Forced migration around the corner: Time to act

By Salma Fikry

The following article is a translation of the foreword written by Salma Fikry for Falhu Aliran Muiy, a book by Muna Mohamed on the inhabited islands of Maldives, the abandonment of islands, and on the history, present and future of forced migration in the Maldives. 

For several years, we in the Maldives have accepted that we are a country with few natural resources. Our development policies were formulated and implemented with the underlying justification that the biggest challenge to our development was the highly dispersed nature of sparsely populated communities, over a vast spread of the ocean.  

This being the case, it was seen as unfeasible to provide services and opportunities to every inhabited island. Priority was given to develop the capital island Malé and subsequently, Vilingili or ViliMalé (a resort island in the vicinity of Malé changed to an inhabited island). Since then, we saw a huge stretch of land reclaimed near Malé, that is Hulhumalé, and the efforts to develop and relocate Maldivians to the artificial island of Hulhumalé. In recent years, we also witnessed a grand project to develop “GulhiMalé’ in the lagoon of Gulhi nearby Malé. And today we witness the reclamation of land for HulhuMalé Phase II.