Abbas Ibrahim

Other sections below:
Abbas and Names
The 1981 'witchhunts' - list of sentenced people
Maldivian elite's World View - diagram

Abbas Ibrahim has been a close confidante of Maumoon Gayyoom and enforcer of the dictator's political will since the early 1970s, specialising in propaganda, intimidation and dirty tricks.

He was selected this month by the president as the speaker of the Special constitutional Majlis after a 'show of hands' election in defiance of the constitutional requirement for a secret vote. Abbas is Gayyoom's brother-in-law from his wife Nasreena's powerful Endherimaage household, and to enforce his election Gayyoom needed a 'show of hands' among Majlis members. A secret vote would have given waiverers the opportunity to reject Abbas who will follow Gayyoom's orders to the letter.

Abbas was the son of Abdul Gadir who changed his name to Dhon Maniku and again to Ibrahim Abbas. He was a wealthy trader and advisor to Ameen Didi who ruled from 1944 until 1953 first as Home Minister and then President for less than a year. Half the population of Maldives died of starvation caused by maladministration while Ameen was in charge, according to senior Maldives historian Abdul Hakeem Hussein Manik.

Abbas's father was a self-made man who received high 'beykalun' status late in life. As Nasir rose to power, he was working as a trusted servant of Sultan Mohamed Fareed. He served his leaders faithfully and became boss of Maafannu, one of Male's four wards.

Together with his brother Ilyas Ibrahim, Abbas inherited control of Maafannu from his father. Abbas was a 'highly political ward leader like his father,' social anthropologist Dr Elizabeth Overton Colton claims in her 1995 thesis 'The Elite of the Maldives: Sociopolitical organisation and change.' Colton researched the elite families in Male' from 1976 until 1983, and detailed the political machinations of the Endherimaage clan and the rise of Maumoon Gayyoom.

Abbas was a news reporter and romance writer for a number of Male' newspapers in the 1960s, writing under the name of Thulhaadhooge Abbas. According to a well-informed source, Abbas dabbled in cigarette and textile smuggling rackets in the 1960s and 1970s. He acted as household secretary for Prime Minister Ibrahim Nasir until 1967 when he was fired for plotting against his master.

Abbas suffered torture ordered by Nasir - he was placed in stocks, handcuffed and incarcerated in a cell next to a bakery in Villingili island west of Male'. Years later, Abbas was scoffing at 'alleged torture' in Maldives jails when a listener reminded him that he himself had been tortured in jail. 'You have to reach the top of the mountain to know how it is on the other side,' Abbas replied and then he began quoting from a song he had heard from the Majeediyya School boy scouts. 'The bear went over the mountain, the bear went over the mountain, the bear went over the mountain to see what he could see.'

A bear with long claws would be a suitable metaphor for Abbas' political persona.

From the time Gayyoom returned to Maldives in 1971 after twenty-four years abroad, brother-in-law Abbas was one of his closest confidantes. Abbas was Foreign Minister Fathullah Jameel's best friend in Male', according to Gayyoom biographer Royston Ellis. Foreign Minister Fathullah Jameel is a key Gayyoom advisor and his long-term trusted friend. In the 1960s, Abbas Ibrahim asked Fathullah to help his sister Nasreena study English in Egypt. She met Gayyoom in 1965 the day she arrived; they later married. Fathullah, the Endherimaage clan and their associates realised the political value in Maldives of a multi-lingual Islamic scholar like Maumoon Gayyoom, and Gayyoom knew the value of efficient and ruthless family allies. 

Fathullah Jameel admits to Ellis that Gayyoom was part of their 'gang', and the future president's pious public behaviour and reputation as a family man made Fathullah and his other dubious associates more politically acceptable. 'After being known as the rebellious or notorious ones, some people started liking us.'

'He (Gayyoom) was so famous because of his studies in Egypt,' Abbas Ibrahim told Ellis, 'He enjoyed his first job as a teacher. He has intuition. He wants to teach people, to make sure the person he is with understands.'

