Sea, sun and jihad

Islamist extremism rears its head in the tourist paradise

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.

Instead it blames homegrown extremism. Scholars who studied in Pakistan and the Middle East in the 1980s and 1990s returned imbued with a conservative strain of Wahhabi Islam, and found the Maldives' young population receptive. In the past ten years more and more women have started wearing headscarves or burqas. Young men have tended to boycott government-licensed mosques.

The richest country in South Asia in terms of GDP per head, the Maldives has widespread internet access, in Male at least. “There is a tendency to imitate foreign terror groups, even if there are no formal links,” says Mohamed Nasheed, the information minister. The government long ignored these developments. Indeed, President Gayoom promoted Islam as the cornerstone of Maldivian national identity. The explosion in Sultan Park, however, led to promises of immediate action to defend the vital tourism industry.

But after 30 years of strong-arm one-man rule, Mr Gayoom is embattled. In 2003 street protests following a series of custodial killings almost toppled his regime, forcing him to promise democratic reforms. The country's first multi-party election is due this year.

With the president's future uncertain, his government has descended into tried and tested repression. The police have reacted with characteristic gusto to Mr Gayoom's call for a “no-nonsense” approach to extremism. The Maldivian Detainee Network, an activist group, says that more than 300 suspected religious dissidents have been detained since September. Men wearing the short trousers and long beards associated with Wahhabism are subject to random security checks. Most suspects have not reached the courts.

Attempts to impose a state-sponsored moderate Islam have fallen flat. The Supreme Council on Islamic Affairs, a scholars' body led by a Gayoom loyalist, has refused to ratify his ban on women veiling their entire body or to allow a fast track for the licensing of moderate preachers. With an eye on the election, the main opposition Maldivian Democratic Party has forged an alliance with the conservative religious Adhaalath Party, isolating the government politically.

Mr Nasheed complains that the reform process is impeding the government's ability to act decisively. But Mr Gayoom's high-handedness seems as much to blame for the failings of the counter-terrorism effort. Supreme Council rulings have been countered by ministerial decrees and political objections ignored. Denied access to legal recourse, religious radicals increasingly appear the victims of an arbitrary government. As elsewhere in South Asia, political uncertainty is providing a space in which Islamist extremism can grow.

Source: economist.com

Islamic extremism in the Maldives: Is Gayoom the cause?

By Asif Fuard

As the Maldives sinks deeper into political turmoil with President Mamoon Abdul Gayoom and his political opponents engaged in a bitter clash over reforms, the country is also witnessing the emergence of Islamic extremism. The President, who many call a dictator, survived an assassination attempt recently. The attack came a few months after a bomb went off near a popular park and police battled extremists in an island. These events have prompted the government to take steps to combat the threat of Islamic extremism.

Members of a little known group have taken up arms to defend themselves and promote their version of Islam - Wahhabism -- in the archipelago. The Maldivians say the leaders of the group were educated in Pakistan and West Asian countries and their version of Islam conflicts with the version of Islam stipulated by Maldivian law, according to which preaching of different versions of Islam is a crime.

Reports say India's intelligence arm, Research Analysis Wing, has received information that Maldivian Islamic extremists are purchasing weapons from Indian criminal and terrorist groups while other reports indicate that they were also buying weapons from Indonesia and Pakistan.

These reports also say that Sri Lanka is being used as a transit point in the arms smuggling operation. It is against this backdrop, a few months ago, Sri Lanka and the Maldives signed a memorandum of understanding on intelligence sharing.

Opposition parties blame President Gayoom for the rise of extremism. Gayoom has been ruling this Indian Ocean archipelago for nearly three decades. Of late, he has come under severe criticism from within the country and abroad for the mounting corruption, human rights abuses and social ills such as the growing problem of youth addiction to narcotics amidst a high rate of unemployment.

The opposition's view is backed by research conducted by the New Delhi-based Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses focusing on the Maldives and Pakistan. The research shows that people resort to extremism when they are faced with a non-democratic political system.

