Transcript 0:00 [on-hold music] Hi, everybody, and welcome to Trendlines, a podcast on global affairs brought to you by World Politics Review. I'm Judah Grunstein, WPR's editor-in-chief. 0:13 For most people, the island nation of the Maldives conjures up images of pristine beaches and exotic marine life, or else rising sea levels and the threats from climate change. 0:24 But beyond the confines of its tourist resorts lies a country characterized by massive corruption, dirty politics, and a strict form of Islamic law. J.J. 0:33 Robinson will join Peter Dury a little later to explain why, after a failed experiment with democracy, climate change is the least of the Maldives' worries. 0:42 But first, I'll be talking with WPR senior editor Freddy Deknatel about this week's top stories in international affairs. Hi, Freddy. How you doing? Hey, Judah. Doing well. 0:52 So one of the big stories in the news this week was the, uh, US intelligence community's determination that, uh, 1:01 Russia and even personally Vladimir Putin were involved in, uh, u-using cyberattacks to try to influence the outcome of the US presidential election. 1:11 Uh, it comes at the same time as sort of the, the, the final conclusive battle of Aleppo in Syria, where Russia's supporting the Syrian regime of, uh, Bashar al-Assad, seems to be coming to a close in the regime's favor, and at the same time as, uh, Putin meets in the hot tub summit with, uh, the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. 1:38 And so I thought we could talk about Russia, uh, also in the context of, uh, the incoming Trump administration, which has signaled it will, uh, sort of privilege more, more cooperative ties with, uh, with Moscow. 1:52 The, the question sort of arises, has Russia won? 1:56 Yeah, I think that depending on who you read, we're either back in a, you know, Cold War moment, it's the 1980s again, or, uh, you know, this, the Trump t-transition line is, is, uh, not denial, but certainly trying to, uh, take a very alternative view. 2:13 I mean, I think the, the, what I keep coming back to is that, of course, you know, the news out of Aleppo this week especially, and, and then on top of that, uh, the bombshell news, which wasn't really much of a bombshell if you were reading the news for the last couple months, that it was obvious that there was Russian meddling in the election. 2:29 But the fact that the CIA was coming more, coming out, um, to be more, uh, out in the open about it. Uh, you know, Russia has been... 2:39 I don't think Russia's winning, but also Russia has been pushing these buttons, specifically with the US, but also with Western Europe, for several years now. 2:47 Um, they intervened in Syria, obviously, more than a year ago, the Ukraine, uh, and Crimea annexation, um, back in 2014. 2:57 Uh, so I think it's a longer story of, of Russian, uh, aggression on one hand, depending on some people's view, uh, certainly Russia trying to reestablish its, its place as a world power, um, after obviously many years of really being, uh, run down the ladder, uh, internationally. 3:17 A, a decade considered humil... uh, a decade of humiliation by the Russians after the, the fall of the Soviet Union. Uh, obviously, my question was more than a little bit provocative. 3:26 I think also, uh, when I, when I, when I hear other people talk about that or, or s- or talk about Russia's resurgence, uh, even when I write about it myself, I often, uh, try to con- to, to put that into context. 3:40 If Russia has won, what has it won? And to what extent can it win? 3:44 There, there, certainly, uh, one of Putin's goals was to, uh, constrain the United States and its ability to dictate events and outcomes, and I, and I think part of that had to do with, um, a Russian perspective that I think we often don't give enough credence to, a, a Russian perspective where the United States, uh, talked a lot about rules-based norms and global order. 4:10 Uh, I know I've written about that a lot over the last month or two. 4:13 And at the same time as the global superpower, and only global superpow- superpower for quite a while, the US sort of did what it, what it needed to do or what it wanted to do. 4:23 Uh, when those rules con- would've constrained it, it passed outside them. So from a Russian perspective, there's certainly a, a, a valid argument that, uh, that the, the, the US needed to be constrained in some ways. 4:35 Um, and then at the same time, uh, the, there's this asymmetry of power, so in terms of Russia having a veto at the United Nations Security Council and, uh, obviously being a nuclear armed power, uh, is certainly able to, um, 4:51 constrain the US, block the US in some ways. 4:54 The question more recently is to what degree can Russia actually, uh, achieve its own desired outcomes, and to what degree can it, uh, put forward an agenda of its own and, and, and whether or not there are natural constraints and limits to that. 5:08 Um, you've written a lot about Syria for us at WPR and elsewhere, um, and are very plugged into a lot of the discussions there. 5:17 I just saw in scanning the news this morning, uh, a trilateral summit between Russia, Turkey, and Iran to discuss the ceasefire in Aleppo or a ceasefire in Aleppo to discuss Syria. 5:30 A lot, in a lot of ways, obviously, uh, the United States is no longer central party to, uh, some of the discussions going on. Uh, can Russia seal a deal? Can Russia achieve its desired outcomes in Syria? 