Saturday, November 28, 2009

Afternoon tea with the FT: Mohamed Nasheed


By Rahul Jacob

As our plane circles over the Maldives, I look out on the light turquoise circles of water where coral beds break up the indigo blue of the Indian Ocean. More than a thousand tiny islands strung across the water, most of which are uninhabited, the Maldives were described by the 14th-century traveller Ibn Battutah as one of the wonders of the world, and so it seems that afternoon. But, as we prepare to land at Malé airport, I begin to imagine a picture quite different from that enjoyed by honeymooners and tourists to this much-loved holiday destination. Many scientific estimates predict that by the end of this century a large number of the low-lying islands that make up this country could be submerged by rising sea levels brought about by global warming.

I have flown to Malé from nearby Bangalore to meet Mohamed Nasheed, president of the Maldives, whose attempts to persuade the world of the seriousness of this plight have in the past few months turned him into something of a cause célèbre on the issue of climate change. At a United Nations climate summit in New York in September, he gave a speech in which he bluntly declared, “We know that you are not really listening ... Once the rhetoric has settled and the delegates have drifted away, the indignation cools and the world carries on [with] business as usual.”

A week before our meeting, more headlines were made when Nasheed, a trained diver, and six of his ministers conducted a cabinet meeting underwater to draw attention to the threat faced by his country (they used hand signals to communicate). And, next week, at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, he will call for reductions of annual carbon emissions per capita of at least two tonnes. He is also expected to rail against signing a “global suicide pact”, a treaty that settles for anything less.


On my way to have afternoon tea with Nasheed at his office, I wander through the candy-coloured capital of Malé, all vibrant lemons and pinks, and stop at the stock exchange (it has four listed companies) before arriving outside the imposing presidential building, painted peppermint and white. Two tour groups are gazing up – one Chinese, the other Indian. The Chinese group moves off quickly and I am left listening to snatches of Hindi and English from the Indian tour guide. He declares the Maldives “Muslim but broadminded” and says in Hindi that President Nasheed has a “very good relationship” with India.

As I go up to the first floor to meet Nasheed, I think that if anyone can bridge the large divide on climate change between developing countries like China and India and the developed world, it is the articulate Maldivian.

Nasheed is accompanied by his British press secretary and a couple of aides. He has, as one writer observed, the build of “a jockey” and looks even younger than his 42 years. The president leads me to a balcony where an enormous Maldivian tea is laid out with half a dozen place settings. As I fret that all his aides are about to join us, he reassures me by wondering aloud why the table is so laden. I pour him a cup of Lipton’s tea, served black as is customary in the Maldives.

Nasheed has just returned from another climate change conference, this one in India on transferring environmental technologies from western countries to the developing world. I ask him whether New Delhi’s stance is changing – India’s government has been one of the most unyielding critics of the west on climate change, arguing that limits on emissions should not apply to developing countries. He points to a recent leaked letter from the Indian environment minister arguing that it would be in India’s interests to curb emissions.

“India’s [politicians] have this difficulty completely trusting the west and seeing that there is no diabolical plan here to get at India because India’s [economy] is developing fast,” says Nasheed. “I have faith in India because it is a democracy with a very vibrant civil society.” He points out that there are 400m Indians without electricity and that, “If you start thinking in old concepts like diesel (which powers the generators used when there are power cuts in India) and coal (used in most power plants in India), then we are doomed.”

Diplomatically, he follows this by saying that neither China nor India can be expected to throttle their economic growth rates because they have large young populations that need employment. For China and India to “reduce consumption ... to forgo growth is going to be very difficult,” he says.

His east-coexists-with-west approach is also apparent on the table in front of us – traditional Maldivian snacks sit alongside the most luridly coloured pastries I have ever seen (neither of us touches them) and jam doughnuts. I ask him to explain what a Maldivian tea is. “There are usually tuna sandwiches and there are fried tuna rolls and fishcakes. It’s tuna, tuna, tuna,” he declares with a laugh. “It’s all fish. Those are pastries, which are not Maldivian at all.” He eats part of a fishcake while I choose a fish roll and refill his cup assiduously from a gigantic white tea pot.

I tell him that, after his underwater cabinet meeting stunt, colleagues have been joking that he will insist on doing this interview under water as well. He defends the publicity coup as a way for a tiny nation to punch above its weight in attracting the world’s attention. “We are sitting in the middle of the Indian Ocean, there’s 300,000 people here and how in God’s name do we make our message heard? People might say these are gimmicks and stunts. I respect them, I agree with them.

