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Ousted Maldives leader urges toppling of new regime

SHIHAR ANEEZ and J.J. ROBINSON
MALE, MALDIVES — Reuters

Last updated Friday, Aug. 31 2012, 2:15 AM EDT

Supporters of a former president of the Maldives scuffled with soldiers on Thursday in a protest against a report which said the leader’s ousting this year did not constitute a coup.

The verdict of the Commonwealth-backed Commission of National Inquiry is a blow for former president Mohamed Nasheed, who hopes to return to power.

About 1,000 supporters – in a country whose population stands at about 330,000 – took to the heavily policed streets, hours after Mr. Nasheed urged his backers and the army to topple the new government of President Mohamed Waheed.

“If the commission report declares it was not a coup, then it is legitimate for the people to topple the government from the street,” Mr. Nasheed said.

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Mr. Nasheed, who won global attention by holding a cabinet meeting underwater to highlight the threat rising sea levels pose to the low-lying archipelago, was the Maldives’s first democratically elected president until his ousting in February.

His fall from power and the violence that followed dented the Indian Ocean nation’s reputation as a laid-back luxury tourist paradise.

But the commission said the transfer of power followed the constitution. Commonwealth Secretary-General Kamalesh Sharma said the investigation was objective and credible.

“The change of president in the Republic of Maldives on February 7, 2012, was legal and constitutional,” the Commission of National Inquiry said in the report.

“The resignation of President Nasheed was voluntary and of his own free will. It was not caused by any illegal coercion or intimidation.”

Mr. Nasheed said at the time of his removal that he had been forced to resign at gunpoint by mutinying police and soldiers.

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U.S. State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland, in a statement, commended the commission and called the investigation “thorough and inclusive.”

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