5:43 And what, what would that mean? What would it look like? I think Russia's gonna find that it is in a position that the US 5:50 avoided and never wanted in Syria, and has really been the Obama administration's reason for not getting more involved, because they would own Syria. 5:57 And I think that Russia runs the risk now of, of having that, even though Assad is, is much more their, you know, client in a lot of ways, and they have, they very obviously back him and have Throughout the war, despite international condemnation and records of atrocities, uh, but, I mean, just in the last few days, some of the back and forth news about a potential ceasefire in the rebel-held parts of Aleppo and a deal to get civilians out, uh, there was one, 6:25 uh, detail in that, in, in this back and forth that apparently the Russians and the Turks had agreed on, on the ceasefire deal, but the Iranians weren't, or at least some of the Iranian-backed militias that are also fighting on the ground in Aleppo were resisting. 6:37 And so I think that was just one data point that, you know, Russia doesn't have control over these Iranian-backed groups. 6:44 Um, they've obviously inserted themselves into the mess in Syria and, you know, when you're bombing rebels from the air, it can look fairly straightforward, but when it gets down into the nitty-gritty, not only of the battlefield on the ground, but also, you know, the war is far from over and they have, 7:03 you know, attached themselves to Assad's fate much more, um, than they, than they had even before they intervened. 7:08 And I think that, uh, that said, there's still this question of, you know, do they even want Assad there long term? Um, they want to keep their foothold in, in the Middle East, which is what Syria is for them, but, uh, 7:21 you could argue that even, even if hostilities, you know, die down in places like Aleppo, um, as free to get us r- in the column today, you know, the war is gonna go on for a long time. 7:31 Assad's gonna keep on looking over his shoulder and, you know, how long does Russia want to be backstopping Assad? 7:38 The other thing, too, to keep in mind is that, um, similar to what the United States experienced in Iraq, uh, it's easier to get buy-in from the local parties when their backs are against the wall and when it's a question of, uh, organizing and cooperating towards a common goal or perishing, which was the case when Russia began its intervention in Syria. 7:59 Uh, Iran and the Syrian regime, uh, really had every reason to, uh, create a united front and s- in some ways, uh, follow Russia's, Moscow's marching orders to the degree that that was the relationship. 8:16 Um, at the same time, once that, uh, that urgency begins to subside, that's when the conflicting and, and various, uh, agendas and objectives start coming into play and, uh, and we'll see, uh, 8:33 to what degree Russia really can, uh, impose its will there. 8:37 Uh, in Asia, briefly, uh, we see this, uh, this meeting, uh, between, uh, uh, Putin and Abe where there is a territorial claim or dispute between them over the, what the Russians call the Kuril 8:51 Islands and the Japanese, the Northern Territories, uh, which dates back to the end of World War II. 8:56 Uh, that also for me sort of throws into a pretty stark contrast the limits of what Russia can really achieve in Asia, where it threat, it's risk, it risks being a junior partner to China, uh, somewhat, uh, distant from some of the other major players and with these, uh, these major issues that get in between, uh, Moscow and Tokyo, for instance, and o- obviously the North Korea issue, making ties with South Korea always somewhat, uh, fragile. 9:25 Um, so I, I guess my own answer to my provocative question is maybe Russia has won a round or two, maybe Putin has achieved some of his objectives in terms of constraining, uh, the US, uh, agenda, but again, time will tell and, uh, the jury's still out on, uh, on its long-term prospects. 9:43 Yeah, I think the only other point I would add is that what Russia has won so far, um, they've been able to do pretty successfully at a pretty low cost, specifically cyber warfare, um, has been a, you know, a maximal return and minimal investment in terms of, uh, just the costs of, uh, of hacking and, and cyber warfare. 10:04 Syria is obviously, you know, the costs there are higher, but arguably that's been sort of one of Putin's strategies so far is, is, uh, you know, a, a, a smaller amount of investment for, you know, more maximum geopolitical payoff. 10:17 And I think that, you know, the costs will go higher as they try to achieve more things. 10:22 And, and just before we wrap it up, uh, I, the implications of the Trump presidency throwing a lot of uncertainty, uncertainty into the equation because, uh, in some ways a, a more cooperative US, re- relationship with the US could further Putin's agenda and in other ways it adds an urgency to determine where he wants to steer them. 10:43 Okay, before we, uh, before we wrap things up, were there, was there any other article or briefing or, that we covered, uh, this week on WPR that you wanted to mention? 10:52 Uh, yeah, just briefly, it was a, a briefing by Patrick Corcoran, uh, on Argentina and its president, Mauricio Macri, who came into office last year promising a whole lot of things and, uh, his sort of honeymoon period is already fading. 