Music
Thompson: This is the Maldives the world recognises -- the postcard perfect image of a paradise on earth.
An entire nation of islands atop a seemingly endless string of reefs, ringing pristine beaches and aqua blue lagoons.
Music
Thompson: In recent years, the tourists have outnumbered the locals two to one.
But the same translucent seas which lured these people were about to wreak unimaginable havoc.
It would be beyond anyone’s comprehension, even though for years the Maldives had been braced for threats from the sea.
President: Our medium level of ground over the sea is about 3 to 4 feet, son if the predicted sea level rise takes place, it will pose a very serious threat to our very survival.
Thompson: But the threatening sea would strike sooner and with more force than anyone could have imagined.
Thompson: Even before the Tsunami these tourists were learning that reality doesn’t always match the holiday brochure.
Betti: The waves are going to take us … please be seated, we are going to try another reef – a little more protected.
Thompson: They had escaped the European winter for some five star treatment at the Four Seasons Resort. Just one of 87 hideaways each on its own island and private reef.
Betti: We are going to jump in here – follow the reef in this direction -- the current goes like this – so it should be fine. It’s a bit rough but I think it’s going to be fine.
Thompson: Tourists generate most of this country’s income. But while their dollars are welcome at resorts, they are prohibited from visiting most islands.
They spend their holidays splendidly isolated from the conservative, Muslim and alcohol-free life of the real Maldives.
Music
Thompson: Male, the nation’s capital, rises from the Indian Ocean like a ringed fortress.
Music
Thompson: Barely two kilometres long and one kilometre wide, the residents of the city have long feared they are living on borrowed time.
This Great Wall of Male has been built from pronged concrete barriers, called tetrapods, donated by the Japanese at a cost of 60 million dollars.
Dr. Ali: We have empirical data to show that in the last 10 to 12 years the tide gauge monitoring we have across the Maldives has shown a rising trend.
It is now 3 to 4 times higher than it was for global sea level 100 years ago.
Thompson: Dr Mohammed Ali is the director of the Maldives Environmental Research Centre.
Scientists here warned that Male’s very existence is under threat. Development on reclaimed land had doubled the city’s size, but destroyed the reefs - robbing the city of its natural defences.
Dr Ali: Now we know this is a costly mistake and we have to avoid such mistakes elsewhere in the Maldives.
Thompson: The sea has been cruel to the Maldives before.
Reporter: One third of the island of Male was under sea water.
Thompson: Back in 1987, this monsoonal high tide almost claimed the life of the President himself.
Reporter: Residents agreed this was the worst such incident in living memory.
President: I was driving around Male looking at various sights where damage has been done and then all of a sudden there was a very high wave which came into Male and it dragged the vehicle I was driving, and the people there they held onto the vehicle and in fact they saved me, otherwise I would have been dragged into the sea.
Thompson: That would have focussed your attention?
President: It did.
Music
Thompson: Male is bursting at the seams. One hundred thousand people -- a third of the country’s entire population -- are packed in here.
The squeeze was reaching crisis point when the President Gayoom revealed an extraordinary solution.
And this is his vision. Rising out of the sea is the new Male – Huhulmale – entirely man-made – and the highest, driest island in the country.
It was to be the foundation of the President’s dream of building a new Singapore in the Indian Ocean.
Music
President: In one island we are trying to complement all the, you know, several complements of such an island. Trade, development, housing, schooling, and government infrastructure and so forth.
Thompson: Male’s residents jumped at the opportunity to leave a crowded capital behind for President Gayoom’s promised land -- a mere ten minute boat ride away.
Usman Ibrahim is one of the lucky few to have drawn a government lot enabling him to buy a flat on Huhulmale.
But a lot of imagination is needed to envisage how this barren vista promises an alluring future.
Usman: This is a reclaimed island and there is nothing much that is natural here.
Here you will only see a patch of sand. It will take a long time for people to settle here.
Thompson: Even in the weeks before the Tsunami, safety was uppermost in Usman’s mind.
Usman: Even if a tide is high, it doesn’t come up to the island – the wave doesn’t come over the island. Because the island is built higher, it is safer than Male.
