31st July 2010, Male, Maldives, Maldivestoday, a comment taken from the Guardian UK.

Dear Ms Faisal,

Your article would have been better received were you not indebted to President Nasheed for appointing you to your current position as Maldivian High Commissioner to the UK, entirely without merit and not based on any prior service to your country. Indeed, being one of the highest-remunerated beneficiaries in President Nasheed’s nepotism-filled administration (to name just one, I understand the current Minister of Defence is a member of your family?), it is entirely understandable that you should praise Nasheed to the high heavens.

However, your inherent partiality aside, your article suffers from glaring misrepresentations:
- there were no journalists or prisoners of conscience imprisoned to be released by President Nasheed; could you name a single one? On the other hand, kindly refer to news reports of the period which described the immense public outcry when President Nasheed summarily pardoned convicted drug offenders and other violent criminals onto the streets of the capital; perhaps these are the prisoners of conscience you were referring to?
- there was only one jail in the Maldives when President Nasheed took office; please note that it was this regime that opened the country’s second jail in the farthest-flung corner of the Maldives in an island whose former inhabitants had been relocated by the previous government due to the island being continually isolated from the rest of the atoll even given the slightest inclement weather. No information has yet been released as to who are the prisoners (enemy combatants, perhaps?) who have been banished to our very own Chateau d’If. Seeing as you are occupied in London, it might have escaped your notice that the Human Rights Commission of the Maldives has also condemned the prison conditions as inhumane?
- President Nasheed’s “modest bungalow” is the former palace of the Sultans of the Maldives; the secretive “essential refurbishments” required to prepare the 18-room mansion (not including a 12-room annexe) for the First Couple’s arrival is currently the subject of corruption investigations by the independent Anti-Corruption Commission.
- re your assertion of dismantling corrupt networks, presumably this sterling effort included the summary dissolution of the elected local development committees on each inhabited island (190 in all) and their replacement with loyal party members as committees appointed by the Home Minister and “councillors” appointed by President Nasheed himself? Not to mention the expropriation, almost entirely always under threat of police intervention, of all communal assets, power distribution machinery & equipment, and the seizing of an average per island of a couple of hundred of thousands of Maldivian Rufiyaa (in some well-publicised cases, the amount was in excess of two million rufiyaa) in community development funds? This despite the fact that some island communities obtained local magistrates’ rulings that all forcibly seized assets were to be returned immediately, as well as a landmark Civil Court ruling that the elected committees were dissolved unlawfully?
- would your references to “breaking up the patronage system and freeing people for independent lives” also include the dismissal (under the guise of cost-cutting) of thousands of civil servants and slashing the pay packets of the remainder to near-impoverishment levels (with arbitrary reductions of up to one-half of the salaries of the most lowly civil servants) whilst simultaneously appointing cronies to ministerial-level “political posts” at ludicrously-high wages? For example, most of the civil servants dismissed “to save the Treasury money” earned less than Mrf 4,000 per month on average; on the other hand, each of the more than six hundred new political appointees earns approximately MRf 15,000 per month. Do the math, Ms Faisal. No corruption, cronyism or nepotism here, obviously.
- Much as President Nasheed would like to take credit, the state pension introduced under the Pensions Act 2008 to replace the earlier pensions schemes, introduced by President Gayoom in the early Eighties under the name of “Provident Funds” and long-service pensions, was itself promulgated into law under President Gayoom. A grace period of 2 years (from May 2008 till May 2010) was provided to allow for both public and private sectors to implement this, which is why you’re only hearing about it now.
- you fail to reveal that the MPs being hounded by the regime were first arrested on charges of attempting to overthrow the government; when these charges were ridiculed, they were replaced by corruption allegations based upon, as the police stated to the court, a letter sent by the President’s Office. Leave aside the fact that the Supreme Court ruled that the police had acted unconstitutionally, nothing must be allowed to get in the way of massaging the message.

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