Once you accept the incongruity of a cluster of tiny islands with a population of 330,000 barely managing to keep their heads above the Indian Ocean waters being called a country, the rest is easy. I refer, of course, to the Maldives, 500 miles southwest of India.
The Maldives’ main claim to fame is the ominous possibility that it may become one of the first countries to be submerged by rising sea levels caused by global warming. The Maldives is a collection of 1200 atolls, of which 80 percent barely manage to rise three to five feet above the sea level. That low elevation makes it the world's lowest nation.
The man who epitomized the Maldives’ main claim to fame is Mohammed Nasheed, until recently its president and now a politician on the run and in refuge at the Indian high commission in the capital Male. Nasheed was one of the most high profile voices against the dangers of climate change and global warming and how his tiny nation could soon go under. He once held a meeting of his entire cabinet underwater.
Political ferment in the Maldives has pushed Nasheed into a corner. Facing what he calls a politically motivated criminal investigation, Nasheed stayed away from a court hearing a week or so ago and instead took refuge in the Indian high commission. Being the preeminent power in the region India has often had to arbitrate local disputes. In terms of its demographic weight, dealing with the Maldives for India is like dealing with an island housing resort. It is a delicate act for a country of 1.2 billion people to treat a country of 330,000 with the requisite seriousness. But India tries.
For now the court hearing against Nasheed has been canceled but the threat of his arrest remains intact. The hearing was canceled mainly because they could not produce Nasheed in the court. India has dispatched diplomat Harsh Vardhan Shringla as its envoy to resolve the standoff that comes barely six months before the country’s presidential elections. The government of President Mohammed Waheed has the unpleasant task of criticizing India for harboring Nasheed even while balancing its strategic dependence on New Delhi.
Apprehensions have been expressed in recent months since the ouster of Nasheed that the Maldives might slip into the hands of Islamic fundamentalists. The Waheed government has denied any such possibility.
With this as the background there has been some media chatter in India about whether the US should consider “intervention” in the Maldives. I don’t understand what that means. Robert O. Blake, Jr., Assistant Secretary, Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs, who among other much broader South Asian interests is also concerned with the Maldives, was asked that question by Suhasini Haidar on CNN-IBN.
“I don't want to try to engage in speculation about what might happen. But our bottom lines again are, this all needs to take place in the context of the Maldivian constitution, and in the context of these very very important elections that are taking place.
All of us have a strong stake in the Maldives because they've been a very strong supporter of things like climate change and international human rights issues that are extremely important to the United States. So this is a country that we would like to see succeed and its institutions respected,” Blake said.
I would like to think that a country like the Maldives should be more concerned about the much greater elemental threat to its very geological existence than arresting a former president. No one should be surprised if a massive underwater earthquake in the region could set off tsunamis high enough to inundate the Maldives out of existence even before the rising sea levels could.
It was not that long ago Nasheed was actually looking at the possibilities of buying a new homeland to shift the Maldives as a country. "We can do nothing to stop climate change on our own and so we have to buy land elsewhere. It's an insurance policy for the worst possible outcome. After all, the Israelis [began by buying] land in Palestine," Nasheed was quoted as saying in 2008 just as he prepared to take over as president in 2008.
As for the direct U.S. intervention, I am not quite sure if the fragile ecosystem could withstand the sheer geostrategic weight of such an act. It might speed up its sinking. It is from that angle I do not comprehend the question.
Also, there is a larger philosophical question here about whether we need to change how we define a nation-state. Does the size of the population, for instance, need to be factored in while calling an entity a country? These are treacherous questions fraught with controversy. But someone has to raise them.