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[Demonstration Majeedhee Magu Male’ – image by author]

Maldives President Quits After Police Mutiny, Protests

“President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives, widely credited with bringing democracy to the Indian Ocean archipelago, has resigned after weeks of opposition protests erupted into a police mutiny and what an aide said amounted to a coup.  Nasheed, the Sunni Muslim nation’s first democratically elected president, handed power to Vice-President, Mohamed Waheed Hassan Manik, and said that continuing in office would result in his having to use force against the people.  Protests last year over the faltering economy and scrambling ahead of this year’s presidential election have seen parties adopting hard-line Islamist rhetoric and accusing Nasheed of being anti-Islamic.  Britain’s Foreign Office said a team of diplomats was on its way to the Maldives and that London viewed developments ‘with concern’ and called on all groups ‘to find a peaceful way through these difficulties, in accordance with the Constitution.’”

[Reuters, 2012]

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Maldives 11

                                    Street in Male’ Maldives – Courtesy of Google Images   

A five-star hotel.  A very lovely warm night near the Equator. A waiter glides by with a large Bami Goreng bedecked with a handsome lettuce leaf that elects to hang-glide off the plate into the pool.  Tonight, guests have to slum it and use the tiny, unappetising beach recently built at the backside of the hotel, a little dark and scary at night. For, this evening, the Maldives Olympic swimming squad is practising, this being the only remotely large pool in the Maldives and, even then, a bit on the mingy side compared with the monster the team will no doubt be faced with in a year or so. Always a hypnotic sight, cruising the lengths, strong, silent, on a mission and with those huge, dazzling teeth Maldivians possess, just like sharks – and both without benefit of orthodontics. Continue reading