On January 8, a boy scout foiled an assassination attempt on the President's life when he grabbed the assassin's knife, saving the executive from death. The assassin, 20-year-old Mohamed Murshid, unemployed and having no previous criminal record, attempted to attack the President when he visited, Hoarafushi in the north of the Maldives.

Earlier a homemade bomb exploded in the capital city of Male on September 29 last year in what was said to be the country's first act of terrorism after the failed attempt by a Sri Lankan mercenary group hired by wealthy Maldivian to overthrow the President in 1988.

Information Minister Mohamed Nasheed told a news conference that the perpetrators might have had extremist connections."Investigations into the September attack showed that there was fundamentalist thinking behind it," he said. In December, three men convicted of carrying out the September bombing were jailed for 15 years. Although the government may have been worried after reports linked some of the suspects to Kashmiri groups, they have since then taken measures to combat extremism in the island.

The government had taken steps to promote moderate thinking through education and banned the traditional Islamic veil in public places, offices, courts, and educational establishments, Minister Nasheed said. He said the government had also banned Muslim religious gatherings unless permission was obtained.

Foreign clerics too have been banned by the government, because it fears they can promote fundamentalism."We do not have madrassas or religious schools, like you see in Pakistan, from where militant thinking comes in," Minister Nasheed said. "In this country, fundamentalism is not spread through teachings."

It is spread by a handful of clerics, according to analysts. The rise of extremism is a threat to the country's tourism industry, one of the pillars of the small island nation's economy. Gayoom has ruled the islands since Nov. 11, 1978, and in recent years has strongly defended the presidential form of government, as opposed to the parliamentary system, which is promoted by the main opposition, the Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP).

The founder for the MDP, Mohammed Latheef, told The Sunday Times the Egyptian-educated Gayoom is the father of the country's extremism as it was he who had brought the Wahhabi (Islam practised in Saudi Arabia) thinking into the country. "Soon after becoming President, he opened the first Islamic schools. Religious scholars from Egypt were brought to 'enlighten' the Maldivians during the month of Ramadan.

“ Some even shocked the moderate Muslim community by preaching men could beat their wives. School textbooks were revised to follow the dictator's version of Islam. Islam is used as a tool of governance in the Maldives and its people are tired of it," he said.

"There is no rule of law or checks and balances in the system of governance in the Maldives. The judiciary, the legislature and the security forces revolve around a single individual who runs the country. “In a state which has no governance one can expect such incidents taking place," he said.

Source: sundaytimes.lk

Maldives seek Interpol help to arrest terror suspects

The Maldives is seeking Interpol's help to arrest 10 of its nationals, wanted in connection with a bomb blast in the capital Male, who have fled to Pakistan, police said.

The calm of the paradise holiday destination was shattered in September when Islamic radicals set off a home-made bomb, wounding 12 foreign tourists.

Police arrested six of 16 Maldivians believed to be linked to the attack, but said another 10 escaped to Pakistan.

"The Attorney General's office has given us the court order and we have now asked Interpol to issue a red notice," Maldives police spokesman Ahmed Shiyam told AFP in Colombo by telephone.

A red notice allows an arrest warrant to be circulated worldwide, with the intent that the person will be extradited, according to Interpol's website.

Shiyam did not say what charges the suspects might face.

The September 29 bombing occurred outside Sultan Park in Male, wounding a British honeymoon couple, two Japanese and eight Chinese on a city tour.

The two prime suspects, Abdul Latheef Ibrahim and Ali Shameem, fled the Maldives with the help of an immigration officer who is now in custody, Assistant Commissioner of Police Abdullah Riyaz said.

Police in the Muslim nation said those detained received training in assembling bombs at Pakistani madrassas, or religious schools.

President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom said the blast was the first terrorist attack in the Indian Ocean island chain, and has unveiled tough measures to combat Islamic extremism and to protect its vital upmarket tourism industry.

Gayoom, who has ruled the Maldives with an iron fist since 1978, banned fundamentalists from conducting religious services and foreign clerics from entering the country without permission.

