Sad times for Maldives President as Saddam's statues fall

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Sad times for Maldives President as Saddam's statues fall
Maldives Culture Editors Report
April 2003
Statue photos from Sydney Morning Herald

President Maumoon Gayyoom has been asking his people to pray for Saddam Hussein.
His request, broadcast by Voice of Maldives on 28 March 2003 after Friday prayer, should come as no surprise; there have been friendly links between these two dictators since they first met two decades ago. Gayyoom's official biography gives details of the meeting:

Maumoon made only one official overseas visit in 1980, and that was to Iraq, in the very year that Iran-Iraq conflict escalated into full scale war. In his speech in Cuba the year before, Maumoon had praised Iraq, saying, "Maldives welcomes the decision of the Iraqi Government to channel the surcharge on the price of Iraqi oil into long-term development loans."

Maumoon remembers his visit to Iraq for an unusual encounter with President Saddam Hussein. After the official speech-making Saddam invited Maumoon for a drive. He dismissed his driver and got into the driving seat of the small car and gestured to Maumoon to take the front passenger seat. There was no obvious security presence and Maumoon was intrigued to see a submachine gun lying at Saddam's feet. He wondered if Saddam expected to use it.

Saddam took Maumoon on a drive around Baghdad, pointing out the sights, and then swung the car into the entrance of a girls school. There was an impromptu rally as the pupils flocked around Saddam and he introduced Maumoon to them.

That evening, after dinner, Saddam took Maumoon aside and told him that to govern the country, he needed to have an organisation. In Iraq, he said, there was a single party with power, the Arab Ba'ath Socialist Party. It was only through the one-party system that he was able to govern effectively.

Following that visit, Maumoon developed a close friendship with Saddam Hussein. However, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, the Maldives was the second country in the world to make an official statement condemning the invasion. True to the principles outlined in his Havana speech, Maumoon does not take decisions to please the powerful, but through conviction. So Maldives voted against Iraq despite the personal friendship between the two leaders.
Royston Ellis,
'A Man for All Islands –
A biography of President Maumoon Gayoom,
President of Maldives',
Singapore, Times Editions 1998, pp. 147-148.

Despite Gayyoom's censure of Saddam during the Kuwait occupation, the Maldivian leader was prepared to trade in guns with the Iraqi regime. According to sources inside the Maldives National Security Service, the NSS received several shipments of weapons from Saddam Hussein in the early 1990s. The shipments may have been sent and received in breach of United Nations sanctions against Iraq put in place following the Iraq War in 1991.

The weapons came packed in crates labelled as Ramadan gifts of dates from the people of Iraq to the people of Maldives. Some of the crates in each shipment, in fact, did contain dates. The code word for contraband weapons within the NSS soon became 'kadhuru', the Dhivehi word for dates.

All the guns were covered in dried blood, indicating that they had probably been used in point-blank shootings of some kind. According to a reliable eye-witness, soldiers spent days cleaning the weapons to remove the blood before storing them in the armouries. These guns were regularly used in ceremonial parades and clearly marked with the Iraqi army serial numbers in Arabic numerals.

Gayyoom's affection for Saddam is shared by many Maldivians. They have responded emotionally and spiritually to Arab nationalism and Saudi Islam. However, Gayyoom's concerns over Saddam's demise are different from those of the powerless Maldive people, who saw the Iraqi tyrant as a stubborn tough Arab hero defending his homeland from marauding foreigners.

In the Malé fish market, on the day after the war began, a seller offered a discount to a person who said Saddam's Iraq was winning, and there were phone-calls to Haveeru News expressing disbelief about reports of US victories. In a small poll of twenty people, Haveeru found that all twenty were against the invasion, fifteen believed that Saddam's forces would win, and the others said 'let's see what happens', and 'the Americans will level Iraq this time, even though my heart doesn't want to accept it.'

Maumoon Gayyoom

For Gayyoom and his supporters, who control Maldives through the President's office and the National Security Service, Saddam's fall is an equally unsettling experience. The editorial in Haveeru on 10 April 2003 written in the style of owner/editor Minister Zahir Hussein, a close personal friend of Gayyoom, deeply criticised the US-British-Australian invasion of Iraq, arguing that it has deprived the country of its opportunity to change leaders through elections. The editor claims the invasion sets a precedent for future interventions in other countries.

While Haveeru's support for the electoral process is to be commended, it does not extend into other important areas needed for successful democratic processes in Maldives, such as freedom of speech and protection of human rights. For example, how can there be election-driven changes in Maldives when any serious candidate has to have the endorsement of the regime, and all media is barred from criticism of the government? Malé's recent by-election was a farce with historic low voter participation. Mohamed Nasheed was deprived of his Malé seat in the Majlis with bogus petty theft charges, while the NSS have harrassed any 'reformist' elected officials who dare to promote executive accountability and party democracy. These actions have undermined Maldive people's faith in the democratic electoral process, and all these actions have been at the hands of President Maumoon Gayyoom, not foreign invaders.

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Fareed Zakaria
The Rise of Illiberal Democracy

Maldives Culture is an independent internet magazine of Maldivian cultural issues.
Editors and translators: Michael O'Shea and Fareesha Abdulla, Australia
We invite contributions from Maldivians and others interested in Maldives.
Contributions and comments - mc_editors@hotmail.com