Maldives’ yellow brick road to state of emergency – Part I

On 4 November 2015, President Abdulla Yameen Abdul Gayoom declared a State of Emergency in the Maldives, suspending along with other laws seven different fundamental rights guaranteed by its democratic Constitution. Even as his Attorney General announced the executive decree, the Foreign Ministry led by Yameen’s niece, Dunya Maumoon, was reassuring the world everything was ‘calm and normal’ in the Maldives. Cognitive dissonance between simultaneous announcements and a world of difference between things said and things done, have been hallmarks of Yameen’s regime. The state of emergency is the latest development in a month during which the leader’s paranoid, perhaps even schizophrenic, delusions and hallucinations have become the lived experience of the Maldivian people. For now, the world is looking at the developments, aghast. Soon, however, its attention will wonder, and details of this extraordinary time in Maldivian history can easily be forgotten. This series will record some of the details for posterity, before the Gayooms re-write history as they have a habit of doing. This part discusses events along the road to the current state of emergency. Accounts of later developments will follow in shorter posts as events unfold.

On 28 September 2015 an explosion went off on President Yameen’s speedboat, Finifenmaa[Rose] as she cruised in to dock at the official presidential jetty in Male’. The President, his wife Fathmath Ibrahim, and an entourage of about twenty aides and associates were on board. The first couple were returning from Hajj (as all local media accounts of the incident were careful to note and repeat endlessly). The precise location of the explosion, as investigations later revealed, was right under the President’s usual seat. For whatever reason, it was First Lady Fathmath Ibrahim who took the President’s seat that day. Consequently, the President escaped unscathed. Lady Fathmath, however, remained in hospital until yesterday, reportedly nursing fractures to ‘bones connected to the spine’. At first visited by many admirers, some of whom queued outside the hospital for hours with a white rose each to catch a glimpse of her, she was soon relegated to the back benches of national consciousness as events became progressively more dramatic with each day following the blast.