Mohamed Nasheed
Mohamed Nasheed won the first free election in the Maldives and resigned at gunpoint three years later. Maumoon Abdul Gayoom had ruled for thirty years, and Nasheed was a journalist who had been imprisoned repeatedly, held in solitary confinement, and declared a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International before founding the opposition party from exile in Britain. He won the presidency in 2008 in the country's first multi-candidate vote. The Maldives is about twelve hundred coral islands with an average elevation of roughly a metre and a half, which makes it the country most obviously ended by sea-level rise, and he made that the whole of its foreign policy - held a cabinet meeting underwater in scuba gear before the Copenhagen summit, announced a plan to buy land elsewhere in case the islands became uninhabitable, and pledged carbon neutrality by 2020. The theatre worked in the sense that it put small-island states into the negotiations as a bloc that could not be ignored. The threat is also the economy. Tourism and fishing are almost all of it, and both depend on living coral - resorts occupy whole islands leased one to a company, and the reef is what makes the lagoon and stops the swell. Bleaching in 1998 killed a large share of it, so warming reaches the budget long before it reaches the waterline. At home he governed a state whose judiciary, police and civil service were still the previous president's. He ordered the arrest of a chief judge in January 2012 for obstructing corruption cases; police mutinied, the army did not intervene, and he announced his resignation on television the next day, saying afterwards that he had been threatened with bloodshed if he refused. A commission backed by the Commonwealth concluded it had not been a coup. He was later sentenced to thirteen years on a terrorism charge over the same arrest, allowed to travel to Britain for surgery, given asylum, returned when the opposition won in 2018, and became speaker of parliament.
- Lived: 1967 CE – ?
- Nationality: Maldivian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
