Prologue - The most excellent and lamentable tragedies of Romeo and Juliet. William Shakespeare, printed in 1599 by Thomas Creede and published by Cuthbert Burby
The Capulet – Montague feud that climaxed with the murder of Count Paris and the suicides of Romeo and Juliet in the Italian city of Verona is William Shakespeare´s most successful play, certainly the most imitated, by subsequent playwrights, dramatists and film makers. Having studied at the Overseas School of Colombo, and at Dauntsey’s School, a public school in Wiltshire, before completing his first degree at the Liverpool John Moores University, former President of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed (46 years), a.k.a Anni to his friends, must have had a more than fleeting knowledge of this quintessential Shakespearean tragedy. After all, as he commented during a 45 minute long conversation with the Sunday Observer earlier this week, he is an avid reader.
Shakespeare provides no explanation or evidence of the Capulet and Montague feud – other than to the allusion to the “ancient grudge” in the prologue.
Nasheed, on the other hand, provides an in-depth analysis of the events, the families and the polity that led, at the end, to a peace pact earlier last month (24 March 2017) between his Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP), and his arch rival and long-term President of Maldives, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom´s Progressive Party and several other opposition parties in his book “ Dhangandu Dhahanaa” (Iron Armor), summarized and published in English as “Maldives, a historical overview of traditional Dhivehi polity, 1800-1900” in 2003.
Seated on a plush sofa, clad in a white shirt and a canary yellow tie, Nasheed reminisced about his family – one of the elite clans that historically ruled the Maldives and still continue to hold sway, despite the rise of President Gayoom´s clan in more recent times.
“I come from a family that’s been ill-treated in jail. My father was, my grandfather was, and my uncle died in jail. So this has gone on for so long in our family,” President Nasheed told the Sunday Observer, attempting to illustrate why Human Rights are very important for the clan.
“Protection of Human Rights and trying to defend it has been the single most important thing that I felt I should be working on.
That would of course work around the freedom of expression and freedom of assembly, and therefore the freedom of media, and so on. So my work in life I have very much tried to focus on trying to see how that can be done, “ President Nasheed said.
In the early hours of 3 November, 1988, a motley crew of armed men, all members of the People´s Liberation Organization of Tamil Eelam (PLOTE) of Sri Lanka, accompanied by at least two Maldivians, chief among them, Abdulla Luthufee, a flamboyant and well-known Maldivian in Colombo´s party circles at that time, tried to wrest control of Male from the government of then President Maumoon Gayoom.
A quick intervention by Indian forces put an end to their ill-conceived and badly executed plan. Luthufee, arrested in the high seas by an Indian frigate and brought to Male for trial implicated Sikka Ahmed Ismail Maniku, a paternal uncle of President Nasheed. Maniku, Luthufee said, fed, and kept him at Maniku´s sprawling property near the Sri Lankan parliament, in Battaramulla. “Abdulla Luthufee is a family friend. He is a friend of mine as well. But, to say that my uncle was a plot leader simply because he allowed a family friend to stay at his estate is wrong.”
President Nasheed opinion-éd. Maniku was later released from all charges by President Maumoon Gayoom and continues to live in Colombo, commuting between his estate in Battaramulla and a property in Colombo 3.
Plotting
However, this was not the first time an immediate member of Nasheed´s family was accused of plotting against the Maldivian state. In a curious case of well laid plans of men and mice going awry, a bunch of British ex- Special Air Services (SAS) mercenaries walked into a Colombo bar sometime in the latter part of 1980. One glass led to another and in the camaraderie that followed, the ex-soldiers could not contain themselves. They were on their way to take over a tiny country called the Maldives, they said.
This information soon reached the Maldivian High Commission in Colombo. International calls were quickly taken and border controls tightened in Male while the Sri Lankan government was asked to stop the mercenaries from reaching Male. It turned out the men were hired by Kerafa Ahmed Naseem, a cousin of President Nasheed, who ultimately became Maldives Foreign Minister under Nasheed.
