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Floating golf course to be built in Maldives

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on March 12, 2010

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Andrew Buncombe in The Independent:

The island nation of the Maldives, confronted by rising oceans and a landscape that is just a few feet above sea level, is poised to build a floating golf course and convention centre in what could be the first of a series of futuristic off-shore developments designed to confront the threat of global warming.

The country’s government has signed an agreement with a Dutch firm to investigate the feasibility of developing a number of facilities that would be located among the 26 main atolls. It is likely the company, Dutch Docklands, will also look into the possibility of building floating homes. It has previously built floating islands in Dubai.

“The methods and procedures developed by the company for floating developments reduce the impact on underwater life, and minimise the changes to coastal morphology,” said a statement issued by the office of President Mohamed Nasheed. More:

After the 2004 tsunami: rebuilding lives

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on December 24, 2009

in Climate change, India, Sri Lanka and The Maldives

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From The Guardian:

Shaped like an eyelid in a halo of azure water, the tiny Indian Ocean island of Dhuvaafaru in the Maldives is a fresh-minted community that has been transplanted to the Raa atoll. Clinics, schools and roads have all been built from scratch. Its homes, all newly peopled, are the legacy of tragedy on a vast scale: 2004’s Boxing Day tsunami.

This year – at the culmination of the single biggest construction project in Red Cross/Red Crescent history – 4,000 people from the nearby low-lying island of Kandholhudhoo, a place made uninhabitable by the waves that destroyed houses and snapped trees like matchsticks, were finally moved to Dhuvaafaru on the opposite side of the archipelago to begin new lives.

Among them was Hussain Alifulhu, 48, one of the last to escape the island when the tsunami swamped his home. He was among those who helped build the new community, an electrician by trade who spent the last four years living with his family in temporary shelters, fishing for sea cucumbers to make a living. On his new island home, he is working as an electrician once again. More:

India vs China in the Maldives

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on November 12, 2009

in India, Politics, Sri Lanka and The Maldives

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Jeremy Page from Delhi in The Times, London:

You have to go to a tropical paradise to find the latest front in the brewing cold war between China and India.

On the southernmost tip of the Maldives lies the island of Gan, a tiny patch of coconut palms and powdery white beaches. It was here that Britain set up a secret naval base in 1941, building airstrips and vast fuel tanks to support its fleet in the Indian Ocean during the Second World War.

The RAF then used it as a Cold War outpost until 1976, when the British withdrew and the officers’ quarters were converted into a resort called Equator Village.

Now, 33 years later, India is preparing to reopen the base to station surveillance aircraft, helicopters, and possibly ships, to monitor Chinese vessels in the Indian Ocean. Under a deal signed in August, India is also installing radar across the Maldives, linked to its coastal command. More:

Also read: Opportunity, Made in China by Shekhar Gupta in the Indian Express

The surface is just the start

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on November 9, 2009

in The Maldives and Travel

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Tim Ecott goes to the Maldives. From The National:

From the window of my seaplane, a bright red Maldivian Air Taxi, there is an endless expanse of rich blue sky and Indian Ocean. The air and the sea seem to join on the horizon, a dreamscape of bright colour where air and water are impossible to separate. Below me the water flashes sapphire, and I focus on the occasional patches of white sand that reveal the presence of the tiny atolls that have made the Maldives famous as the one of the world’s most spectacular island getaways.

I am heading for the relatively new resort of Iru Fushi, recently taken over for management by the Hilton group after being built by Maldivian magnate Ahmed Siyam Mohammed. The island lies at the southern tip of the Miladhunmadulu Atoll, better known as Noonu Atoll, a chain of small islands about 160km from the capital Male. Like all Maldivian resorts it boasts white sands, clear blue water and a shoreline fringed with waving palms. But I am here to investigate the beauty beneath the waves: the dive sites of the surrounding reefs and the marine life that inhabits them. More:

Maldives Cabinet holds underwater meeting

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on October 19, 2009

in Climate change and The Maldives

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From AFP: Maldivian President Mohamed Nasheed, who staged the world’s first underwater cabinet meeting at the weekend, is emerging as the global stuntman in the battle against climate change.