“What I asked myself was, ‘Do I pay a publicity company millions of dollars?’ What we were trying to say is, ‘Look we need a deal in Copenhagen.’” What he wants in Copenhagen is for all of us to “to stop behaving in the manner in which we have been behaving”. Unusually for a politician from the developing world, he is calling for a serious commitment on the part of both developed and developing countries to become carbon neutral over this century and will be pushing for developing countries to embrace green technologies.

He has announced that the Maldives will be carbon neutral by 2020. When I suggest that the tiny country’s carbon footprint is probably less than the carbon emissions of the aeroplanes landing at the airport that keep its main industry, tourism, growing, Nasheed says that for developing countries struggling with climate change “the most important adaptive measure is development; you need to have a good income stream”.

He believes that western governments need to change the way policies to arrest global warming are sold to the public. “Instead of asking people to give up life, governments should start spending large amounts on renewable energy plants. The west should switch to renewable energy and – here comes the catch – they should also help countries that need to adapt [by transferring technologies].” By way of example, he points to an agreement between his government and Falcon Energy and GE Energy for a $250m power plant that will produce renewable energy at 15 cents a kilowatt instead of the 50 cents per unit it currently costs at a conventional power plant in the Maldives.

Last year, just days after his election in October, Nasheed announced he would create a sovereign fund to finance the migration of the entire Maldives population if the threat of the Maldives being swamped by rising sea levels continued to increase. This quixotic idea was the first of his successful attempts to grab global attention, though one wonders about the practicalities of moving his countrymen to Australia, India or Sri Lanka as he has suggested. Pushed to elaborate on such plans, he retreats to generalities. “We’re talking about needing dry land and if we are not going to be here, where are we going to be?” he asks. “I think we have to have that conversation now.”

His instinct for gimmicky announcements contrast with his career in the Maldives. Formerly an investigative journalist, he reported on corruption and human rights abuses by the regime of Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, a dictatorship which lasted for more than three decades, and was jailed on 16 occasions. In 1999, Nasheed was elected to parliament before being jailed again. In early 2004 he fled to Sri Lanka, where he continued to liaise with members of the Maldivian Democratic party, which he co-founded. He received political asylum in the UK in late 2004 but returned to the Maldives in May 2005. Pressure from the US and the European Union, and rising domestic anger, prompted a first round of free polling in October 2008. After gaining support from other opposition parties, Nasheed won an election run-off against Gayoom by gaining 54 per cent of the vote.

In his first year in power he has converted the wedding-cake villa of his predecessor into the Supreme Court, to symbolise the rule of law in a democracy, and auctioned off the presidential yacht and a gold-plated toilet. He has also put in place a pension plan and now wants to cut the civil service by 10,000 to 15,000 workers, a move that has prompted demonstrations in the capital. “I like the demonstrations [by civil servants],” he says. “It’s good they are making their points because in the past they would all have been arrested.”

I ask him about his time as a political prisoner and marvel that he is seemingly at peace despite spending a total of six years in jail, 18 months of which were in solitary confinement, and despite the fact that Gayoom remains active in politics as leader of the opposition party. “You lose the novelty of time in solitary confinement,” Nasheed begins. “You know, for instance, I love the sunset, but I spent so many sunsets in solitary confinement ... ”

Recollecting how he missed his two daughters’ births because he was in jail, he grows silent. (Human rights groups report that political prisoners were brutally beaten and occasionally left on uninhabited islands covered with molasses.) Beyond conceding that he was brought to “the brink of death twice”, he refuses to discuss the matter further. Instead he addresses the subject of reconciliation: “It’s difficult to move forward and I can understand why people [whose family members were tortured or imprisoned by Gayoom’s regime have demanded his prosecution] would need justice done, but because this thing is so delicately poised it can come out [as violence on] the streets.”

His affection for Britain extends beyond gratitude for giving him political asylum and his close ties with the Tory leadership (he spoke at the recent party conference in Manchester). The son of a wealthy Maldivian businessman, he was sent to boarding school in Britain and then studied maritime law at John Moores University in Liverpool. He says the British education system “is particularly good at bringing out the best of whatever you have”. I ask him what he means. “At a very early stage, they realised I might be good at public speaking rather than [at] rugby. And public speaking was the most important tool that I had in winning this election, nothing other than the ability to stand in front of the microphone and say ‘hello’ and continue with the speech.”

He is also a fan of 21st-century British multiculturalism. He is worried by the rise of militant Islam in the Maldives and extols the island state’s liberal Sufi Islamic traditions. He says 14 Maldivians have been arrested in Waziristan in Pakistan, for being on the Taliban’s side.

I say that it is a remarkable that a tiny country should be at the crossroads of such issues as terrorism, the battle between moderate and militant Islam, climate change and the transition from dictatorship to democracy.

