Good afternoon, the Chair of the Anna Lindh Foundation, the Board, Anna’s friends, Colleagues and distinguished friends who are gathered here, today.
Thank you very much. Indeed, we are very pleased to be here today. We are so pleased that the foundation has decided to bestow upon us this very honour and I am very humbled by it. I am so pleased to be here in Sweden. We have been treated so well, so lovely by the Swedish government, Anna Lindh Foundation and of course the people, and now the weather as well.
I am again pleased -- as I keep saying this -- pleased to have received this recognition also very much so because, of Anna and what she stood for. She said resignation is our biggest fiend. We should never ever give up.
When I was an MP for our parliament in 2001-- Anna Lindh at that time was the Foreign Minister here, and she was also leading the Council of the European Union as the Chair. And when I was arrested while an MP she wrote to our President and requested for my early release and good treatment. She has been at the focus. She has understood all along how important it is for us to be free – for all humans to be free, especially free of torture, free of intimidation, freedom of expression and your basic civil rights and civil liberties. Most importantly the freedom to live, freedom to survive – that is where we now want to link and say for us it is not enough to be free from torture. We are now, most of us are now free from torture. We do not necessarily want to dilute the core values, the core ideals of human rights; the traditional definition of freedom from torture. But at the same time it is so important that we realise that life itself is the fundamental freedom. It has to be chased and it has to be saved.
We faced a predicament, we faced a problem where our own survival is at risk. We want to see how we may be able to inform the world opinion or the people of this earth on what is happening to the Maldives and what is happening to the world at large. We feel that simply talking about a few degrees rise in the climate or the temperature might not really hit you.
When people talk about -- well lets go for a two degrees or a three degrees rise in temperature and stop it there -- you are basically arguing and talking about, should we allow Maldives to exist or not, should we allow half of Bangladesh to vanish or not, are we contemplating Norway or 20 million people in Norway to be moved.
When we talk about climate change, when we talk about the science of it, we are actually talking about a very human side of life. We are talking about our own existence. So for us this is a fundamental human right.
Before I go in to the climate change issue, I would also like to point out other human rights issues very prominent and very important in my own country. There is a Maldives story that is relevant. We feel that there is a story, we have a narrative that we can give you and it can galvanise the people into political activism. Politicians, remember, will only do what the people ask them to do. They will not do anything more. They will not do anything less. They will only do what the people ask them to do. So it is very important that we continue -- we keep talking to the people. That is where human rights is important. That is why democracy is so at the centre of this whole argument, discussion, discourse.
We were told, even few years back, no one – none of the international community, people who knew about the Maldives, people who were commenting on the Maldives or for that matter many Maldivians – would ever believe that I would be standing here as the President of the Maldives. People didn’t believe that. People always pointed out to us that we are a hundred percent Muslim country, the state is very strong, we’ve had this feudalistic society for the last thousands of years and its just going to be impossible for us to change that.
We didn’t accept that. We thought that it was very important not to feel resigned with this -- in a sense working against the odds. We have always worked against the odds. For the last twenty years we focused singularly on human rights. And through that we have been able to achieve vast amount of change. Our main focus was human rights.
As I was introduced here, I have had my fair share of pain. I have had my fair share of arrests and torture. I had been torture twice. I spent a lot of time behind bars. And I had gone through a fair amount. I feel that because after so many years of struggle, after so many days of loneliness, sadness – that there is always light at the end of the tunnel. There is always hope. You cannot ever give up. And we should never, ever contemplate losing hope. I don’t understand Swedish but I believe Swede dreams were talking about hope. And I stand by it. And we can never give up hope.
We have been able to galvanise the Maldive public into political activism. We have been able to find space for freedom of expression. We have been able to amend our constitution. We have also been able to have a free and fair presidential multi-party election. We have been able to have a smooth transfer of power. We have also been able to recently have multi-party parliamentary elections. We have been able to do all that and now we need to consolidate democracy in the Maldives. Specially now, with climate change looming over us, we feel that democracy is at the centre of all mitigation issues as well as adaptation issues.
In my mind, in our minds, the best adaptation issue is good governance. Very often we tend to think that adaptation is a physical measure, it is the number of revetments, it is the number of concrete embankments, seawalls, breakwaters and so on. But we feel that the best form of adaptation is consultation: how the locals, how the public, how the people, how the public may be able to adapt to what may become, through their own consultation, through their own decisions, how we can have good local governance. We need to be able to find the form, find a mechanism through which we can speak to the people.
Now, if you take your own country -- I do this very often and I think about this very often -- while I was a student back in the 1980s, many of you at that time wouldn’t really actually believe that climatic change or sea-level rise or changes in the environment. But very frantically, western society or developed democracies have been able to come to this position and say, yes, the science is clear, we now have to start doing something.
