A former political prisoner swept to victory in the Maldives’ first democratic presidential election, officials said yesterday, unseating Asia’s longest-serving leader and sparking scenes of celebration.
Supporters of Mohamed “Anni” Nasheed hugged each other and drove around the capital of the Indian Ocean atoll nation from shortly after dawn, waving flags representing his party, as the scale of his victory became clear.
The election commission said that with all votes counted from Tuesday’s watershed poll, Nasheed had won 54.21 percent to 45.79 percent for incumbent leader Maumoon Abdul Gayoom.
PHOTO: AFP
“I want a peaceful transition,” Nasheed told reporters during a visit to a mosque as results were coming in. “I want my supporters to be calm.”
Gayoom, 71, has ruled the tourist paradise islands unchallenged since 1978 and had repeatedly thrown Nasheed in jail over a period of six years.
Conceding defeat on state radio, Gayoom said that he would give his “full support and cooperation” to Nasheed taking power.
“I thank the people of the Maldives for allowing me to serve them for 30 years,” he said.
Thousands of Nasheed supporters drove around the capital Male waving their yellow flags, as others embraced at a beach-front promenade where young people had camped for days to drum up support for his campaign.
“This is spontaneous joy,” Aishath Aniya said.
Fathimath Niusha, a 27-year-old school teacher, said she was thrilled with the change of leadership.
“I want to see how it will be under a new president,” Niusha said. “All my life, it had been under Gayoom.”
Gayoom had failed to win an outright victory in the first round of voting three weeks ago, prompting a run-off against the charismatic Nasheed, 41, a former Amnesty International “prisoner of conscience.”
Nasheed, a political moderate, has promised to root out corruption, improve healthcare and communications to remote islands, cut state spending and turn the lavish presidential palace into the first university in the country.
The Maldives, a liberal Sunni Muslim nation of 1,192 coral islands and some 300,000 people, has never had multi-party elections before.
Until a few years ago, anyone declaring an intention to seek high office would be banished to an uninhabited island.
The elections followed Gayoom’s promise to bring political freedoms to the archipelago in the wake of pro-democracy protests and mounting international pressure.
Despite its popularity as an exotic holiday destination for the rich, the country is beset with corruption, an acute housing shortage and a serious drug problem said to affect one in three youngsters.
With much pomp and circumstance, Cairo is today to inaugurate the long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), widely presented as the crowning jewel on authorities’ efforts to overhaul the country’s vital tourism industry. With a panoramic view of the Giza pyramids plateau, the museum houses thousands of artifacts spanning more than 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity at a whopping cost of more than US$1 billion. More than two decades in the making, the ultra-modern museum anticipates 5 million visitors annually, with never-before-seen relics on display. In the run-up to the grand opening, Egyptian media and official statements have hailed the “historic moment,” describing the
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
RSS