11:07 And I wanted to mention a country report that, uh, we ran this week on Morocco by Intissar Fakir, which added a, a lot of, uh, nuance to the, uh, the, the perception of Morocco as a, a country constantly on, in the process of reform. 11:26 She discusses the limits to that perception, but also the ways in which, uh, things have changed in the political landscape, uh, domestically. Okay, that about wraps it up. 11:36 Uh, time to kick it over to Peter for the report. Sounds good. [upbeat music] I want to tell you my story of the Maldives. It is a tale of corruption, thuggery, and international money laundering. 11:51 The perfect turquoise seas surrounding the whitest, purest white sand beaches. A journalist who criticized the government disappeared. A television station torched. It almost feels like you're in a dream. 12:05 Stepping off the plane and onto the white sand immediately puts you in a different state of mind. State-sponsored terrorism against its own people and institution. 12:17 The people here have many cultural influences, but what struck me the most is how their natural surroundings have influenced their traditions. 12:26 In a country where young women get regularly flogged for having sex outside of marriage. Thinking of going back home seems unreal. It's a world that seems so far away from this perfect patch of land. Everybody is afraid. 12:46 A perfect tropical paradise of white beaches, blue skies and coral reefs. This is how the Maldives are presented to the outside world. 12:57 But domestically, its politics are characterized by patronage, corruption and violence against dissidents. Joining me today to disentangle the two narratives of the Maldives is J.J. 13:09 Robinson, a former editor of Minivan News, now called the Maldives Independent and author of Maldives, Islamic Republic, Tropical Autocracy. The Maldives is really a country of 13:23 two very different spheres, almost two different countries, you could say. 13:27 The first is the country you might imagine when you think of the postcard image of the tropical beach paradise with these resorts stretching out into the sea, 13:37 pina coladas on the beach, that kind of 1970s Coco Cabana European style beach holiday. 13:44 The other side is the Maldives as Maldivians experience it, which is one of the world's perhaps more repressive Islamic societies, very strict rules about what people can and cannot do. 14:00 It's a very densely populated country in the sense that most of the population live in the capital city of Malé, which has about 160,000 people in just 2.2 square kilometers. 14:11 And the rest of the population are spread out across about another 200 inhabited islands in an atoll nation of about 1,192 islands. 14:23 As a result of that, the politics are absolutely centered in this very, very small, very, very densely packed space that looks essentially like New York crammed into a tiny, tiny, tiny island next to the airport. 14:39 What is interesting, if you're a tourist and you come to the Maldives, you fly into the international airport, which is on a separate island to the capital next door. 14:48 You get picked up by a speedboat or a seaplane and either flown or taken, otherwise taken to your resort. So you don't actually set foot on an island that a Maldivian would consider to be inhabited. 15:03 The resorts and the airport are designated officially as uninhabited islands and a whole different set of rules apply to them. So this gets back to my point. 15:12 When you talk about the Maldives, you're really talking about two very separate nation states, essentially, with their own identities, their own social codes and even their own economies. 15:27 The outward facing of these two economies is the tourism sector, responsible for the lion's share of the wealth generated by the Maldives. 15:37 So tourism in the Maldives is indirectly responsible for about 70% of the economy. That comes from essentially the million odd tourists who come there from around the world every year. 15:52 The number one demographic, Chinese tourists at the moment, who the last time we looked at it was about 40% of arrivals. And that was very much on the up. 16:05 For a long time, it's been very popular as a destination for honeymooners from Europe, particularly Italy, France, Germany and the UK. 16:14 And also now with the Middle East and Russia, people are quite drawn to these sort of private islands, the sort of sense of remoteness and privacy on a lot of these islands that you can get. You do feel like you are 16:29 very far from the rest of the world. So even though the economy is 70% tourism, 90% of the foreign exchange comes from tourism, which makes 16:43 the Maldives very, very dependent on tourism for foreign currency. So on the one side, you have a government and a local economy and a local political environment that are very, very 16:59 perhaps almost anti-Western in a way and quite conservative. And then on the other side, you have this hugely dependent economy, very much interested in Western tourism promotion. 17:17 Behind the decor of sandy beaches and five-star resorts lies a political system riddled with intrigue and corruption. 17:25 The best way to characterize politics in the Maldives would be to describe it as Game of Thrones in the Indian Ocean. It's a very connected country. A lot of people have family connections all over the place. 17:39 The dictatorship that was in control of the country for 30 years up until 2008 are very strong as a family presence. The business connections, the family connections, they're all intertwined. 