Resignation at Gunpoint?.
President Mohamed Nasheed resigns amid a police and military mutiny — an event he calls a coup and his successors call lawful. The young democracy's first constitutional crisis remains bitterly contested.
The Maldives' democratic transition of 2008 got its first violent stress-test on 7 February 2012. After weeks of opposition protest — inflamed when President Mohamed Nasheed ordered the arrest of a senior judge — elements of the police and army mutinied in Malé, joined the demonstrators, and seized the state broadcaster.
By that afternoon Nasheed had announced his resignation on television. His vice-president, Mohammed Waheed Hassan, was sworn in within hours. Nasheed said almost immediately that he had been forced out at gunpoint — a coup in all but name; Waheed's government insisted the transfer was voluntary and constitutional.
A Commonwealth-backed commission of inquiry later found the handover legal, but the dispute never really closed: Nasheed's supporters rejected the finding, and the events of 2012 hardened the polarisation that has shaped every Maldivian election since. It was the moment the country learned that a democratic constitution and a stable democracy are not the same thing.
Continue the timeline.
- Wikipedia — 2011–2013 Maldives political crisis
- Report of the Commission of National Inquiry (CoNI), 2012
Two thousand years of history — one extraordinary place to experience it.
The atolls in this story are the islands you can stay on today: private-island resorts and overwater villas, planned by a team that works from inside the Maldives.