Without most people noticing it and anyone acknowledging it, either inside the country or outside, Maldives' new President Abdulla Yameen launched the nation's new 'foreign policy' at a quiet ceremony in capital Male on January 20, 2014.
Analysis
Without most people noticing it and anyone acknowledging it, either inside the country or outside, Maldives’ new President Abdulla Yameen launched the nation’s new ’foreign policy’ at a quiet ceremony in capital Male on January 20, 2014. Coming as it did between the high-voltage presidential polls of November and the twin-elections to the local councils and Parliament, respectively within days and weeks, the local media reported the launch ceremony and left it at that.
A series of events and developments since may have made both supporters and critics of the Government nearer home and afar, the latter, if any, to take notice of the new foreign policy document. In what seems to be a bid to make for a successful development agenda, democratised Maldives seems wanting to make the new foreign policy a tool to achieving the same, keeping options global and open.
In the process, the nation also seems wanting to provide for a stand-alone security policy, where the concerns and consequent priorities still seem to be regional. It is the kind of security policy that nations like Sri Lanka have sought to adopt and adapt, making common cause with the shared, larger Indian neighbour.
Maldives thus seem wanting to strike a fine balance between the over-lapping Indian neighbour’s security concerns and priorities of every kind and the nation’s very own insatiable hunger for large-scale investments. The idea seems wanting to try and repeat the nation’s economic success formula of the Seventies, which has lately faced inevitable stagnation.
Successive governments under the democratisation model have tried to do something about it internally but have blamed the stagnation, if not outright retardation, mostly on external factors. This in turn has widened the rich-poor gap, as has been the case with more reforms-centred economies in the Third World over the past decades, contributing to internal security concerns that external forces have sought to exploit – again, as elsewhere.
It is also in this context, reports about the Indian Ocean archipelago, along with the Sri Lankan neighbour, emerging as a possible base and funding portal for al-Qaeda type religious terrorists needs to be understood. This apart, the two nations are said to be becoming an unwitting and unwilling sanctuary for stand-alone ISI-brand of anti-India terror.
In Maldives, the ’GMR row’ through the past couple of years brought to the street, political and not-so-political anti-India protestors, whose venom was matched only by their vehemence. While most of the peripheral, governments-centric, peripheral issues are being addressed since President Yameen assumed office, the assumptions and presumptions attending on them on the Maldivian side in particular may have submerged for the time being, ready to re-surface if stoked.
The multiple concerns of the larger Indian on multifarious concerns in context thus cannot be wished away, the nation having stood by Maldives, through and through, in terms of trade concessions and security considerations, not to leave out the traditional political equations at the highest levels. India being a reality in the immediate neighbourhood in every which way, the success of the new foreign policy will depend on how Maldives continues to posit the nation, or re-posit it, if that too is an underlying idea, if not philosophy, in the years to come with the full, five-year term of President Yameen holding the key and showing the way.
Crisp and open-ended
The new policy was/is noticeable as much for the crisp and PPt-style packaging of the vision & mission, goals and strategies for a quick view and review as for its non-dogmatic and non-verbiage approach to foreign policy-making and presentation, respectively. Clearly, a 21st century mind and mindset, the latter in terms of keeping Maldives’ post-Cold War options as open-ended as possible, seems to have gone to work, learning from the past two decades’ experience of the nation, the region and the rest of the world, accordingly.
Launching the new foreign policy at a quiet ceremony in the capital, Male, in January, President Yameen highlighted many similarities between the current one and that of former President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, his half-brother and ruling PPM party boss, who had ruled the country for 30 long years, in the pre-democratisation era. The similarities stop with the urgency with which the foreign policy document has approached economic issues, concerns and prosperity for the future, the same way the Gayoom presidency had done in the Seventies, alongside counterpart J R Jayewardene in neighbouring Sri Lanka.
In the same way, the unmentioned options for attracting investments are kept wide open in the new policy, too. The last time, under President Gayoom, the insulated Islamic nation with its mix of the orthodoxy in private life and continuing relative modernity in public, opened up the unexplored – hence unexploited – tourism sector to high-end investments and returns. As a nation, Maldives gained the most, but as individuals, the trickle-down effect of economic liberalisation/reforms has stopped mostly with collective social security that had belonged to a ’socialist era’ elsewhere.