Home to about 300,000 Sunni Muslims, the Maldives is a chain of 1,192 coral islands scattered across 850 kilometres (550 miles).

About 600,000 tourists visit the country each year. Tourism and a successful tuna fishing industry has pushed per capita incomes to nearly 2,700 dollars, making the Maldivians the richest country in South Asia.

Source: AFP

Maldives says 10 bomb suspects now in Pakistan

Maldives police said on Thursday 10 suspects in a September bomb attack that wounded 12 foreign tourists were on the run in Pakistan and they were seeking Interpol assistance to arrest the fugitives.

The 10 men planned the bombing and flew to Pakistan in the weeks preceding the September 29 attack near a mosque in the Maldives' capital Male, police said.

"They masterminded the bombing and then fled to Pakistan," a police spokesman said.

Eleven suspects are in custody on the Indian Ocean islands in connection with the attack which struck tourists at the entrance to the popular Sultan Park.

Three of the men have confessed to police that they planted the device to "target, attack and injure non-Muslims, to fulfil jihad", the spokesman said.

Two of the suspects in Pakistan, Ali Shameem and Abdul Latheef Ibrahim, both Maldives nationals, were on a travel blacklist after family members voiced concerns about their intention to travel to Pakistan to train for militant attacks.

They slipped out of the country with the assistance of an immigration officer who has been arrested, police said.

"Several of the fugitives, as well as some of the suspects detained in the Maldives, received training in bomb making in Pakistani madrasas (Islamic schools)," the police spokesman said.

The Maldives has practised a moderate form of Islam uninterrupted for seven centuries. But fears of extremism have grown in recent years.

Extradition orders have been prepared and Pakistani police have been alerted through Interpol, the spokesman said. At home, police have asked the state to prosecute 16 men, including one minor. Some of those on the run may face trial in absentia.

The chain of over a thousand islands straddling the Equator is home to more than 80 upmarket resorts, attracting more than 500,000 tourists last year.

The tourism industry accounts for two thirds of GDP by some estimates, and is the primary source of foreign currency.

The Maldives government banned travel to Pakistan for study in madrasas over a decade ago, and earlier this year sent its first counter-terror officers to Singapore for training.

In the aftermath of the blast, which injured two Britons, two Japanese and eight Chinese, more than 60 men were rounded up from a single island, a third of the adult male population, after a pitched battle outside a mosque.

President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, in power since 1978, has announced plans to ban the full veil and prevent foreign preachers entering the country. The proposals have been fiercely criticised by religious scholars and an increasingly popular conservative Islamic political party.

Source: Reuters

Religious tension hits Maldive Islands, a hot spot for tycoons, superstars

While vacationing tycoons and bikini-clad Hollywood superstars blissfully sipped drinks on the Maldives' secluded white beaches, an Islamic revolution fueled by preachers trained in Pakistan and the Middle East was brewing.

On Sept. 29, the two faces of the Maldives collided when a homemade bomb exploded in a park in the capital, Male, wounding 12 tourists, threatening the critical resort industry and sending the clear message that even this remote corner of paradise is not immune to terrorism.

The attack, and a bloody confrontation days later between police and masked Islamic extremists armed with harpoons, stunned this Indian Ocean nation and threatened its careful effort to balance its traditionally moderate Islamic heritage with liberal Western values.

The government reacted swiftly to crush the fundamentalist movement that had risen amid the palm trees and crystal blue waters of its 1,190 coral islands. Authorities banned the veil, arrested scores of suspected extremists, sealed underground mosques and promised a crackdown on radical preachers.

"We are not taking chances," Information Minister Mohamed Nasheed said.

So far, the violence has not frightened off the tourists, who account for one-third of the economy, he said. But "if there is another attack, then we just close tourism here. And we can't afford that," he said.

By far the most prosperous country in south Asia, with a per capita annual income of $2,700, the republic had seemed safe from the worldwide rise of Islamic militancy. Its longtime ruler, President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, had harnessed his nation's major natural resource — hundreds of small, deserted islands — to create remote, upscale resorts that fueled explosive economic growth.