Family intrigue
The family intrigue has a longer history. Both, President Nasheed´s father Kerafaa Abdul Sattar and his grandfather Kerafa Dhon Maniku, have been accused and convicted of being involved in earlier coup attempts against former Prime Ministers and Presidents of Male, before the 1980 coup attempt against President Gayoom. “I am not at all suggesting that my family is full of saints, not at all. My generation is trying to work out how we be may be able to have a peaceful transition,” President Nasheed explained.
“Moving out from feudalism to pluralism, you would see that this sort of ‘clan mentality’ remains, but it takes countries a few years or few generations perhaps, to move out. South Asians are doing it differently. Of course, look at the politics in here, India or Bangladesh, it is there. The Maldives probably needs far more improvement in its democratic process. Unlike Sri Lanka, we did not have a functioning judiciary, we did not have a functioning parliament we did not have universities, schools and education for all these years.
Going into the political history in the eighties and the nineties and analyzing it, can bring you many pictures. I am more focused on the future. I want to see that all political leaders of the Maldives can join hands. Sit down and have reasonable discussions and make sure that we have a free and fair election,” he said.
There is old history and there are current events, which eventually become history. The current events that are shaping Maldives history has its beginning in another coalition; the coalition that helped President Nasheed to assume power in 2008. After losing by a wide margin to President Maumoon Gayoom, in the first round of voting, President Nasheed gathered the smaller parties and won the perquisite 50% plus one vote in the run off to become President. However, within months of establishing himself as the first democratically elected President of the Maldives, the coalition unravelled.
“The received political wisdom then was that you must consolidate power when going into government,” Nasheed said. Because there was no constitutional binding that the alliance must continue beyond the election, President Nasheed moved quickly to bring in his confidences into the cabinet. In hindsight, Nasheed said, “that of course was wrong. Coming back from that experience, having formed the government through an alliance and then not maintaining the alliance, leading to the fall of the government in 2012, I think I must understand this process.”
New Coalition
According to President Nasheed, the other members of his new coalition now understand the urgency and importance of coalition building - post election. He attributes the lack of coalition building to a structural issue in the Maldivian Constitution.
“It is obvious that President Yameen too tried to consolidate power vigorously, through corruption, arrests and a number of other irregularities. However, in essence, the exercise is to consolidate power. So I think there is a structural problem in our constitution and we must address this structural issue immediately,” President Nasheed said. It was not only the lack of coalition building and charges of cronyism (…No body from my family …… but there were friends and kind of ‘cliques’.) that led to the alleged forced resignation of President Nasheed in 2012. The flashpoint came when his Ministry of Defence arrested the Maldives’s chief judge of the criminal court, Justice Abdulla Mohamed.
“When we came into government in 2008 there were three things that the people of the Maldives wanted. They wanted a new executive, which they got through the 2008 election. They wanted new legislature, which they got through the 2009 Parliamentary elections. They also wanted a new judiciary, which they did not get. There was a transitional judiciary only. According to the system that existed the old judiciary swore themselves into the new positions. Therefore, people had a number of issues with the judiciary.
Political elements
We had not removed one military person, only the chief of staff. In addition, the Chief of Staff who came in was the Deputy Chief of Staff. We had not removed one person from the Police when we came into government. We had the previous regime and the infrastructure in place.
The tentacles go very deep. In trying to see how we could get the new judiciary installed or composed, we went into a difficulty. In addition, the upshot was that the Criminal Court judge was arrested and kept in one of the military retreats”, Nasheed explained.
Given that some of the political elements involved in the mass demonstrations that followed this arrest are, once more, partners of the new coalition, President Nasheed declined to go into the details of what happened.
“I am trying to work out a coalition and a vast number of people in this alliance have had all sorts of relationships with me in the past and if I were to dig into that now this can cloud other things that I am doing. Therefore, it is not at all that I do not want to be transparent. It’s difficult to be a politician,” he said. In the last scene of Romeo and Juliet, after Romeo kills Prince Paris and takes the poison, and after Juliet, grief stricken, plunges Romeo´s dagger into her heart, the guards arrives, followed closely by the Prince, the Capulets, and Montague.
Montague declares that Lady Montague has died of grief over Romeo’s exile. Seeing their children’s bodies, Capulet and Montague agree to end their long-standing feud and to raise gold statues of their children side-by-side in a newly peaceful Verona.
The drama in the Maldives has many more scenes to play out.