Music
Thompson: But the President’s dream of Utopia had a price – one the tourists never saw.
After 27 years in power Gayoom tolerated no challenge to his authority.A thin veneer of electoral process attempted to disguise a system which kept him power for nearly three decades.
Last August, demands for democratic reform led to an unprecedented mass protest in Male.A state of emergency was declared. Hundreds were arrested.
When we first visited the Maldives just two weeks before the Tsunami, the country’s opposition was living a shadowy existence.
Nazim: So we are trying to, we are campaigning for some of the detainee candidates who have sort of stood for Parliament this time – and this is one of them – these are Mr Ibrahim Ismail.
Thompson: They were allowed to campaign for parliamentary elections – but their candidate was locked up and their every move was watched.
Nazim: At least the government has to show they are free and fair, or they are trying to be. I think that is the reason. But they have an underlying secret agenda, that’s for sure. That’s probably why our main candidate Ibrahim Ismail has been charged during the campaign.
Thompson: Nazim Sattar is a founding member of the banned Maldivian Democratic Party.
Nearly every person helping out at this campaign office has a story of arbitrary detention or abuse.
Woman detainee: I was stripped and I was kept in the rain.
Thompson: For how long?
Woman detainee: For about 5 or more hours.
Thompson: How long were you detained for?Man detainee: 97 days in detention centre and a total of 102 days..
Thompson: Were you ever charged in that time?Man detainee: No.
Thompson: Amnesty International says scores of prisoners have been abused - President Gayoom said it never happened.
President: None of them have ever said anything about any abuse of prisoners.
Thompson: So any allegations of abuse are false?
President: No, no allegations of abuse. At all.
Thompson: As we left the campaign office that night we passed the house of opposition candidate Ibrahim Ismail.A notice on his door declared he was under house arrest and visitors were forbidden. No one could have imagined how dramatically and how soon their lives would change.
The Tsunami struck the Maldives at about 9 o’clock in the morning on December the 26th.
At this Club Med resort, about half an hour’s boat ride from Male, the only warning would be a freakish low-tide.
Otherwise, these tourists and thousands like them were blissfully unaware.
Thompson: Across Asia and beyond hundreds of thousands are killed and the lives of millions of survivors are changed forever.
For the rest of us, it’s a day we’ll never forget.
Two weeks later, I return to the Maldives and the Club Med resort. Remarkably, only about 80 people have been confirmed dead and only three of them are tourists. No one is hurt here at Club Med but the damage is extensive.
A quarter of the nation’s resorts are closed due to Tsunami damage – the remainder, while largely unscathed, are deserted.
But also shut down are the livelihoods of the more than 700 people who live on this neighbouring island – which relies on that resort for 90% of its employment.
Music
Thompson: One third of the nation’s people are directly affected by the Tsunami. No one’s died on this island, but a quarter of its houses are destroyed.
Thousands of refugees from the islands flee to the capital Male, which escaped remarkably unscathed.
Dr Ali: Somebody called me up and said the sea is coming in.
and I looked out and everything was under water, the whole breakwater, the roads were flooded. We were sitting on the eighth storey building and everything around us. There was water all over and things were being washed away.
Thompson: I meet again with Dr Mohamed Ali.He tells of watching transfixed as the sea’s assault was beaten back by the capital’s frontline defences.
Dr Ali: If it were not for the tetrapods we would have had a much bigger wave smashing into the island.
It is so ironical, you know, we were talking, we were hypothesising about something and all of a sudden it has hit us and it didn’t take long and we know the effect.
Thompson: The Tsunami’s effect on Male is not obvious to the eye, but this is a city that’s been hit by a wave of change.
Facing an unprecedented national disaster, on New Year’s Eve, President Gayoom announces that those arrested last August will be set free.
I return to the home where parliamentary candidate Ibrahim Ismail has held been under house arrest, after enduring 68 days in solitary confinement.
Thompson: Hi, Ibrahim Ismail. Are we allowed in now.
Ismail: Sure, sure. Come on in.
Thompson: He believes the door forced open by the Tsunami cannot be closed again.