Nasheed, 42, dived with his cabinet to the sea bottom Saturday in an effort to press December’s UN summit in Copenhagen to cap carbon emissions that cause global warming, threatening low-lying nations such as the Maldives.

“We should come out of Copenhagen with a deal that will ensure that everyone will survive,” said the president as he bobbed in the shimmering Indian Ocean after the meeting. More

Can this man save the Maldives – and the rest of the world – from the rising seas?

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on October 14, 2009

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Mohamed Nasheed, the President of the Maldives. Photo: the Guardian

Mohamed Nasheed, the President of the Maldives. Photo: the Observor

Robin McKie in the Observor:

On a humid, airless night last March, Mohamed Nasheed – the 42-year-old president of the Maldives – opened up his palace in Male for an unusual public event. A projection screen was hung at the back of a ballroom and brightly coloured chairs were arranged in rows. Then the audience was shown in: lawyers, cabinet members, presidential advisers and journalists, along with a sizeable chunk of Maldives society.

Nasheed, dressed in an open-neck striped shirt and dark chinos, sat in the front row. The lights dimmed and scenes of environmental mayhem unfolded on the screen: Sydney Opera House in flames, ice sheets crashing into the seas, deserts spreading and forests burning.

Thus the people of the Maldives had their first glimpse of Franny Armstrong’s documentary, The Age of Stupid, in which Pete Postlethwaite plays the last man left alive in a post-apocalyptic, climate-fried world.

The film is scrappy but passionate, a classic example of agit-prop cinema. But in the dripping night heat of Male, The Age of Stupid had a very different effect on its audience than it has had in the west. Its message seemed direct and immediate, a call to arms. Nor is it hard to understand such emotion. The islands that make up the Maldives are threatened with complete inundation, probably by the end of the century, as ice sheets melt and sea levels rise catastrophically, thanks to global warming. More

Maldives cabinet meets underwater

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on October 7, 2009

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From the Independent:

The president of the Maldives is desperate for the world to know how seriously his government takes the threat of climate change and rising sea levels to the survival of his country. He wants his ministers to know as well.

To this end, Mohamed Nasheed has organised an underwater cabinet meeting and told all his ministers to get in training for the sub-aqua session. Six metres beneath the surface, the ministers will ratify a treaty calling on other countries to cut greenhouse emissions.

Ahead of the meeting, scheduled for 17 October, cabinet members have been squeezing into wet-suits and practising their underwater skills. The President was not present at the first session, held over the weekend, because he is already a qualified diver. More:

Save the Maldives from fundamentalists

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on October 1, 2009

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From the Guardian’s Comment is Free:

On his recent visit to the Maldives, Salih Yucel, a Turkish Islamic scholar and lecturer at Monash University in Australia, was rejected by his fellow Muslims who deemed his beard too short and his trousers too long for him to be a bona fide Muslim. The response to the former imam came as no surprise, being symptomatic of the puritanical Wahhabism taking root in the Indian Ocean archipelago, a favourite haunt of honeymooners and A-list celebrities.

The country’s legislative architecture entrenches this intolerance, in a constitution that recognises only Muslims as citizens and a Religious Unity Act that stringently demarcates the type of Islam to be practised. Nor are the country’s non-Muslim expatriates, largely Buddhist Sri Lankans and Hindu Indians, permitted to practise their faiths in public as all places of worship apart from mosques are banned. The intolerance does not end here: for Wahhabis, even other Muslims, such as Shias and Sufis, are apostates. More:

Maldives’ dilemma

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on September 26, 2009

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It cannot be carbon neutral without killing tourism. From the Times:

In the 1960s a United Nations report warned the Maldives that, sadly, it was unlikely to attract tourists.

Not much grows on lumps of coral in the Indian Ocean apart from coconuts and fish, the report pointed out: the Maldives is largely dependent on imports and the nearest ports are hundreds of miles away. Few of its 1,000-odd scattered islands even had electricity. Yet within ten years, the Maldives had established the reputation it has now, as a holiday paradise for honeymooners, scuba divers and the super-rich.

