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The real Maldives

The Maldives are a strange sort of paradise. The archipelago is gifted with soft white beaches and crystal blue seas, but the islanders themselves are seen as paupers of the Indian Ocean, forced to live off soil too thin to sustain a harvest, battered by storms and ruled by a jittery, autocratic regime that has only a passing interest in human rights and democracy.

Tourism to the Maldives began in the 1970s, as Europeans began arriving on these islands. The first group of tourists from Italy ordered dinner from the local restaurants but were so dismayed by the curries and biryanis that they asked their cooks to prepare simpler food for them.

President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, who has been in power since 1978, has encouraged this disconnection between local life and the tourists' experience.

He has steadily turned various islands into acclaimed, luxurious resorts where guests pay several hundred dollars a night to stay in beach villas with their own private pools and butlers. All fruit, vegetables, wine and water are flown in to create the illusion of abundance.

Meanwhile, any Maldivian citizen caught drinking alcohol faces a hundred lashes, and one quarter of children under the age of five in the Maldives suffers from stunted growth.

The tsunami worsened this gap between the tourists and the villagers, and set the country back about 20 years in terms of socio-economic development. Out of the archipelago's 199 islands 20 were totally destroyed and another 53 were severely damaged. Schools, clinics and pharmacies were destroyed on around 50 islands. Most devastating of all, the seawater that washed over the island contaminated the groundwater and reservoirs that supply the Maldives with drinking water.

In recent years, a new kind of radical Islam has moved into the Maldives, exploiting the frustration many islanders feel at having to eke out a sparse existence in a country that has become a byword for luxury in the west.

The Maldives has always practised a moderate form of Sunni Islam, but over the last few years women who tended to wear multi-coloured headscarves have donned all encompassing black robes instead. Children are being taught at new mosques that have sprung up and that preach a more extreme form of Islam than that normally heard on the archipelago.

The government meanwhile, has fought its battles elsewhere. Political parties were only legalised in 2005, but even this judicial protection has not stopped members of the main opposition, the Maldivian Democratic party being routinely arrested and beaten. President Gayoom has accused it of being funded by Christian missionaries jealous of a Muslim country's success.

When the nailbomb exploded this Saturday in a tourist corner of Male, the president and his spokesman hinted that the MDP and a Brtish-based pressure group, the Friends of the Maldives, were responsible.

It was a clumsy piece of political manoeuvring that gave the impression that the government will go to any lengths to discredit its formal opponents. The FBI has now moved in to help with investigations, and the government is beginning to accept that Islamic fundamentalists may well be responsible instead. Their next challenge is how to give Maldivian citizens a stake in their country's development to prevent the threat from fundamental Islam growing further.

This post was written by: Franklin Manuel

Franklin Manuel is a professional blogger, web designer and front end web developer. Follow him on Twitter