Ismail: All in all,I don’t see that things can be reversed now. I think we’re past the point of no return in that sense. Because I think it’s in the best interests of the government too.
Thompson: President Gayoom keeps busy touring affected islands and reassuring the displaced, while asking for more than one billion in international assistance.The President’s opponents fear his sudden softening is a cynical ploy to silence his critics and attract more aid. But he scoffs at such notions. Even before the Tsunami, President Gayoom was promising reform.
President: We would like to develop this country as a modern liberal democracy.
Thompson: And those changes will come?
President: They will come, certainly they will.
Thompson: Nature’s unimaginable blow has swept away the old political landscape.
This is the very same Nazim Sattar we snuck out of our hotel to meet at night.
Now he openly loads aid collected by exiled Maldivian opposition groups into a fishing boat destined for the worst affected islands in the country’s south.
And, he’s doing it with help from the soldiers who weeks earlier would have willingly thrown him in jail.
Nazim: The soldiers have been helpful in carrying the aid and when we have soldiers it is sometimes easier for the officials to work with us, but at the same time they are keeping an eye on us. But we don’t mind, we say what we want.
Thompson: After fourteen hours at sea, we near our destination at the other end of the Maldives archipelago.
Thompson: Is it possible, at all possible, that for someone like you, who supports change in the Maldives, that this wave could be a good thing, even a good thing in the long run?
Nazim: I don’t know whether the wave was a good thing, but the changes which may come after it could be positive – I think. The wave has destroyed a lot of lives, so that is a sad fact, but what we want in the future is more negotiations with the government and to move forward together and in that way it is a positive aspect of the disaster.
Music
Thompson: The mercy ship’s destination is the vulnerable eastern side of the Thaa atoll. Two thousand people lived on Vilufushi before waves swept this community away. Now it is a ghost island. 17 people died here. The highest death toll on a single island in the Maldives.
Music
Ali Zoomal: Here’s the cyber café – over there – there’s the pharmacy in here – here’s the pharmacy – but now there’s nothing.
Thompson: The body of Ali Zoomal’s grandmother was washed away to another island altogether.
Ali Zoomal: This is my grandmother – she died.
Thompson: A fate Hafeeza Sulaiman narrowly avoided by clinging to a coconut palm.
Hafeeza: I came out and looked and was only able to reach this coconut tree. I held on to the tree and with each wave I was pushed up. When I was as high as I could go the waves went over my head.
Music
Thompson: The government has committed itself to rebuilding Vilufushi. But nine other affected islands have been abandoned forever.
Survivors will be moved to bigger islands, others to temporary shelters for at least a year while communities are rebuilt.
Even President Gayoom’s dream of a new Singapore has been dented.
Returning to Huhulmale I meet up again with Usman Ibrahim on his way to work.
Thompson: The water came up to your waist?
Usman: I thought about it and was very surprised.
I also remembered our interview and I was very afraid that day because of how the wave came.
Thompson: The vision of a modern Maldivian metropolis has given way to emergency housing.
This morning Hulhumale braces for another wave – a tide of refugees. Survivors of devastated Vilufushi.
Man: We are now starting to move the people to these temporary shelters after this sad incident affected the Maldives.
Woman: I feel sad. We will have to stay here until our houses are built, won’t we? After the houses are built, we will go back to our island, every one of us together.
Music
Ismail: Obviously the Tsunami has changed a lot of things.
The immediate concern is to re-organise our communities which have been very badly hit by the Tsunami, but I think in order even to do that, we need a stable political system where there is fairness, there’s equality, there’s justice, and I think our biggest challenge now is to develop such a system which will facilitate the rest of the things.
Thompson: Selling this unique environment to the world’s tourists has almost doubled the Maldive’s wealth in just ten years. Now disaster has set it back by twenty.
But this is a paradise forever aware of the threat from the very seas which grant it its beauty. A wariness the Asian Tsunami has forced everyone to share. As well as reminding the Maldive’s autocratic President that no man is an island and no nation of islands can be only one man.
Reporter: Geoff Thompson
Camera: Geoffrey Lye
Sound: Damien Maher
Editor: Garth Thomas
Research: Mavourneen Dineen
Thompson: This is the Maldives the world recognises -- the postcard perfect image of a paradise on earth.
