of a senior judge.  

Mr Nasheed announced his resignation during a televised news conference: "It will be better for the country in the current situation if I resign. I don't want to run the country with an iron fist." The police officers who had mutinied against him were supporters of the Maldives' former President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, an autocrat who had held power for 30 years (1978-2008).

Mark Lynas, Mr Nasheed's climate adviser, told OneWorld this morning: "This is obviously disastrous for a fledgling democracy."

Mohamed Nasheed had been a human rights campaigner before he came to power during the Maldives' first multi-party elections on 28 October 2008. After graduating in 1989 with a BA in Maritime Studies from the University of Liverpool, Mr Nasheed "helped establish Sangu, a political magazine scrutinising the ruling political class," according to India's Daily News and Analysis. "The government banned Sangu within a year of its first publication and Nasheed was arrested and jailed. In 2003, Nasheed fled the Maldives. A year later, on Nov 10, 2004, he co-founded the country's first opposition party, the Maldivian Democratic Party."

He founded his opposition party while in exile in Sri Lanka - and this close connection with Sri Lanka's ruling party has led to doubts about his pro-democracy credentials from those who suffered from the Sri Lankan government's violent suppression of its Tamil community. 

Mr Nasheed is best known globally not as a human rights campaigner with good governance on his mind but as an environmental campaigner passionate about human rights to a stable climate. He is a high-profile advocate of the rights of the people of the Maldives to be able to go on living on their island homes. The Maldives is a chain of nearly 1,200 islands in the Indian Ocean, under severe threat from rising sea levels caused by climate change.

'We will drown!" he cried out, when OneWorld's climate channel team interviewed him during the UN's Copenhagen Climate Conference in 2009, asking him what would happen to the Maldives if urgent action were not taken by world leaders to combat climate change. 

Mr Nasheed did much to promote the need to take both governmental and personal action to combat climate change. He launched a plan in 2009 to make the Maldives carbon-neutral within a decade; hit the global headlines when he held a half-hour cabinet meeting six metres under water, with the members of the cabinet dressed in full scuba gear, and  fixed solar panels onto the roof of his home in view of the global press.

Right now, however, the focus of the Maldives remains on the political crisis, which some see as a crisis of democracy. Mark Lynas told us: "The impact of climate policy will be secondary to having a functioning government, which is hopefully not a restoration of the old dictatorship."

You can see the interview here.

 

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