On Tuesday, the tiny country of 350,000 people once again showed it can punch above its weight. The Maldivian President, Mohamed Nasheed, shared a billing with Barack Obama and Hu Jintao at the United Nations General Assembly, where he pleaded the cause of small island states at risk from climate change. In many news outlets, it was Nasheed who made the headlines.

In many respects the Maldives has always been the little nation that could. Despite its minuscule population and strategic location, it has never been colonised (it peacefully dismissed the British, who had made it a protectorate, in 1965). It has retained its unique language and script, and hung on to its cultural identity while incorporating Islam, elements from African religions, black magic, Indian cooking and the occasional British naval tradition. In 2008 it made a peaceful transition to democracy and was hailed as an example to other, more troubled Muslim nations. More:

The Maldives’ struggle to stay afloat

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on May 13, 2009

in The Maldives

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From TIME Asia:

The Maldives’ coffers, though, are perilously low. In part that is a consequence of the global downturn, which has hit international tourism hard. The crunch was exacerbated by profligate spending in the final years of the Gayoom regime, as it sought to cement votes with new infrastructure projects. In February, Nasheed’s government moved to auction off some of the former ruler’s more extravagant state possessions, including a personal yacht, a private pleasure island and a gold-plated toilet.

Gayoom’s supporters point to the influx of foreign cash that flooded into the country after he assumed power. His government opened dozens of the archipelago’s islands to international tourism, which now directly contributes to 30% of the Maldives’ GDP. In a country short on land, construction became a lucrative business: the cramped capital Malé, where more than a third of the population lives, is a maze of concrete. Rents sometimes match those of world cities such as Hong Kong or New York City, and a bleary-eyed community of foreign laborers hammers away at building sites daily. That’s quite a change. Not long ago, Malé was a sleepy fishing island with sand-packed streets and pens for livestock, only reachable after a perilous weeklong journey by ship from Colombo. Now, most people there sport flashy cell phones; at night, a few Porsches and Maseratis rev their engines impotently around the 500-acre (2 sq km) capital’s congested roads. More:

Wanted: A new home for my country

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on May 9, 2009

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Global warming may drown the Maldives, and the island nation’s president is considering relocating the entire population. Nicholas Schmidle in the New York Times Magazine:

One recent evening at the presidential palace in Malé, the capital of the Maldives, around 100 people showed up to watch a movie. Rows of overstuffed chairs in a gaudy combination of stripes and paisleys faced a projection screen hanging on the front wall of what seemed like a grand ballroom. At the back of the hall, journalists erected camera and microphone rigs: Mohamed Nasheed, the Maldives’ 41-year-old president, was expected to make a major announcement after the film. And ever since Nasheed declared on the eve of his inauguration last November that, because of global warming, he would try to find a new homeland for Maldivians somewhere else in the world, on higher ground, local reporters didn’t miss the chance to see their unpredictable (“erratic” and “crazy” were other adjectives I heard used) president.

Nasheed appeared when a pair of French doors opened and a gust of conversation blew into the room. It was a humid night in March. Several dozen cabinet members, Supreme Court justices, parliamentarians, presidential advisers and other dignitaries trailed the young president, who wore navy slacks and a striped white shirt, open at the neck and sleeves rolled to the elbows. He took a seat in the front row, the lights dimmed and the British feature documentary “The Age of Stupid” began. More:

[Images: MyMaldives and Wikipedia]

Maldives first to go carbon neutral

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on March 15, 2009

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From The Guardian:

Photo: Maldives Tourism

Photo: Maldives Tourism

The president of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, will today unveil a plan to make his country carbon-neutral within a decade. The announcement comes only days after scientists issued stark new warnings that rising seas caused by climate change could engulf the Maldives and other low-lying nations this century.

The president will formally announce the scheme – and make a plea for other countries to follow the Maldives’ lead – this evening, following the world premiere of The Age of Stupid, a major new climate change film in which a man living alone in the devastated world of 2055 looks at old footage from 2008 and asks why people didn’t stop climate change when they had the chance.

More here and here:

Extreme make-under in the Maldives

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on February 18, 2009

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The BBC’s Chris Morris explores the private island of the former president:

We were heading for another island, Arah, the former president’s weekend retreat. A multi-million dollar presidential yacht was moored in the tiny harbour. It will now be auctioned off, possibly on eBay.

