The Maldives: Another Atoll Heard From

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The Maldives sound like something that belongs in a salad. Actually, they are an autonomous British protectorate in the middle of the Indian Ocean, consisting of some 2,000 palm-shaded coral islands and reefs, 215 of them inhabited, and they are not quite real. Auld Lang Syne used to be the national anthem,*the Mother Hubbard is the prescribed dress for women, and the primary means of transportation are outriggers and baggalas, which resemble a cross between a Chinese junk and a Spanish galleon. Crime in the Maldives (rhymes with bald wives) is virtually unknown, and once a year most of the islands' 90,000 Moslems try to perform an act of national service, such as whitewashing a government building. But last week the idyllic little islands were reverberating to the cry of nationalism in its most preposterous form.

The trouble goes back to 1959, when the British finished a jet airstrip on the southern island of Gan to link their Middle Eastern bases with Singapore and Australia. In the process, they accidentally subsidized an uprising; most of Can's labor force came from Addu Atoll, which had rebelled against the islands' central government at Male, 300 miles to the north. To protest taxation and "other repressive measures," the rebels had even formed an independent "Republic" on their little atoll.

Last fall the British finally agreed to help the central government put down the rebellion—but they also helped the rebel leader, one Abdullah Afif, get away to safety in the Seychelle Islands, 1,200 miles to the southwest. That infuriated Maldivian Prime Minister Ibrahim Nasir, who simultaneously functions as Foreign, Finance, Education and Public Safety Minister. In revenge, Maldivian saboteurs began to tear up a British mail and supply airstrip near Male. When the British (who hand out $50,000 a year to the Maldives) protested, Nasir decided he would act just like a great big emerging nation, demanded complete independence and the return of his old enemy Afif before he would even discuss the situation.

With their Gan base jeopardized, the British were proceeding carefully. But Afif would scarcely surrender of his own accord; in the past, it was not unknown for a ruler of the Maldives to take care of a wrongdoer by cutting off his hands.