The march of tourism (and a threat to the Maldives)

Beset by rising sea levels and a £90m budget shortfall, the Maldives government has set its sights on leasing 31 uninhabited islands for new resorts. Now the Tourism Minister has quit over the threat to the islands’ fragile ecology. Andrew Buncombe in The Independent:

They have become the short-hand for a tropical paradise. A nation of islands off the southern tip of India, the Maldives are the home of cobalt-blue seas and white-sand beaches. Every year the country attracts up to half-a-million tourists in search of a picture-perfect getaway.

But how much is too much? For a country that depends so heavily on tourists lured by the prospect of pristine beauty, at what point does that flood of tourists start to threaten the very environment that attracted them in the first place?

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Trouble in paradise

A footballing triumph has provided some light relief for the people of the Maldives, more use to a diet of poverty, repression and censorship. Nick Milton in The Guardian:

In the middle of the Indian ocean, the people of the Maldives are celebrating a great footballing victory. In a gripping game to rival anything in Euro 2008 they beat the favourites, India, 1-0 on Saturday night to secure their first South Asia Football Federation Championship title. Cheering on the winning side was Asia’s longest serving and increasingly autocratic ruler, President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom.

For Gayoom the win provides the ideal platform from which to launch his audacious bid for a record seventh term in office. However, for the 330,000 Sunni Muslims living in the Maldives the football win provides a short respite from the poverty, repression, torture and censorship which have come to symbolise his 30 years in power.

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The Maldives: Sea, sun and jihad

From The Economist:

A record number of tourists, some 650,000, visited the Maldives’ upmarket and otherwise uninhabited island resorts last year. But from the populated parts of the Indian Ocean archipelago the news is more worrying. On a January visit to one of its 1,200 white sand and coral islands, President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom was rescued from a knife attack by a boy scout. The would-be assassin’s shout of “Allahu Akbar!” was the latest evidence of growing Islamic extremism in the 350,000-strong nation of Sunni Muslims.

Last September terrorists detonated a bomb in the capital Male’s Sultan Park, injuring 12 tourists. Foreign concern mounted in November when a video posted on an al Qaeda-linked website called for more attacks. The almost simultaneous police revelation that the “masterminds” of the Sultan Park attack had received training in Pakistan heightened fears. But the Maldives government insists there is no evidence that international terror networks have infiltrated the country.

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