An entire nation of islands atop a seemingly endless string of reefs, ringing pristine beaches and aqua blue lagoons.
Music
Thompson: In recent years, the tourists have outnumbered the locals two to one.
But the same translucent seas which lured these people were about to wreak unimaginable havoc.
It would be beyond anyone’s comprehension, even though for years the Maldives had been braced for threats from the sea.
President: Our medium level of ground over the sea is about 3 to 4 feet, son if the predicted sea level rise takes place, it will pose a very serious threat to our very survival.
Thompson: But the threatening sea would strike sooner and with more force than anyone could have imagined.
Thompson: Even before the Tsunami these tourists were learning that reality doesn’t always match the holiday brochure.
Betti: The waves are going to take us … please be seated, we are going to try another reef – a little more protected.
Thompson: They had escaped the European winter for some five star treatment at the Four Seasons Resort. Just one of 87 hideaways each on its own island and private reef.
Betti: We are going to jump in here – follow the reef in this direction -- the current goes like this – so it should be fine. It’s a bit rough but I think it’s going to be fine.
Thompson: Tourists generate most of this country’s income. But while their dollars are welcome at resorts, they are prohibited from visiting most islands.
They spend their holidays splendidly isolated from the conservative, Muslim and alcohol-free life of the real Maldives.
Music
Thompson: Male, the nation’s capital, rises from the Indian Ocean like a ringed fortress.
Music
Thompson: Barely two kilometres long and one kilometre wide, the residents of the city have long feared they are living on borrowed time.
This Great Wall of Male has been built from pronged concrete barriers, called tetrapods, donated by the Japanese at a cost of 60 million dollars.
Dr. Ali: We have empirical data to show that in the last 10 to 12 years the tide gauge monitoring we have across the Maldives has shown a rising trend.
It is now 3 to 4 times higher than it was for global sea level 100 years ago.
Thompson: Dr Mohammed Ali is the director of the Maldives Environmental Research Centre.
Scientists here warned that Male’s very existence is under threat. Development on reclaimed land had doubled the city’s size, but destroyed the reefs - robbing the city of its natural defences.
Dr Ali: Now we know this is a costly mistake and we have to avoid such mistakes elsewhere in the Maldives.
Thompson: The sea has been cruel to the Maldives before.
Reporter: One third of the island of Male was under sea water.
Thompson: Back in 1987, this monsoonal high tide almost claimed the life of the President himself.
Reporter: Residents agreed this was the worst such incident in living memory.
President: I was driving around Male looking at various sights where damage has been done and then all of a sudden there was a very high wave which came into Male and it dragged the vehicle I was driving, and the people there they held onto the vehicle and in fact they saved me, otherwise I would have been dragged into the sea.
Thompson: That would have focussed your attention?
President: It did.
Music
Thompson: Male is bursting at the seams. One hundred thousand people -- a third of the country’s entire population -- are packed in here.
The squeeze was reaching crisis point when the President Gayoom revealed an extraordinary solution.
And this is his vision. Rising out of the sea is the new Male – Huhulmale – entirely man-made – and the highest, driest island in the country.
It was to be the foundation of the President’s dream of building a new Singapore in the Indian Ocean.
Music
President: In one island we are trying to complement all the, you know, several complements of such an island. Trade, development, housing, schooling, and government infrastructure and so forth.
Thompson: Male’s residents jumped at the opportunity to leave a crowded capital behind for President Gayoom’s promised land -- a mere ten minute boat ride away.
Usman Ibrahim is one of the lucky few to have drawn a government lot enabling him to buy a flat on Huhulmale.
But a lot of imagination is needed to envisage how this barren vista promises an alluring future.
Usman: This is a reclaimed island and there is nothing much that is natural here.
Here you will only see a patch of sand. It will take a long time for people to settle here.
Thompson: Even in the weeks before the Tsunami, safety was uppermost in Usman’s mind.
Usman: Even if a tide is high, it doesn’t come up to the island – the wave doesn’t come over the island. Because the island is built higher, it is safer than Male.