Nasheed argues, unconventionally for an Asian leader, that democracy provides a more effective way of dealing with the problems a nation confronts. “It is so much easier; you can always tell the people and they will tell us how to go about it. If you want longevity, then democracy is not the right form, but if you’re looking at communicating with people efficiently then democracy makes that much easier.”

His aides are circling behind our table and I am ushered out. A photographer and reporter from a Finnish newspaper supplement have been waiting patiently for a photo shoot scheduled to start 45 minutes ago. The photographer wants Nasheed, in a play on the film The Age of Stupid, which forecast environmental apocalypse, to hold up a handwritten sign, which declares in Finnish, “Don’t be stupid.” Then she asks the president to stand on a chair placed precariously close to the balcony’s edge.

Ever the showman, Nasheed calls out to me, “Look what they are doing to me and you say it’s my fault!” He looks a little silly, like a schoolboy being punished. Yet he would probably argue that a little embarrassment is worth it to highlight the threat to his besieged nation – and the world – from global warming.

Rahul Jacob is the FT’s travel editor

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President’s office
Malé, The Maldives

Fish rolls
Fishcakes
Tuna sandwiches
Pastries
Doughnuts
Lipton’s tea

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Re-icing the Arctic and other plans to save the world

Mohamed Nasheed’s proposal to relocate the population of the Maldives as the islands confront the possibility of being submerged by rising sea levels is one approach to the problem countries such as his face, writes Hazel Sheffi. More controversially, others have investigated geo-engineering – deliberate, large-scale alterations, generally opposed by scientists and environmentalist, to the earth’s atmosphere. Here are a few examples.

Source: FT

Nepal cabinet to meet near Everest to highlight climate change

Nepal's cabinet will meet near the base of Mount Everest next week to highlight the impact of climate change on the Himalayas, ahead of the UN summit to discuss global warming in Copenhagen, officials said today.

About 26 ministers and other cabinet officials will fly to Gorakshep on a helicopter to attend the cabinet meet scheduled to take place on December 4 at an altitude 5,165 metre near the Everest base camp, said Bishnu Rijal, the prime minister’s press advisor.

He said the cabinet meeting at the gateway to the Everest will pass a resolution on climate change.

A medical team will accompany the government officials along with oxygen cylinders to facilitate the cabinet meeting, he said.

The unique meeting comes after the Maldives Cabinet met underwater in October to symbolically flag the threat of global warming ahead of a crucial UN Summit.

The government of the Maldives had held the underwater cabinet meeting in a bid to draw global attention towards the rising sea levels that threaten the existence of the island country.

Earlier, mrime minister Madhav Kumar Nepal underlined the adverse impact of climate change on his country. He said Nepal is the most affected by the melting snows and our melting glaciers are inviting a bigger catastrophe in near future though it contributes minimum to the global climate change. Prime minister Nepal said his country will raise the issue of global warning in a big way at the Copenhagen conference in Denmark from December 7-18.

The Nepalese cabinet meeting, which had earlier been planned at an altitude of 5,360 metres in November, was postponed due to the ill health of the prime minister. The officials also visualised logistic problem in holding the meet at an higher altitude.

The landmark cabinet meeting would provide an unique opportunity for the top Nepalese leaders to have a first-hand information about the adverse impact of climate change on the Himalayan range, the PMO official said.

According to experts, glaciers are melting at an alarming rate, creating lakes whose walls could burst and flood villages below.

Source: dnaindia.com

Friday, November 27, 2009

Prince Andrew the Duke of York concludes his unofficial visit to the Maldives

His Royal Highness Prince Andrew the Duke of York has concluded his unofficial visit to the Maldives. During his visit, Prince Andrew visited Gan and Hithadhoo of Addu Atoll.

Prince Andrew arrived in the Maldives on 17 November. On his arrival in Gan International Airport, he was greeted by President Mohamed Nasheed, First Lady Madam Laila Ali, Vice President Dr Mohamed Waheed and Minister of State for Home Affairs in South Province Mohamed Naseer. The Prince was also given an honour guard by Maldives National Defence Force Southern Command, on his arrival.

During his visit, on 18 November, the Duke of York laid a wreath at the War Memorial in Gan, in remembrance of the servicemen who are buried on Addu Atoll.

Gan of Addu Atoll was a British Royal Air Force Base during the Second World War.

On his visit to Hithadhoo on 18 November, Prince Andrew was presented the Ceremonial Key to the South Province. The Key to the South Province was presented to Prince Andrew by Minister of State for Home Affairs in South Province Mohamed Naseer at a cultural ceremony held at the South Province Office.

Speaking at the function, President Nasheed said there were a number of lessons to be learned from the historical relations between Addu Atoll and Britain for the development of the Maldives. He thanked His Royal Highness for visiting Addu Atoll and attending the ceremonies in his honour.

