Maldives Democratic Transition and Reversal
Mohamed Nasheed won the Maldives' first multiparty election in October 2008, ending thirty years of one-man rule. Maumoon Abdul Gayoom had been president since 1978 and had won six referendums in which he was the only candidate, with results above ninety per cent. The country had no political parties, no independent press, and a security service that dealt with critics. Nasheed was a journalist who had been arrested more than twenty times and imprisoned for six years, including eighteen months in solitary confinement in a corrugated iron cell on a remote island. He founded the Maldivian Democratic Party in exile in Sri Lanka in 2003, after a prisoner was beaten to death in the jail at Maafushi and the riots that followed forced Gayoom into a reform process he expected to control. Nasheed won the run-off with 54 per cent. His presidency was defined by climate. The Maldives averages about 1.5 metres above sea level and is among the first states whose physical existence is at stake; he held a cabinet meeting underwater in scuba gear in 2009 to make the point, and announced a plan to buy land elsewhere against the possibility of relocation. He was forced to resign at gunpoint in February 2012, in what he called a coup and a commission of inquiry called a lawful transfer. He was jailed for thirteen years in 2015 on a terrorism charge over the arrest of a judge, released for medical treatment abroad, and returned in 2018 to become speaker.
- Year: 2008 CE
- Category: Political
