The Supreme Court of the Maldives ordered the release and retrial of nine of President Abdulla Yameen’s leading political opponents, along with the restoration of 12 seats in the legislature to lawmakers sacked for defecting from the president’s party. The president, an autocrat who came to power in a coup in 2012 and proceeded to imprison or exile many of the former allies who had brought him to power, responded with new arrests aimed at his opponents, including two justices of the Supreme Court, and the eventual declaration of a state of emergency. After parliament was suspended, troops stormed the Supreme Court’s courtroom, and the president detained his own half-brother, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, (an influential former dictator himself).

The U.S., UK, and India have all condemned the turmoil in the Maldives, but China has adopted a more neutral stance, warning against outside military intervention by foreign powers. President Yameen has waved through several Chinese projects and recently signed a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with Beijing during a visit to China in December, and the island nation has long been linked to China’s ‘string of pearls’ strategy of consolidating its geopolitical presence in and around the Indian Ocean.

Background

Democracy, interrupted. The current crisis has its roots in the fall from power of former president Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, the current president’s half-sibling. Gayoom ruled as an autocrat for three decades before agreeing to free and fair elections in 2008 – elections in which he lost to former political prisoner Mohamed Nasheed, who was subsequently overthrown in the 2012 coup. Ultimately Nasheed was unable to purge the country’s judiciary and security services of Gayoom loyalists, and these elements helped bring down his presidency and pave the way for President Yameen to come to power. Since then however, Yameen has fallen out spectacularly with many of his own allies, including his half-brother, and has sought to strike out by himself. Meanwhile the 80-year-old ex-president Gayoom has forged an uneasy alliance with Nasheed to try and bring his sibling down. President Yameen’s harsh crackdown on the opposition following the Supreme Court’s first surprise decision may therefore have been motivated by the fact that it quashed a terrorism conviction that would have prevented Nasheed from returning to the Maldives from Sri Lanka and contesting the upcoming presidential elections.