You come to this realisation mainly because of your strong democratic credentials, because you have freedom of expression, because you have freedom of thought, because you can engage is discourse, because you can have foundations such as this, because you are free.
Now, for us to be able to meet the challenges of climatic change we have to have the same processes, the same structures. And that is why we feel that human rights and democracy stands at the centre of today’s global and climatic change debate issues.
We hope that western societies will understand that. Very often many international governments are reluctant to assist dissidents. Reluctant to talk to opposition. Especially in countries where opposition is not recognised where dissent is not allowed. We hope that western society or western governments would start talking to dissident elements within other countries. No one would talk to me before; many ambassadors come to the Maldives. They do of course secretly -- they would have a telephone conversation with me very secretly. And therefore we had to go on and on for the last 20 years, because no one would talk to us. Then we realized, it took us a tsunami to realise that we have to go for direct action and we had to galvanize the people.
My trade was, I was a writer before. A journalist and writer. All my books were banned. Therefore they sell very well. You should get books banned. Excellent way of marketing it.
But I realized and many of us realized that just simply writing in newspapers or leaflets or the internet wasn’t enough. You really have to take a bold step and come out and say, well, I’m out here and we are going to challenge you. Right to the face of dictatorship. Right to the face of evil. You have to come and face it. When you do that you’ll be surprised how weak evil is. You’ll be surprised to know that the state machineries are not strong in face of truth. When you are challenged with that they just simply tremble. They fade away. We’ve seen this again and again and again.
I feel that if we are to bring climatic change issues, to the centre stage and if we are to find solutions to climatic change issues, we really have to go for and try to make climatic change to be a human rights. It is a human right. It’s our right for existence. As much as I might have died being tortured, now I live only to die because of sea level rise. So the fight goes on, and we have to be able to galvanize the people to political activism.
I’m very pleased, I’m always optimistic. I see that there is another generation of politicians, another generation of thinkers coming out all over the world. They live differently, they do things differently. And very soon we will be surprised again by the speed of this. We will find that young generations of this would change politics. Would make climatic change or the environment the central political discourse -- very similar, very same as communism was some 40 years back. While communism was the main threat for freedom for the liberal society. You did develop a front set of front line states. That these states were there to be protected. Everyone pulled their resources to protect these states so that it would stand as an obstacle of emerging or encroaching communism.
We now come into a very different reality where the Maldives will be the front line state. If you can’t protect the Maldives today you can’t protect yourself. We have to fight ways and means of protecting the front line states. We have to redefine international politics. We have to redefine international relations. Even if we don’t do it, even if try to resist it, this is going to happen. I strongly believe that the people are very intelligent. They are not stupid. They will not stand around to see the world being destroyed. They will find ways and means of changing the realities that we face today.
I’m encouraged and so pleased to receive this award because of strong minded courageous politicians like herself like I am -- young people who are coming out on the centre stage. I was very encouraged by the Indian elections. Rahul Gandhi gave 126 speeches for the last election. And none of this speeches looked anything like everyone else was talking about. His speeches were so different from what his mother was saying. And I am set that this is happening. We don’t have a hang up with colonialism. We have other means and ways of finding solutions. For instance very often, I say how do you find answers to questions. What is the mechanism? People might say a committee; a commission might be a mechanism. But I think fiction might be a better mechanism to answer questions. We’ve seen that happen very often.
I shouldn’t go on and on. The weather is beautiful; we all want to go out. Then again, before I end, I would like to stress that the link between human rights and climatic change is very real and very linear -- it’s a very linear equation. There are no variables to disturb this.
Thank you for giving us the position or giving us the platform so that we maybe able to take the message to, hopefully, where ever we can. But at the same time my hands are very full, we need to consolidate democracy at home. Without consolidating democracy at home we will not be able to meet the challenges of climatic change.
Consolidating democracy has many difficulties. What do you do with the past? I have to start with actually being fairly arrogant. And I’ve been trying to tell the people of the Maldives, to come on shut up lets move forward. There’s nothing we can gain from dwelling in the past. But this is not possible. Seven eight months down the line we have to bring closure. We have to find a way of talking about what happened in the past. There are at least 15,000 Maldivians waking up in up in the middle of the night sweating with nightmares. We have to find a way of addressing this. The loved ones will not stop unless and until we find why this happened, how this happened and so on.
Now the difficulty is if I do that if we try, if we push that we that on the other hand should put a lot of pressure on the opposition. The opposition still is the former ruler Gayoom. He is clinging on as the leader of opposition. His brothers, his in-laws, his sons his family is the opposition.
We have a difficulty, we have a predicament but I am encouraged that there is young blood in the opposition. So this younger new opposition should emerge. The old should go. New thinking will have to bless us. I’m again very optimistic and I will continue to be optimistic. I am certain that we will find solutions to the problems that we face today.
Thank you and thank you very much again.
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