17:52 So it's very hard to talk about politics in the Maldives without talking about businesses, without talking about these different family groups. For 30 years, the Maldives was ruled by President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, who 18:06 came into power sometime in, I believe it was the early 70s, and became a very, increasingly a very autocratic figure. Political opposition was essentially outlawed. 18:21 It was a nation of, of essentially one man, one vote. He was the man, he had the vote. It was a very paternalistic society where people looked to Gayoom for, for guidance. 18:33 The average Maldivian, you could say, benefits quite, in quite a limited fashion from, from tourism. 18:40 Some of the estimates suggest that there's only about 50 people who really benefit from tourism in the Maldives, with the exception of a, of a sort of trickle of employment. 18:51 Um, but a large amount of the tourism doesn't really benefit, benefit local people. It, it is a 100% Islamic country in the sense that its constitution mandates the population to be, to be Sunni Muslim. 19:04 Uh, there's very little room to, to challenge that. Uh, very... 19:07 There was very little in the way of freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and the preferred way of dealing with political opponents was to either banish them to remote islands where they could, could not be in any, any trouble or throw them in prison. 19:23 So this changed in about 2003 with the, uh, murder in custody of a young man called Evan Naseem. 19:32 Usually, uh, when someone died in custody or was killed in custody, the body just washed up on shore somewhere, or the person just disappeared and no one was able to, to find them. 19:43 However, in this case, uh, the body was, was, uh, taken back to the capital city of Malé, and, uh, Evan Naseem's mother displayed this battered and bruised 19:55 body of her son in the city, and people were able to actually see this, and it confirmed what a lot of people had, had felt. It created a huge, uh, genuine social uproar and protests 20:09 and sparked a, a political opposition movement called the Maldivian Democratic Party, 20:16 and this was led by a young man called Mohamed Nasheed, who had worked as a journalist and had been prisoned, uh, imprisoned many times. He was an amnesty prisoner of conscience, 20:27 and he campaigned, uh, uh, at the head of this party up until 2008, forcing the government, uh, to take more notice of international demands for freedom of speech, uh, multi-party democracy, 20:42 and concession after concession was gained until finally they had elections and Nasheed was able to win, which was quite, quite unique. 20:50 It was, uh, framed internationally as a, as a bloodless democratic revolution, which in a sense it, it was. And so Nasheed came to power in 2008, and the politics of the Maldives changed dramatically. 21:07 It became much more open to the outside world. Uh, Nasheed, being Western-educated, um, and sort of having a sensitivity for Western audiences, really went after the climate change issue. 21:19 He put, put the Maldives on a pedestal as an icon in the fight against climate change. [water bubbling] Arriving for a cabinet meeting, a member of the Maldives government takes an unorthodox journey to work. 21:34 He and fellow cabinet members were holding the world's first underwater cabinet meeting. The Maldives is one of the most vulnerable places on Earth to rising sea levels. 21:44 Its politicians, seen here signing an SOS message at their underwater desks, want the rest of the world to know. 21:51 The idea was the brainchild of their president, Mohamed Nasheed, who's sending the SOS message to be presented at the UN Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen. 22:03 President Nasheed proceeded to take control of the executive branch of the Maldives government, but both the judiciary and the security services remained stacked with supporters of Gayoom, accumulated over decades of paternalistic rule. 22:20 Gayoom's party also won the parliamentary elections in the following year, sharply limiting Nasheed's political options. In February 2012, tensions came to a head. 22:33 With supporters of the former president demonstrating against Nasheed in the streets, elements of the security forces staged a coup and forced Nasheed to resign. 22:43 In the immediate aftermath of, of the coup, uh, Nasheed's vice president, um, Dr. 22:49 Mohammed Waheed Hassan, uh, was made, was made pres- or became president, and very quickly it became clear that this may have been something engineered by the regime as a, as a face-saving operation for the international community. 23:06 Uh, Waheed essentially became more and more aligned with Gayoom as, as the remainder of the term unfolded, and meanwhile, the courts and the 23:19 regime that was back in power did their level best to try and put Nasheed into, into prison. 23:24 When the elections finally happened, um, Nasheed was able to contest them, and the Supreme Court intervened to throw out result after result after result that were not, that were not suited to the, to the former regime. 23:40 And eventually, through a combination of apathy and vote buying, um, uh, Gayoom's, uh, half-brother, a fellow called Abdullah Yameen, uh, won with 51% of the vote, uh, in a runoff against Nasheed. 