Music
Thompson: But the President’s dream of Utopia had a price – one the tourists never saw.
After 27 years in power Gayoom tolerated no challenge to his authority.A thin veneer of electoral process attempted to disguise a system which kept him power for nearly three decades.
Last August, demands for democratic reform led to an unprecedented mass protest in Male.A state of emergency was declared. Hundreds were arrested.
When we first visited the Maldives just two weeks before the Tsunami, the country’s opposition was living a shadowy existence.
Nazim: So we are trying to, we are campaigning for some of the detainee candidates who have sort of stood for Parliament this time – and this is one of them – these are Mr Ibrahim Ismail.
Thompson: They were allowed to campaign for parliamentary elections – but their candidate was locked up and their every move was watched.
Nazim: At least the government has to show they are free and fair, or they are trying to be. I think that is the reason. But they have an underlying secret agenda, that’s for sure. That’s probably why our main candidate Ibrahim Ismail has been charged during the campaign.
Thompson: Nazim Sattar is a founding member of the banned Maldivian Democratic Party.
Nearly every person helping out at this campaign office has a story of arbitrary detention or abuse.
Woman detainee: I was stripped and I was kept in the rain.
Thompson: For how long?
Woman detainee: For about 5 or more hours.
Thompson: How long were you detained for?Man detainee: 97 days in detention centre and a total of 102 days..
Thompson: Were you ever charged in that time?Man detainee: No.
Thompson: Amnesty International says scores of prisoners have been abused - President Gayoom said it never happened.
President: None of them have ever said anything about any abuse of prisoners.
Thompson: So any allegations of abuse are false?
President: No, no allegations of abuse. At all.
Thompson: As we left the campaign office that night we passed the house of opposition candidate Ibrahim Ismail.A notice on his door declared he was under house arrest and visitors were forbidden. No one could have imagined how dramatically and how soon their lives would change.
The Tsunami struck the Maldives at about 9 o’clock in the morning on December the 26th.
At this Club Med resort, about half an hour’s boat ride from Male, the only warning would be a freakish low-tide.
Otherwise, these tourists and thousands like them were blissfully unaware.
Thompson: Across Asia and beyond hundreds of thousands are killed and the lives of millions of survivors are changed forever.
For the rest of us, it’s a day we’ll never forget.
Two weeks later, I return to the Maldives and the Club Med resort. Remarkably, only about 80 people have been confirmed dead and only three of them are tourists. No one is hurt here at Club Med but the damage is extensive.
A quarter of the nation’s resorts are closed due to Tsunami damage – the remainder, while largely unscathed, are deserted.
But also shut down are the livelihoods of the more than 700 people who live on this neighbouring island – which relies on that resort for 90% of its employment.
Music
Thompson: One third of the nation’s people are directly affected by the Tsunami. No one’s died on this island, but a quarter of its houses are destroyed.
Thousands of refugees from the islands flee to the capital Male, which escaped remarkably unscathed.
Dr Ali: Somebody called me up and said the sea is coming in.
and I looked out and everything was under water, the whole breakwater, the roads were flooded. We were sitting on the eighth storey building and everything around us. There was water all over and things were being washed away.
Thompson: I meet again with Dr Mohamed Ali.He tells of watching transfixed as the sea’s assault was beaten back by the capital’s frontline defences.
Dr Ali: If it were not for the tetrapods we would have had a much bigger wave smashing into the island.
It is so ironical, you know, we were talking, we were hypothesising about something and all of a sudden it has hit us and it didn’t take long and we know the effect.
Thompson: The Tsunami’s effect on Male is not obvious to the eye, but this is a city that’s been hit by a wave of change.
Facing an unprecedented national disaster, on New Year’s Eve, President Gayoom announces that those arrested last August will be set free.
I return to the home where parliamentary candidate Ibrahim Ismail has held been under house arrest, after enduring 68 days in solitary confinement.
Thompson: Hi, Ibrahim Ismail. Are we allowed in now.
Ismail: Sure, sure. Come on in.
Thompson: He believes the door forced open by the Tsunami cannot be closed again.