But the country also suffered deep divisions.

While many high school graduates went to Europe or Australia for a liberal education, others studied religion at extremist institutions in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and spread their radical beliefs across the islands, said Rohan Gunaratna, a Singapore-based terrorism expert hired by the government. He estimated that several thousand of the country's 300,000 people now follow these clerics.

"They are preaching a deviant form of Islam," he said.

These once marginal preachers have found a new wave of adherents in recent years. The global outburst of Islamic anger after the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the spread of Internet access to this country's remote islands played a major role in the growing fundamentalism, said Hassan Saeed, the Maldives' former attorney general.

"Suddenly, an island nation cut off from the rest of the world became part of the global village," he said.

So did the Maldives. But despite the relative prosperity, there weren't enough jobs for the huge population of young people, and many turned to drugs or radical Islam, Saeed said. The Islamic Council, the government body that runs official mosques, accredits preachers and controls all aspects of religion here, was still distributing decades-old sermons to its imams and was caught unprepared, he said.

The trauma of the 2004 tsunami, which killed more than 100 people here and devastated many islands, also fueled an Islamic revival. Hussein Mohammed, 40, said he was among 200 displaced people originally from the island of Moondu who spent two years in an abandoned textile factory on the island of Gan before getting a new house. Many in the crowded factory sought solace in the translated copies of the Quran the government provided, and within months nearly all the women began wearing head scarves, he said.

"After something like the tsunami, this frightening thing, people became far more interested in religion," he said.

While many of the fundamentalists were not violent, a Maldivian was caught trying to join the Taliban in Afghanistan, another was arrested in India seeking to buy sniper rifles, and a third was jailed by U.S. authorities in Guantanamo Bay, Saeed said.

"For a small country, there were a large number of alarming signals," said Saeed, who quit the government in August, in part because he felt a report he wrote on the looming problem was ignored.

Like villagers on several other scattered islands, the people of Gan found themselves suddenly confronted by a small group of angry fundamentalists earlier this year.

"They said they are Muslims and others are not Muslims and that others should be killed," said Daoud Ibrahim, the clean-shaven imam at the government mosque. "I have never seen this before ... it's against our traditions."

While rows of villagers in knitted white skullcaps prayed in the spacious mosque with its green tile floors, the fundamentalists — dressed in Saudi-style white robes and headdress — took over a tiny mosque of concrete and corrugated metal meant for Bangladeshi construction workers. They pressured Maldivian women to wear head scarves, mocked clean-shaven men as unbelievers and quietly plotted to drive tourists out, officials said.

Some in the group were tsunami refugees from the remote island of Kalhadoo, which embraced a strict form of Islam more than a quarter century ago under the tutelage of a Saudi-educated preacher named Mohammed Ibrahim. Angry at Ibrahim's dissident Islamic views, the government banished him from Male to Kalhadoo, where he quickly turned the islanders into his disciples, said Yousef Ismail, a former Kalhadoo resident who now lives in Gan. Ismail spoke as his wife sat nearby, covered head-to-toe in a black robe.

Police say at least one of the men on Gan, whose cell phone was discovered in the ocean near the airport, was directly connected to the Male blast. On Wednesday, police said the man, Abdul Latheef Ibrahim, had fled to Pakistan ahead of the blast along with nine other suspects from different Maldive islands. Six other suspects were already in custody.

Source: MSNBC By RAVI NESSMAN Associated Press Writer

Maldives Terrorist Attack Suspects Flee to Pakistan, Police Say

Maldives police said 10 suspects in a bomb attack on international tourists in September fled to Pakistan and the Indian Ocean island nation is seeking Interpol's assistance to detain the fugitives.

The two prime suspects, Abdul Latheef Ibrahim and Ali Shameem, escaped the Maldives with the assistance of an immigration officer, Assistant Commissioner of Police Abdullah Riyaz said. Another eight entered Pakistan through Karachi before the Sept. 29 blast in the capital, Male, he said.