23:55 He was very connected, um... thought to be connected to organized crime. Um, there were lots of dark rumors about his involvement in, um, sort of the black market activities going on in the Maldives. 24:12 Um, at one point, he was the head of, or the chairman of the state trading organization, which was, um, busily supplying oil on the black market to the Burmese military junta. 24:25 Since his election, there's been a systematic crackdown on freedom of assembly. The opposition has, or opposition leadership has been all, well, almost every leader is either in jail or in exile abroad. 24:40 There is, for all intents and purposes, no freedom of assembly. Freedom of expression has been severely curtailed. People are sort of once again looking over their shoulders when they talk in cafes. 24:52 The climate has totally, totally shifted. The international community, to some extent, has abandoned the Maldives. Yameen has switched from 25:02 Nasheed's idea of making the Maldives carbon neutral and being a climate change icon to pursuing alliances with Saudi Arabia and China and declaring his intention to drill. 25:14 So the psychology of the regime is totally opposite to 2008. 25:21 But while the ancien regime has achieved as complete a victory as it could have hoped for, the experience of the new president has been anything but smooth sailing. 25:33 Major corruption and money laundering scandals have once again turned international attention to the regime, and without the pressure of a domestic democratic opposition, internal fractures have weakened the alliances on which President Yameen had built his coalition. 25:50 The situation now is very interesting. It's something of a stalemate. First of all, Nasheed and the Maldivian Democratic Party were essentially crushed after this election. Nasheed was finally sentenced. 26:07 The international community had sort of lost interest by that point, and he was thrown into prison. Eventually, he was able to arrange a deal where he would leave to go to the UK, and that is where he is now with 26:25 whatever members of the opposition who were able to get out. And they have started to align themselves with, or the beginning of this year rather, started to align themselves with elements 26:38 of Yameen's government who had fallen out of favor. One of the interesting things about a dictatorship is that when it actually wins, when it eliminates its opposition, it does have a tendency to turn on itself. 26:53 So Yameen has been through two or three vice presidents, a whole array of cabinet ministers, and these people who were very involved in getting rid of the MDP and forcing Nasheed out during the coup in 2012 27:09 are now in exile with the MDP in London, busy plotting Yameen's political demise. But in particular, there's been a big falling out between Gayoom and Yameen. 27:20 Yameen had decided to introduce some legislation which would allow him to hand out islands in the Maldives to any investors, anyone without a bidding process, which facilitated massive corruption. And 27:39 this all came out in a documentary that Al Jazeera did recently called Stealing Paradise. It was absolutely brilliant. They got hold of the iPhones belonging to one of the jailed tourism ministers who 27:54 lost favor with Yameen and just amazing evidence of almost a billion dollars worth of international money laundering flowing through the state bank. The Maldives has essentially been operating 28:07 as a sort of rogue financial entity on the international money laundering circuit, which has gotten it quite a lot of interest. 28:14 So that aside, Gayoom has fallen out with Yameen and there seems to be something of a stalemate. 28:22 Gayoom has been kicked out of his party that he and Yameen had shared and remains to be seen whether Yameen's command of the government and command of its institutions, especially the judiciary, are going to match up against this kind of aura of sort of paternalistic authority that Gayoom has continued to maintain over a large chunk of the country. 28:46 It's anyone's guess which way it will go. The most alarming aspect, I would say, is 28:53 that the fundamentalism that has been rapidly growing within the country and has been fostered by the regime and used and abused as a political weapon, this fundamentalism which was let out of the bag has actually led to 29:08 quite a substantial number of Maldivians going abroad to fight in Syria and other places. And this has meant that now they're starting to come back and it seems to be a very strange and 29:25 perhaps incendiary mix to have an economy based on 29:30 resort, Western sort of hedonistic resort tourism and at the same time have this really, really dangerous culture of not just ignoring the fundamentalism but in some cases complicity with it. Many thanks to J.J. 29:46 Robinson for joining us this week. If you'd like to read more about politics and corruption in the Maldives, you can find his in-depth article on worldpoliticsreview.com. 29:56 If you like what you hear on Trendlines, go ahead and subscribe to it in the podcast app of your choice. That will save you the trouble of downloading each new episode. 30:04 Trendlines is produced and edited by Peter Dury, who also conducts the report interviews. 30:09 You can follow him and World Politics Review on Twitter, and you can find links to pieces covering the issues we talked about in the show notes on worldpoliticsreview.com. 30:18 Have a great weekend, and see you next week for a new episode of Trendlines.