Ismail: All in all,I don’t see that things can be reversed now. I think we’re past the point of no return in that sense. Because I think it’s in the best interests of the government too.
Thompson: President Gayoom keeps busy touring affected islands and reassuring the displaced, while asking for more than one billion in international assistance.The President’s opponents fear his sudden softening is a cynical ploy to silence his critics and attract more aid. But he scoffs at such notions. Even before the Tsunami, President Gayoom was promising reform.
President: We would like to develop this country as a modern liberal democracy.
Thompson: And those changes will come?
President: They will come, certainly they will.
Thompson: Nature’s unimaginable blow has swept away the old political landscape.
This is the very same Nazim Sattar we snuck out of our hotel to meet at night.
Now he openly loads aid collected by exiled Maldivian opposition groups into a fishing boat destined for the worst affected islands in the country’s south.
And, he’s doing it with help from the soldiers who weeks earlier would have willingly thrown him in jail.
Nazim: The soldiers have been helpful in carrying the aid and when we have soldiers it is sometimes easier for the officials to work with us, but at the same time they are keeping an eye on us. But we don’t mind, we say what we want.
Thompson: After fourteen hours at sea, we near our destination at the other end of the Maldives archipelago.
Thompson: Is it possible, at all possible, that for someone like you, who supports change in the Maldives, that this wave could be a good thing, even a good thing in the long run?
Nazim: I don’t know whether the wave was a good thing, but the changes which may come after it could be positive – I think. The wave has destroyed a lot of lives, so that is a sad fact, but what we want in the future is more negotiations with the government and to move forward together and in that way it is a positive aspect of the disaster.
Music
Thompson: The mercy ship’s destination is the vulnerable eastern side of the Thaa atoll. Two thousand people lived on Vilufushi before waves swept this community away. Now it is a ghost island. 17 people died here. The highest death toll on a single island in the Maldives.
Music
Ali Zoomal: Here’s the cyber café – over there – there’s the pharmacy in here – here’s the pharmacy – but now there’s nothing.
Thompson: The body of Ali Zoomal’s grandmother was washed away to another island altogether.
Ali Zoomal: This is my grandmother – she died.
Thompson: A fate Hafeeza Sulaiman narrowly avoided by clinging to a coconut palm.
Hafeeza: I came out and looked and was only able to reach this coconut tree. I held on to the tree and with each wave I was pushed up. When I was as high as I could go the waves went over my head.
Music
Thompson: The government has committed itself to rebuilding Vilufushi. But nine other affected islands have been abandoned forever.
Survivors will be moved to bigger islands, others to temporary shelters for at least a year while communities are rebuilt.
Even President Gayoom’s dream of a new Singapore has been dented.
Returning to Huhulmale I meet up again with Usman Ibrahim on his way to work.
Thompson: The water came up to your waist?
Usman: I thought about it and was very surprised.
I also remembered our interview and I was very afraid that day because of how the wave came.
Thompson: The vision of a modern Maldivian metropolis has given way to emergency housing.
This morning Hulhumale braces for another wave – a tide of refugees. Survivors of devastated Vilufushi.
Man: We are now starting to move the people to these temporary shelters after this sad incident affected the Maldives.
Woman: I feel sad. We will have to stay here until our houses are built, won’t we? After the houses are built, we will go back to our island, every one of us together.
Music
Ismail: Obviously the Tsunami has changed a lot of things.
The immediate concern is to re-organise our communities which have been very badly hit by the Tsunami, but I think in order even to do that, we need a stable political system where there is fairness, there’s equality, there’s justice, and I think our biggest challenge now is to develop such a system which will facilitate the rest of the things.
Thompson: Selling this unique environment to the world’s tourists has almost doubled the Maldive’s wealth in just ten years. Now disaster has set it back by twenty.
But this is a paradise forever aware of the threat from the very seas which grant it its beauty. A wariness the Asian Tsunami has forced everyone to share. As well as reminding the Maldive’s autocratic President that no man is an island and no nation of islands can be only one man.
Reporter: Geoff Thompson
Camera: Geoffrey Lye
Sound: Damien Maher
Editor: Garth Thomas
Research: Mavourneen Dineen