A Paradise Divided

In the cavernous hall of a dazzling white palace that rises out of the Indian Ocean, the tiny President of one of the world's smallest countries wriggles forward in his armchair, plants tiptoes on the floor and begins the story of his revolutionary days. It's a little-known epic of how a humble teacher endured oppression, rose to lead his island people against a tyrant and finally triumphed, uniting the palm-lined Maldives. Maumoon Abdul Gayoom wears a saintly smile as he stresses that he "did not seek" greatness but rather "a lot of people wanted me to be President... so I accepted." As the man who is now Asia's longest-serving elected leader begins his sixth five-year term, he relates how under his guidance Maldivians realized a small but perfectly formed paradise. When he took office, incomes averaged $300 a year, life expectancy was just 48 years and one in nine infants died; the average islander now lives to 73 on a comfortable $2,100 a year. The capital Malé is no longer a squalid speck of dirt and disease between India and Africa but a genteel hamlet of cobbled roads, shoreline restaurants and tasteful coffeehouses. Gayoom boasts that he is both an environmental and religious champion, protecting reefs and 300,000 Muslim Maldivians from the twin dangers of global warming and the bikini-clad hordes who crowd the islands' 87 high-end resorts. Today, the 40,000 tourists who fly in every month are met by speedboat taxis moored in a coral lagoon and a banner that reads: "Welcome to the sunny side of life."

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But in the cafés, noodle joints and bare-bulb fishermen's shacks outside the palace, many Maldivians tell a different story. Here the social indices that matter are one of the world's highest divorce rates and rampant heroin addiction indicated by 1,000 convicted dealers in a capital city of 86,000. Although everyone acknowledges tourism's success, many Maldivians—and international relief workers—charge that it has made multimillionaires of Gayoom's friends while official figures show that 42% of Maldivians earn less than $1 a day. And there's a hot fury reserved for Gayoom himself, whom they and Amnesty International accuse of running an iron-fisted regime that controls the police, army, media, legislature and courts, tolerates no rival parties, virtually outlaws free speech and makes liberal use of torture. Inmates inside nearby Maafushi Prison claim they are the epicenter of the repression. "They torture and kill, then they hang the bodies from a bedsheet so it looks like suicide," says one 36-year-old prisoner speaking on a smuggled mobile phone, who says he has seen 12 inmates die this way. Ahmed Nazim, 27, an opposition spokesman, rages that Gayoom has spread "fear" across the islands with a "culture of torture and abuse." On Sept. 19 guards at Maafushi beat to death inmate Hassan Eevan Naseem, a convicted drug abuser, sparking a riot in which three prisoners were shot dead. After Naseem's funeral the next day, a mob of hundreds rampaged through Malé, torching and ransacking courts, election offices, police stations and other symbols of the regime.

None of which appears to disturb Gayoom's reverie. Ensconced in his seafront palace, the President is cooing over his victory in October's election when, as the sole candidate, he won 90% of the vote. (Opposition figures abroad insist the elections—conducted by Gayoom's appointees—were rigged. Gayoom denies this.) The President airbrushes away anything that mars his picture of a peaceful paradise. To allegations of profiting from tourism, he declares that "I'm a poor man," despite the presidential yacht bobbing behind him. He says the press is free and the editors of the Internet magazine Sandhaanu—detained in early 2002 and tortured, according to Amnesty International and Reporters Sans Frontières—"were never really journalists." He even claims the riots were due to a spontaneous wave of mass criminality rather than any expression of popular frustration. "There was nothing political in this," he promises. No, if anything is wrong with the Maldives, Gayoom sighs, it is that he has been too successful. "Everything is looked after today. Food, clothes, everything. People don't have to work like their parents did, and people take it too easy. It's a problem we are faced with." Many Maldivians would disagree. But will their President ever hear them?