New Maldives

New Maldives began as a group of young ministers who supported the dictatorship of President Gayoom and claimed to be working to usher in liberal democracy to the Maldives. Its most public proponent is Ahmed Shaheed, supported by Hassan Saeed and Mohamed Jameel Ahmed, who were serving as Foreign Minister, Attorney-General and Justice Minister, respectively. The New Maldives was launched in December 2005 in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and was initially used by the media as a pejorative term.

New Maldives developed out of the close relationship between Hassan Saeed, who became the Attorney-General in November 2003, and Ahmed Shaheed when the latter was appointed as Chief Government Spokesman in May 2004. Both Saeed and Shaheed are alumni of the University of Queensland where they obtained their PhDs. They used their positions as Chief Legal Adviser to the President and Director of Communications respectively to dismantle the autocratic regime of Gayoom.

It was widely believed that it was Saeed and Shaheed who engineered the dismissal of the bulk of the Old Guard from the Cabinet of President Gayoom in May 2005. Shaheed became the Foreign Minister in the new Cabinet line-up, replacing Fathulla Jameel, who had served 28 years as Foreign Minister.

Shaheed claims to have coined the term New Maldives in November 2005 as a vision of the political reforms that were being implemented by President Gayoom in his sixth term in office. The concept was unveiled to the public in December 2005 at a press conference hosted by the Maldives High Commission in Colombo. The ministers in the panel were Foreign Minister Shaheed, Attorney General Saeed, Justice Minister Mohamed Jameel Ahmed, and Information Minister Mohamed Nasheed. Media reports of the event labeled the participating ministers as New Maldives.

As a ginger group, the New Maldives reached their high point when they produced the Roadmap for the Reform Agenda in March 2006, through which they tied the president to time-bound steps to create a new political order in the Maldives. The campaign to produce the Roadmap, January – March 2006, saw the New Maldives ministers clash openly with the Old Guard, especially over the insertion of provisions in the Roadmap to combat corruption and to subscribe to international human rights norms. The New Maldives claims credit for having acceded to all the major international human rights treaties.

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Wikipedia