The suspects targeted non-Muslims to fulfill their ``jihad,'' or holy war, Riyaz said, in a statement on the Maldives Police Service Web site.

Several of the fugitives and people already detained in connection with the attack received training in bomb making at Pakistani madrassas, or religious schools, the British Broadcasting Corp. reported. The Maldives, a chain of 1,190 islands located southwest of India, is made up almost entirely of Sunni Muslims, according to U.S. government data.

The bomb exploded at a popular park while the tourists were on a city tour. The 12 people wounded included a British couple on their honeymoon, two Japanese and eight Chinese. The incident was the first terrorist attack in the country, President Abdul Gayoom said at the time.

Moderate Islam

The nation of 369,000 people has practiced a moderate form of Islam for the past 700 years and is concerned about the infiltration of Islamic radicals, according to the BBC.

Plans by Gayoom, who has led the country since 1978, to ban the veil and prevent preachers from overseas entering the country have been resisted by religious scholars and the Islamic political party, the broadcaster reported on its Web site.

Assistant Commissioner Riyaz showed video footage taken by the plotters of the preparation of the improvised explosive device used in the attack, according to a police statement.

Police yesterday applied for an Interpol Red Notice to arrest the fugitives and are working with the Pakistani authorities on the case, it said.

The United Nations said in a September report that Pakistan trains, recruits or shelters more than 80 percent of suicide bombers staging attacks in neighboring Afghanistan.

Almost all suicide attackers in Afghanistan ``undergo some form of training and preparation'' in Pakistani madrassas, according to the report.

In 2006, President Pervez Musharraf ordered religious schools to register with the government. A year earlier, he demanded they expel non-Pakistani students, after a U.K. investigation into the 2005 bombings in London showed that at least one of the suicide attackers visited a Pakistani madrassa.

The Maldives islands are spread over 900 kilometers (540 miles) in the Indian Ocean. The country's population lives on 198 of the islands. At $2,419, the Maldives had the highest per capita gross national income in the South Asia region in 2004, according to the World Bank.

Tourism accounts for almost a third of the Maldives economy and more than 60 percent of foreign exchange, according to the U.S. government's database.

Source: Bloomberg By Michael Heath

Maldives fears foreign terror cells as religious tensions rise

The Maldives has begun a crackdown on Islamic militant groups in an effort to prevent international terror networks from setting up cells here, President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom told AFP.

The president said a small minority of the Indian Ocean archipelago's 330,000 Sunni Muslims had begun preaching an extremist form of Islam that could affect the peaceful image of the popular tourist destination.

A bomb attack targeting foreign tourists here last month followed by violent clashes with police and security forces had alerted the country to the "very serious threat of extremism," he said in an interview at his seafront office at the weekend.

"Maldivians are influenced by what is happening in the world. They go to Pakistan, study in madrassas and come back with extreme religious ideas," said Gayoom, who is an Islamic scholar from Egypt's Cairo University.

Asked whether foreign groups could be funding Maldivian extremists, Gayoom said: "It is very plausible... We have taken enough measures to deal with the problem. We take it very seriously."

He said there was evidence that extremists may be receiving funding from abroad and the unrest could allow international terror groups to capitalise and set up cells in the country unless authorities applied pressure.

Maldivian police said there was no hard evidence of Al-Qaeda operating here, but that the possibility could not be discounted.

Gayoom, 69, said the Maldives was sharing intelligence with neighbouring India and Sri Lanka as well as Britain and the United States to tackle Islamic militants.

More than 50 people, all Maldivians, are already in custody, according to officials.

The president said Islamic extremism had begun to affect the peaceful coral islands, better known as an up-market destination for honeymooners and well-heeled tourists than a hotbed of militancy.

"They want to lead a very primitive life. They want women to cover their faces," Gayoom said, referring to those already in custody.

"It is not good for the image of the country. We have been a liberal country for centuries."

