Playing politics with people's lives :: Maldives News :: Dhivehi Observer

Nashid Column

Playing politics with people's lives

by Dr. Ibrahim Nashid - ibrahimnash@gmail.com, G. Keneree Ge, Male', 7 November 2005

On the 18th of November 2005, it will be three months since the Human Rights Commission of the Maldives Bill became law. This law requires the parliament to elect members of the commission before this date. It is the job of the government to propose names to the parliament for discussion. According to the government spokesperson they still have enough time to propose a set of names and get them through parliament before the November 18^th deadline. If things work out as easily as the government spokesperson thinks, those two hundred or so people who have got cases pending would soon have reason to be happy.

Unfortunately the problem is that this government has never kept its word and there is no reason to think it would be any different this time. It is not that they would delay proposing names to the parliament, but it is very conceivable that the government would propose a set of names that are only acceptable to them but not to the opposition or the general public. This way they can lay the blame on the opposition members of the parliament for not having a functioning human rights commission. This scenario is not so far fetched when one looks at the government's human rights record.

If it was the intention of the government to improve its human rights record then they would not have watered down the Human Rights Commission of the Maldives Bill in the first place. If there was even the slightest amount of political will on the part of the government they could have moved quickly to elect the members of the commission so that the commission could carry on working without any further delays. Instead Gayoom decided to send his security forces on the rampage. On Gayoom's orders members of these forces violated the sanctity of people's homes, beating grandmothers in front of the grandchildren while they took their fathers away. Many of us have experienced such scenes and no one can deny the brutality of the officers making the arrests even though the suspect is fully cooperating with the officers making the arrest. The bad language used by the officers is enough of a violation let alone the physical violence.

Passing a bill to form a Human Rights Commission may buy some time in front of the international public. But in the spirit of the many international agreements that this government has signed, having such a commission is not enough. It has to actively work towards achieving the goals of these international agreements. For example, the Human Rights Commission of the Maldives has to work towards eradicating torture in the Maldives because the Maldives is a party to the Convention Against Torture and its Optional Protocol. The commission must investigate all the complaints of torture lodged at the commission. According to these international conventions the complaints must be investigated within reasonable time. Muaviath Mahmood died at the hands of Gayoom's security forces on the 9^th of March 2005. Although the Human Rights Commission of the Maldives has taken a number of statements from various people involved in the case, his friends and family are still waiting for the perpetrators to be brought to justice. Eight months for a case like Muaviath's is beyond reasonable time. But from the recent experience of Evan Naseem's case, we know that justice will not be done in Muaviath's case either. Unfortunately for his family and friends, there is very little chance of his case even getting to the courts because of the government's pre-judgment in this case. In the view of the current foreign minister he was just “another drug addict” and therefore perhaps dispensable.

If there was any sincerity on the part of the government they would propose a respectable member from our community to head the Human Rights Commission of the Maldives and let that person carry out the functions of the commission without any further hindrance from the government. If the government wishes to show any kind of respect towards the people they govern, they would allow the commission to get through its backlog of more than two hundred pending cases and bring justice to these people without any further delay.

But, as always with this government they would choose a course that benefits them only rather than the whole country. They would look first and foremost after their own self-interest and then perhaps maybe the rest of the country. It is not be unreasonable to assume that they would play politics with other people's lives in order to score a cheap political point over their opponents. For more than two decades they have been lowering the bar of integrity and soon we shall see it lowered yet another notch.

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