I was shown luxury beach villas, a tree house for the presidential children, a private cricket pitch, and of course the presidential beach. The island used to be the exclusive preserve of President Gayoom and his guests.

The Maldives: Trouble in paradise

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on February 1, 2009

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Rising seas are threatening to engulf the Maldives, so the president wants to buy a new homeland for his people. But should he instead be looking to build a new one on the grave of the old? From The Sunday Times:

Green Sea turtle, the Maldives. Photo: Edgar Barany

Green Sea turtle, the Maldives. Photo: Edgar Barany

It is 1990 and a young writer sits in solitary confinement, his hands and feet shackled inside a metal tube, known as the “hot cell”. It is designed to heat up like an oven in the tropical sun. His food is deliberately laced with broken glass and laxatives, and he is repeatedly beaten – he has dared to openly criticise his country’s political elite. Through a slit in the metal walls he can see a sliver of ocean on the horizon. This is his only comfort. It is, he says, what opened his imagination, led him to think about a better future for his country.

Just a short distance from the small prison island where he is held, a paradise is being carefully crafted. The small knots of low-lying islands and coral-reef atolls that make up the Maldives are being engineered into one of the world’s most romantic tourist destinations.

Exclusive resorts are taking over many of the 1,200 tiny isles grouped in 26 coral atolls. Stilted luxury villas snake across translucent waters teeming with exotic marine life; glass floor panels have been installed underfoot in many. The trademark of these tourist oases is that no visitor’s request for pampering is considered too onerous. And the guest books will fill with the signatures of world-famous leaders and celebrities in the years to come. The daily grind for most Maldivians — prohibited from visiting these resorts to prevent what the government calls “cultural contamination” — was different. Little tourist revenue filtered down, and all dissent was brutally quashed. Those who criticised the country’s president, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom — who ruled his country with an iron fist from 1978, and became Asia’s longest-serving leader — were beaten and thrown in jail.

Paradise almost lost: Maldives seek to buy a new homeland

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on November 11, 2008

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Randeep Ramesh from Male, the Maldives, in the Guardian:

The highest land point on the Maldives is only 2.4 metres above sea level.

The highest land point on the Maldives is only 2.4 metres above sea level.

The Maldives will begin to divert a portion of the country’s billion-dollar annual tourist revenue into buying a new homeland – as an insurance policy against climate change that threatens to turn the 300,000 islanders into environmental refugees, the country’s first democratically elected president has told the Guardian.

Mohamed Nasheed, who takes power officially tomorrow in the island’s capital, Male, said the chain of 1,200 island and coral atolls dotted 500 miles from the tip of India is likely to disappear under the waves if the current pace of climate change continues to raise sea levels.

But where on earth can they go?

Also in the Guardian, Jon Henley explores the Maldives’ options:

It is an intriguing, if deeply depressing idea: the first nation on earth to be forced to abandon its homeland because of the impact of global warming and steadily rising sea levels. Nasheed is basically talking about relocating the Maldives’ 300,000-strong population to nearby India, or Sri Lanka or, possibly, Australia. But even if you accept the neccessity of such a grim scenario, is it actually feasible? Could an entire people simply move to a new country, set up home there and pick up their lives again as if nothing bar the unfortunate disappearance of their old base had actually happened?

The current consensus seems to be that it is not. “It would be very difficult for a state, as such, to move,” says Dr Graham Price, head of the Asia programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs. “There can be ad-hoc migration, of course, even of quite large numbers. But there are big jurisdictional issues here, issues of sovereignty. That said, it is a real problem, and one we’re going to have to get used to. Nasheed is saying to the rest of the world, we really have to think about this. We want to stay together, we don’t want to lose our culture, and this isn’t our fault.”

