On a humid, airless night in March, Mohamed Nasheed, the 42-year-old president of the Maldives, opened up his palace in Male for an unusual public event. A projection screen was hung at the back of a ballroom and brightly colored chairs were arranged in rows. Then the audience was shown in: lawyers, Cabinet members, presidential advisers and journalists, along with a sizeable chunk of Maldives society.
Nasheed, dressed in an open-neck striped shirt and dark chinos, sat in the front row. The lights dimmed and scenes of environmental mayhem unfolded on the screen: Sydney Opera House in flames, ice sheets crashing into the seas, deserts spreading and forests burning.
Thus, the people of the Maldives had their first glimpse of Franny Armstrong’s documentary, The Age of Stupid, in which Pete Postlethwaite plays the last man left alive in a post-apocalyptic, climate-fried world.
The film is scrappy but passionate, a classic example of agit-prop cinema. But in the dripping night heat of Male, The Age of Stupid had a very different effect on its audience than it has had in the West. Its message seemed direct and immediate, a call to arms. Nor is it hard to understand such emotion. The islands that make up the Maldives are threatened with complete inundation, probably by the end of the century, as ice sheets melt and sea levels rise catastrophically thanks to global warming.
The islands stand less than a couple of meters above sea level. In fact, their highest point, at 2.3m, is the “lowest high point” for any nation on Earth. It won’t take much to inundate them. Hence, the impact of the film, which left its audience desperate for reassurance from their president as he moved to a microphone stand in the center of the ballroom.
“If man can walk on the moon, we can unite to defeat our common carbon enemy,” Nasheed said. “And so today, I announce that the Maldives will become the first carbon-neutral country in the world.”
The announcement was a typically slick public relations exercise by Nasheed. He had only been propelled into power a few weeks earlier in a national vote that had made him “the world’s first democratically elected president of a 100 percent Muslim country,” as he puts it.
Yet he was already revealing himself to be an adroit and effective operator. The former investigative journalist, jailed six times by his authoritarian predecessor, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, and made an Amnesty prisoner of conscience in 1991, has begun making waves — in every sense.
Apart from his pledge to turn the Maldives — a collection of atolls and islands in the Indian Ocean that have become one of the world’s most luxurious tourist resorts — into a carbon-neutral state, he has revealed that he has embarked on an ambitious campaign to buy up land — in India, Sri Lanka or Australia — on which he will build a New Maldives to replace the old one when it disappears under the waves. This will be achieved by using the country’s vast tourism revenues to establish “a sovereign wealth fund” to relocate its people.
“Our actions will be a template, an action kit for other nations across the world,” he said recently.
Last week Nasheed — or “Anni” as he is generally known — was at it again. First, he wowed the British Conservative party annual conference in Manchester with a flawlessly delivered speech — typically presented without notes — on the importance of center-right politics when it comes to saving the world. Then he topped this performance by announcing that this Saturday, he will chair the world’s first underwater Cabinet meeting.
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