Ordinary Gweilo

I felt a strange sense of deja vu when I finally got round to reading an article about the Maldives in the Christmas & New Year edition of The Economist:

IN THE Seagull Café a young man is talking quietly to two others who are taking notes. He is describing how he was tortured in prison and by whom. Sipping his espresso at the next table, Ahmed Abbas, a leading opposition figure and cartoonist, is eavesdropping. He is puzzled: not by the torture victim’s routine tale, but by the identities of the three men. How can it be he does not know them?

This is a vignette not from the dying days of some despotic East European country, but from a day this September in Male, capital of the Maldives, a tropical paradise. The country is a clutch of atolls, with some 1,200 coral islands, about 200 of which are inhabited, strung like so many pearls in a necklace across hundreds of miles of the Indian Ocean.

The Maldives is best known as an upmarket tourist destination, with miraculous marine life and luxurious beachside bungalows offering the ultimate in romantic holiday hideaways. It is also known as the country likely to be the first to drown when global warming raises sea levels. The devastating tsunami of December 2004 seemed in the Maldives, more than anywhere else, a herald of the apocalypse. But the country is also gaining attention for a third reason: political and social ferment among its 300,000 people.

Why?  Because a few days earlier, The Guardian had a similar article:

There’s a cafe just outside arrivals at Hulhulé airport. Sit at one of the little aluminium tables, under the sign reminding passengers of the harsh penalties for drug traffickers, and you’ll see the holiday-makers arrive.

The ones on the cheaper packages – families and budget divers – wait for their holiday reps. The richer types, perma-tanned middle-aged couples and upscale honeymooners, are greeted by neatly-uniformed men who whisk them off in speedboats to islands with $3,000-a-night water villas, personal butlers, infinity pools and brochure copy peppered with phrases such as “redefining luxury”.

These are the places you read about in travel pages, usually under headlines containing the word “paradise”. You may have noticed that you read about paradise rather a lot. There always seems to be a free trip for a writer to suffer a week of pampering in return for a few bland paragraphs. You may have also noticed what’s missing from all those articles: people.

Ah, yes, The Economist did indeed call it a “tourist paradise” but they also cover most of the issues highlighted by The Guardian, whilst noting that most visitors to the Madives are not interested in the country they are visiting:

But, as Mr Shougee points out, many of the Maldives’ visitors are less interested in experiencing a new country than in exploring each other. Many are on honeymoon. Mohamed Ibrahim Didi, of the Full Moon resort, near Male, says that 12% of its customers are newly-weds and a further 38% are “repeaters”. (One man has come back 38 times. It is not clear how many weddings that involved.)

Both also mention the role of a British PR firm in promoting the Maldives:

In 2004 [..] The Economist received an e-mail from Hill & Knowlton, a British public-relations firm, which announced, in effect, that on June 9th the Maldives was to become a democracy. Mr Gayoom’s supporters had always portrayed him as a revered, popular leader, endorsed six times by a huge popular mandate. But even he seemed to have accepted that not all was well, and promised a raft of radical-looking democratic reforms. The process is supposed to culminate in a new constitution and competitive multi-party elections in 2008. Some reformist members of his government—the “new Maldives caucus”—take advice on policy and its presentation from Hill & Knowlton. The government has even held talks with the opposition.

Both newspapers (yes, The Economist likes to think of itself as a newspaper rather than a magazine), are unsure whether the government has any real intention of introducing democracy, though (unsurprisingly) The Guardian seems more cynical.  However, tourism will continue regardless, and is so important to the Maldives that even those who are pushing for changes don’t want to stop visitors from coming and spending money.

Finally, The Guardian reports that there is a contingency plan for global warming:

The government is building a 2m-high artificial island next to Malé, the national equivalent of standing on stilts.

It’s worth a try, I suppose.