Abbas, Gayyoom and Sammarey Manik were arrested in 1973 and temporarily banished for holding political discussions at the Endherimaage house. Gayyoom stayed in the best house on Maamakunudu island for a few months before being recalled to Male'. Abbas learnt herbal medicine and extra fanditha practices on the island where he was exiled.

In the 1970s, Ilyas was President Nasir's closest advisor and Abbas remained allied with, and partly protected by his brother; however Abbas' relationship with President Nasir was marred by plotting and jealousy. Nasir's third wife Naseema was the sister of a woman Abbas had 'ardently tried to marry', writes Colton. 'His suit was rejected by the woman's father (Mohamed Kaleyfaan). He became the father-in-law of the president, which set Abbas even more against Nasir and his affines (kin by marriage).'

Things went better for the 'gang' in 1978 after an unwell Nasir decided not to contest the presidency. Abbas Ibrahim and his millionaire brother Ilyas were key members of the team that bribed twenty-seven MPs to vote for Gayyoom's candidature for the referendum. Even after Gayyoom was elected, Abbas and his friends left nothing to chance. Maumoon Gayyoom and his senior supporters all carried pistols when Gayyoom took his first oath as President at midnight on 10 November 1978. Abbas proudly displayed his own pistol to friends. 'We were ready for war that day,' he later admitted.

Abbas used his new powers as a Gayyoom operative to take 'immediate action against those he felt had wronged him in the past,' Colton writes. 'He bluntly said to the aging father-in-law (Mohamed Kaleyfaan) of the ex-president, the father of the daughters Abbas had wanted to marry, 'Now that we have the power, we can do anything we want. And I want to have you cut up into little pieces and fed to the crows.'

Nasir's brother-in-law Naseem confessed to a coup plot in 1980, and Gayyoom unleashed a vicious pogrom against a large group of alleged plotters who also happened to be his most experienced and talented political opposition at that time. One of the main families to suffer during this first Gayyoom terror campaign in Male' was the Hikifinifenmaage household headed by Mohamed Kaleyfaan. 

'Thus Abbas and his brother and their friends,' Colton writes, 'all of whom had grievances against the former President and his affines and their close friends, finally got their revenge.. During the peak of the house arrests in 1980, besides keeping mobs 'howling' outside their houses, the government installed lights and loudspeakers outside the houses of those accused, and they were kept blaring all night with obscene verbal attacks on the families locked inside the walls around their courtyard and house, terrified that at any moment the mobs might come over the walls.'

Abdullah Hameed, Fathullah Jameel, Maumoon Gayyoom and Abbas Ibrahim on state visit to China 1984

Abbas and Names
Abbas's patrilineal grandfather was Ibrahim Dhon Maniku, and Abbas' father hated the name Abdul Gadir and insisted on being known as Dhon Maniku and later (possibly posthumously) as Ibrahim Abbas. For reasons best understood by himself, Abdul Gadir alias Dhon Maniku alias Ibrahim Abbas, also kept his grandfather's first name as the family name for his children, so Abbas Ibrahim was almost Abbas Dhon Maniku and should have been Abbas Abdul Gadir. Later, Abbas had further reason to regret his name when he went to Singapore and found himself nicknamed 'Baas' in Bahasa Malay. Abbas was offended by 'Baas' because it sounds close to the Sinhala word 'Baasunna' or 'work gang foreman'.

This information may sound trivial, but the Gayyoom regime has heavily regulated all people's names in Maldives. The sort of 'name anarchy' practised by Abbas' father is now forbidden and subject to legal sanctions. No one may change their name in Maldives without government permission and all new babies must have their names submitted to the government for approval. Only Arab or Islamic-sounding names are allowed.

Sentencing list above, and graphic below, the Maldivian Elite's World View, are from Dr Elizabeth Colton's 1995 thesis:
'The Elite of the Maldives: Sociopolitical organisation and change.'

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