Last week, the president ordered a ban on bearded mullahs, or clerics, entering his country unless invited by the authorities.

On Sunday he went a step further, announcing plans to bar Maldivians from travelling to extremist religious schools in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia that advocate Taliban-style practices.

"Some of these extremist people have said that it is against Islam to sing," Gayoom said. "This is not proper religious teaching. Uneducated people are falling for it."

On Sunday, he also ordered an investigation into whether religious schools here were sticking to official texts.

Gayoom came to power in 1978 and under his rule the Maldives, a nation of 1,191 tiny coral islands scattered some 850 kilometres (550 miles) across the equator, has become South Asia's most prosperous economy.

He is worried that any sign of trouble could tarnish the peaceful image of the country, where some resorts charge as much as 14,500 dollars a night for the super-rich to stay at exclusive resorts on small, palm-fringed islands.

"We want to be known as very peaceful country with political and social stability. We are determined to preserve that image," he said.

He said the September 29 bombing that wounded 12 foreign nationals had led to cancellations of holidays here, but the industry had since recovered.

Resorts are reporting near full occupancy.

Reforms unveiled by Gayoom two years ago to allow political parties to function for the first time in living memory may have also led to open defiance of authority, according to officials here.

Gayoom said he hoped to complete the democratic reforms within a few months and contest elections due within a year "to complete the work I started."

Source: AFP

Maldives tourism under threat

MALE - A rise in Islamic militancy poses an unprecedented threat to the Maldives’ status as South Asia’s most upmarket holiday destination, but the government is determined to beat the extremists.

The first concrete sign of trouble in the archipelago traditionally seen as the holiday-maker’s paradise came last month, when 12 foreign tourists including a honeymooning British couple were wounded in a bomb attack.

President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, an Islamic scholar, responded quickly, ordering a major crackdown in the moderate Sunni Muslim nation of 330,000.

While well-heeled tourists are welcome, Gayoom has made it clear Muslim clerics eager to bring Taliban-style extremism to the turquoise blue lagoons and secluded tiny coral islands are not.

Gayoom decreed foreign clerics should not be allowed entry without special permission, barred women from covering themselves from head to toe, and ordered that educational qualifications from foreign madrassas, or Islamic seminaries, will not be recognised.

Former education minister Mohamed Zahir Hussain said a minority of people believed that tourism was against Islam and were keen to disrupt the mainstay of the economy.

Extremist elements oppose revenues from tourism, including the sale of liquor, which is prohibited by Islam.

“I am sure we can manage,” Hussain said. “People are shocked, but we can deal with the problem because of the geography of the Maldives."

Only 200 of the 1,192 islands are inhabited, and tourist resorts are kept separate, with foreigners not allowed to spend the night on any inhabited island except the capital Male.

Maldivians are employed in resorts, but cannot work as bar tenders.

Tourism Minister Mahamood Shougee said he believed extremism would simply fizzle out.

“There is no popular support for them and the extremists had reached the maximum level they could,” Shougee told AFP, adding the problem could also be tackled without undermining growth in tourism, the mainstay of the islands’ economy.

The Maldives hopes to welcome 650,000 holiday-makers this year, around 10% up on 2006, he said, adding that the industry earned the country about 200 to 300 million dollars annually.

However, the September 29 bombing at the Sultan Park in Male, a popular stop for tourists visiting this highly congested, one-square-mile capital, has tarnished the country’s image as a peaceful destination.

Former attorney general Hassan Saeed warned the problem could escalate unless the government took immediate action to address the underlying economic and social problems.

“If the situation is left unattended, there will be more serious trouble,” Saeed said. “It can be stopped. The good thing is that Maldivians are traditionally moderate."

Earlier this month, the government raided the epicentre of radical extremism on an island some 100 kilometres south of Male and detained over 50 people who clashed with police and security forces.

Saeed said Maldivian extremists may be inspired by events in Afghanistan and Iraq, but the troubles in the atoll nation were essentially due to underlying domestic issues.