Whether the nation’s relative success in economic growth, which in turn also funded State-sponsored welfare measures for large sections of the society, owed to the power-structure and the political philosophy of the times, as against the huge hiccups that the Sri Lankan neighbour faced after a near-similar start may have no space for an academic appreciation in the post-democratised Maldives. But in trying to revive the spirit of those times on the economic front, through a conscious application of the tools of foreign policy more than ever, Maldives may need to look for pit-stops every now and again to collect its thoughts and calculate the net benefit(s) to the nation, every now and again.
Stoic, strategic silence?
To the extent that President Gayoom’s policies, both on the foreign and economic fronts, though not necessarily in that order, had helped Maldives to bounce from being an idyllic archipelago of poverty-stricken fishing hamlets into a high-end international tourist destination, it is a success formula, worth adaptation to the times. But Maldives should not lose sight of of the ever-changing global economic situations and attendant geo-strategic prioritisation by nations in the region and elsewhere, to be able to constantly tune and re-tune its policy priorities, including foreign policy priorities, from time to time.
What counted at the end in the case of President Gayoom was/is also the political enlightenment that came from State-sponsored education, and consequent employment, nearer home or overseas, that did not leave Maldives behind. The intervening global IT revolution may have hastened the inevitable. This, for instance, led to grater democratisation, for which President Gayoom might not have been prepared for, at least up to a stage. But when the movement acquired a momentum of its own – so to say – he did not falter much in moving with the times, either.
Yet, when the change did come about, President Gayoom lost the first multi-party presidential polls of 2008, as much to the new-generation beneficiaries of the welfare schemes that he had initiated in the early innings as to the newly-formed Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) nominee, Mohammed Nasheed, who became the face and force of that democratisation process. The mutual dependence of politics, economy, foreign and security policies of the nation thus could not be compartmentalised after a point, as Maldives saw for itself in the recent past.
It is in this context, the current-generation rulers and the rest of the nation’s polity need to view the continuing influence of the democratisation process in funnelling the eternal restlessness of every new generation of a nation’s youth, to productive poll-centric policy changes and priorities. Domestic turbulence could be an alternative, which external players are ever-ready to stoke, and Maldives needs to be cautious about the possibility, too, if their current policies failed its people.
It may be tempting to conclude that the new Foreign Policy was a hurried work of a Government that came to power only in mid-November. A close look would show that it should have been up on the anvil at least for a few months, if not years, before being given the final shape. The fact that no one nearer home, starting with the inimitable and irascible Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) Opposition too has been maintaining a stoic, if not strategic, silence for months now on the new foreign policy, could be a pointer.
The new Policy thus may have been the product of national consensus, post facto, even though not everyone might have been consulted or taken into confidence when it was on the works. That the slick document does not say anything much on anything, and is capable of being interpreted in whichever way one wants, could be another reason why prospective critics could not find fault with it until it had actually been put into practice, and thus tested in real-life situations – and in relation to the same.
Sovereign equality, Islamic identity
Launching the new policy, President Yameen said that it focussed on enhancing national sovereignty and protecting the Islamic identity of the country. Noting that a strong and strategic policy was vital for Maldives to maintain peace and stability, he said that the newly-formulated government policy promoted sovereign equality of States in accordance with international law, and gave emphasis to consolidating friendship with all countries based on mutual respect.
President Yameen’s introduction of the Policy, in a way, was a take-off from the new document, if it could be called so in the conventional sense of the term. The framework outlines the ’Five Principles of Foreign Policy’ for the country, thus:
1. Sovereign equality of States in accordance with international law
2. A rule-based and inclusive international system
3. Non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries
4. The supremacy of diplomacy in managing and resolving global problems, and
5. Friendship with all countries, based on mutual respect.
Underlining that the main objective of his foreign policy was to increase opportunities for the economic advancement of Maldivian, President Yameen said that in today’s world, an independent foreign policy could only be employed by becoming an economically sufficient and resilient nation. He also stressed that bilateral collaborations must be lead through diplomatic dialogue and that each country was entitled to sovereign equality.
In context, particularly in the post-Cold War, terminologies like ’sovereign equality’ and ’non-interference’ have acquired new meanings and relevance. Unilateral initiation of politico-military action by larger, faraway nations, unconnected to the region – hence dis-connected too – has had consequences that the affected nations and regions are unequal for repairing and re-setting.
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