Democracy for Maldives

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on November 2, 2008

in The Maldives

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For many Westerners, the Maldives represents the peak of aspirational tourism but lurking behind the paradisiacal façade is a grim story of poverty and exploitation. From New Statesman:

The statistics do jar. A number of tiny, uninhabited islands are auctioned every year, fetching around £30m each. A survey conducted by the Tourism Employees Association of the Maldives (TEAM) showed that basic workers’ pay was between $80-$120 per month, although even the very lowest end resorts had an annual income of $3-4million. Fishing stocks are hugely depleted and fresh fruit and vegetables bypass local residents, going directly to tourist islands. The UN recently found that over 30 per cent of Maldivian children under the age of five suffer from malnutrition.

Barnett notes the lack of international awareness. “Gayoom’s regime was so repressive that it is very hard to get information out…”

Previously in AW: Ex-prisoner defeats ‘dictator’ president of Maldives

Ex-prisoner defeats ‘dictator’ president of Maldives

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on October 30, 2008

in The Maldives

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Mohamed “Anni” Nasheed, a former Amnesty International prisoner of conscience, defeated President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom in the Maldives’ first democratic presidential election. Gayoom has been the Maldives’ undisputed President for 30 years.

Here’s the Reuters story:

Nasheed’s victory caps a remarkable journey for an activist whose criticism of Gayoom and crusading for democracy saw him charged 27 times and jailed or banished to remote atolls for a total of six years.

“This is a happier day than ever in the history of the Maldives. The Maldives will change, it will have a peaceful government,” said Nasheed, 41, who was just 11 years old when Gayoom took power in 1978. More here, and here

The BBC’s Adam Mynott – who has visited the country many times – has this assessment:

I recorded an interview with Mr Gayoom for the BBC in 2005 when he denied a number of allegations that he had suppressed free speech and thrown political opponents into jail.

International human rights bodies point to a catalogue of opposition figures being incarcerated without trial in the dreaded Maafusi Jail. More:

And click here for the profile of Mohamed Nasheed, the new President-elect of the Maldives.

The march of tourism (and a threat to the Maldives)

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on July 17, 2008

in The Maldives

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Beset by rising sea levels and a £90m budget shortfall, the Maldives government has set its sights on leasing 31 uninhabited islands for new resorts. Now the Tourism Minister has quit over the threat to the islands’ fragile ecology. Andrew Buncombe in The Independent:

They have become the short-hand for a tropical paradise. A nation of islands off the southern tip of India, the Maldives are the home of cobalt-blue seas and white-sand beaches. Every year the country attracts up to half-a-million tourists in search of a picture-perfect getaway.

But how much is too much? For a country that depends so heavily on tourists lured by the prospect of pristine beauty, at what point does that flood of tourists start to threaten the very environment that attracted them in the first place?

Trouble in paradise

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on June 18, 2008

in The Maldives

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A footballing triumph has provided some light relief for the people of the Maldives, more use to a diet of poverty, repression and censorship. Nick Milton in The Guardian:

In the middle of the Indian ocean, the people of the Maldives are celebrating a great footballing victory. In a gripping game to rival anything in Euro 2008 they beat the favourites, India, 1-0 on Saturday night to secure their first South Asia Football Federation Championship title. Cheering on the winning side was Asia’s longest serving and increasingly autocratic ruler, President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom.

For Gayoom the win provides the ideal platform from which to launch his audacious bid for a record seventh term in office. However, for the 330,000 Sunni Muslims living in the Maldives the football win provides a short respite from the poverty, repression, torture and censorship which have come to symbolise his 30 years in power.

The Maldives: Sea, sun and jihad

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on February 15, 2008

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From The Economist:

A record number of tourists, some 650,000, visited the Maldives’ upmarket and otherwise uninhabited island resorts last year. But from the populated parts of the Indian Ocean archipelago the news is more worrying. On a January visit to one of its 1,200 white sand and coral islands, President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom was rescued from a knife attack by a boy scout. The would-be assassin’s shout of “Allahu Akbar!” was the latest evidence of growing Islamic extremism in the 350,000-strong nation of Sunni Muslims.

Last September terrorists detonated a bomb in the capital Male’s Sultan Park, injuring 12 tourists. Foreign concern mounted in November when a video posted on an al Qaeda-linked website called for more attacks. The almost simultaneous police revelation that the “masterminds” of the Sultan Park attack had received training in Pakistan heightened fears. But the Maldives government insists there is no evidence that international terror networks have infiltrated the country.