“I believe it is home grown,” said Saeed, who quit as attorney general in August saying the government was not taking adequate measures to deal with the problem.

Asian diplomats believe the government may even be trying to play up religious extremism to allow it to crack down on dissent in a country that recognised political parties only two years ago.

Source: AFP

Ukulhas on verge of becoming another extremist den

North Ari atoll, October 20, 2007 (Haveeru News Service) - After landing on Ukulhas island in North Ari atoll, one of Maldives\' top tourism zones, Haveeru Daily reporters found that like neighboring Himandhoo, this island may be on the verge of becoming another den for Islamic extremists.

As we came on to the island, we passed a woman and asked her where the island\'s mosque was.

\"There is no mosque,\" she replied. \"We have only one mosque built by the government but that has been closed because we found out that the mosque was constructed on top of a graveyard.”

The mosque called Masjid Al-Thaqwa has been closed down for almost three years now. Ever since the Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs shut down the mosque on 3 November 2005, the issue has been hotly contested among the 700 residents in this island. [Read more on haveeru online]

Maldives militant move condemned

A Maldives opposition group has strongly condemned moves announced earlier this week by the president to curb Islamic militancy in the country.

A spokesman for the Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) said the move was would "exacerbate extremism". They argue that innocent people are being affected by the crackdown. President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom said that measures to combat Islamic extremism were necessary to protect the country's lucrative tourism industry.

Special permission

Last month the country was hit by a bomb attack in a park near the main mosque in the capital, Male. Two Britons, two Japanese and eight Chinese tourists were hurt by the bomb - reported to have been homemade.

In an order made on Tuesday, President Gayoom said extremist elements should not be allowed to operate in the country, and that foreign clerics would not be able to enter the country without special permission.

In a wide ranging decree, the president ordered:

• A new dress code which outlaws women from being covered from head-to-toe
• Moderate Islamic views to be promoted in schools and colleges
• Action against anyone suspected of being a religious extremist
• Research into why some Muslims have become more radical
• A new law that bans words or actions likely to encourage extremism

• 
  
A new dress code which outlaws women from being covered from head-to-toeModerate Islamic views to be promoted in schools and collegesAction against anyone suspected of being a religious extremistResearch into why some Muslims have become more radical
• 
  

Ahmad Moosa, a spokesman for the MDP in London, accused the president of "using a sledgehammer to crack a nut".

In an interview with the BBC, he said that the president himself must bear some responsibility for the rise of militant Islam in the islands.

"As early as 1980 he was inviting radicals from abroad to visit our country in addition to setting up Islamic schools. He has only himself to blame."

Correspondents say that September's bombing has unsettled the Maldives, a nation of over 1,000 islands scattered across some 850k (550 miles) off the southern coast of India.

Officials say that President Gayoom is eager to stem militant violence, which many fear could detract from the country's position as a top destination for tourists.

Police arrested nearly 50 people last week on a remote island in connection with the Male blast.

Those detained were all Maldivians belonging to an Islamic militant group, according to a government spokesman.

Source: BBC World

Maldives cracks down on extremism

The Maldives Wednesday unveiled tough measures to combat extremism and protect its vital luxury tourism industry after an unprecedented bombing wounded British, Japanese and Chinese holiday makers.

An order from President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom said fundamentalists should not be allowed to conduct religious services and that foreign clerics should not be able to enter the country without special permission.

Ban on women’s covering: The decree, which also outlaws head-to-toe covering for women, comes in the wake of a bombing on September 29 which wounded two Britons, two Japanese and eight Chinese tourists visiting a park in the island capital of Male.

Officials said Gayoom’s order underlined a desire to stem fundamentalism that could undermine the tiny atoll nation’s status as one of the world’s top destinations for well-heeled tourists. “The president addressed letters to the ministries of education and higher education and the Supreme Council of Islamic Affairs outlining the measures to curb religious extremism,” the government said in a statement.

Under the tough new measures, the government will also not recognise educational qualifications obtained from madrassas, or Islamic seminaries. afp