Prince Andrew also spoke at the cultural ceremony. He said, visiting the South Province gave him great pleasure due to its close relations over the years with the United Kingdom.

Nothing that this was his third visit to the Maldives, Prince Andrew said seeing how the Maldives was developing and facing the environmental prospects, and learning how the Maldivians were dealing with issues of living in the middle of the Indian Ocean, “is truly invigorating”.

Prince Andrew reiterated his hope that through his work and the work he does for the United Kingdom, the Maldives and the United Kingdom “will continue to have a close relationship”.

Prince Andrew added, this relationship would help the Maldives continue its development at pace.

Following the Key presentation ceremony, the Duke of York visited the Eedhigili Kilhi conservation area, a natural lake in Hithadhoo which provides a habitat for a number of birds and other living creatures.

Before concluding his visit to Gan and Hithadhoo, the Duke of York planted a tree in the area of the former Royal Air Force Base in Gan.

Source: presidencymaldives.gov.mv

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Climate-vulnerable countries send SOS over climate change

Ahead of the forthcoming climate change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, the world's most climate-vulnerable countries have called on the developed countries to provide money amounting to at least 1.5 per cent of their gross domestic product to assist developing countries make their transition to a climate resilient low-carbon economy.

Bangladesh, Nepal, Vietnam, Kiribati, Barbados, The Maldive Island, Bhutan, Ghana, Rwanda, Kenya and Tanzania, popularly known as the V11, are the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change but they are also among the lowest greenhouse gas emitters.

There are growing fears that some of them, like the Maldives, could disappear within a century.

The call was made Friday at a two-day meeting organised by the government of Maldives, a member of the Climate Neutral Network, according to a news release issued Saturday by the Nairobi-based United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), made available to PANA.

According to UNEP, the meeting highlighted the countries' concerns and determina tion to "green" their economies.

However, the outcome of the meeting did not quite live up to the expectations of its chief organiser, President Mohamed Nasheed of Maldives, who had hoped the countries attending the forum would commit to become carbon neutral within a decade.

In March, Nasheed announced plans to make his own country the world's first carbon-neutral nation by 2019 and last month, he announced the construction of a wind farm that can supply 40 per cent of the country's electricity.

The President has been an active spokesperson for the island states, many of which are now threatened by rising sea levels.

Earlier this year, Nasheed took part in a public service announcement (PSA) organised by UNEP, which called for world leaders to seal the deal in the climate negotiations in Copenhagen next month.

Shot in six locations and across four continents, the videos launched in September feature President Nasheed; Hollywood actor, Don Cheadle; Nobel Laureate, Professor Wangari Maathai; UN Messenger of Peace, Midori Goto; Animal Planet presenter and environmentalist, Phillipe Cousteau and wildlife film maker, Saba Douglas-Hamilton.

In May, the Maldives became the seventh country to join the Climate Neutral Network (CN Net), a UNEP initiative launched in February 2008 to promote global transition to low-carbon economies and societies.

The Climate Neutral Network also includes cities, regions, companies and organisations.

Last month, Nasheed staged the world's first underwater cabinet meeting to promote awareness about rising sea levels.

The V11 group of states said achieving carbon neutrality for developing countries will be very difficult, given their lack of resources.

The question will be on the table in just three weeks at the UN climate summit in Copenhagen.

Source: www.afriquejet.com

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Maldives Press Conference held at WTM


Press conference was held during the first day of the World Travel Market to share the updates of the tourism industry as well as government e with the British media. This is the first time that the tourism sector held a press conference after the new government came into power.


The Press Conference was headed by Dr. Ahmed Ali Ali Sawad, Minister of Tourism, Arts and Culture. In the head table also included Dr. Farahanaz Faizal, High Commissioner of Maldives to the UK, Mr. Hussain Afeef, Executive Board Member of Maldives Association of Tourism Industry (MATI) , Ali Shiyam, Economic Advisor to the President of the Maldives, Yusuf Riffath, Chairman of Maldives Association of Travel agents and Tour Operators (MATATO), Mohamed Riyaz Chairman of Maldives Yacht Association (MAYA)


The information that the Maldives shared with the media included the bold initiatives taken by the government for the protection of the environment as well bringing to the attention of the vulnerability of the environment to the world through the much talked about ‘under water cabinet meeting’. Information was also given about the forecast of tourist arrivals for the coming years while highlighting the resilient of the tourism product of the Maldives and the continuous effort from the industry to sustain the market.


The new policies for the development of the country with tourism was also addressed at the conference, focusing on the major national transport system that was introduced and the efforts of the government to support the target of being a carbon neutral country in 10 years time with major projects like the recently announced wind farm to source power. The direction towards building a destination with a cultural product to enhance the existing popular Maldives product was also shared with the media. Source: