No Nobel Peace Prize for President Gayoom Say People of Maldives

When Dictator Maumoon Abdul Gayoom asked the Royal Commonwealth Society in London “Is there a Right to a Safe Environment?” and argued that climate change was a human issue linked to human rights, those who are ignorant about his repressive regime might applaud him as a visionary. However, for us Maldivians, if it were not repulsive, it would have been a joke. For having suffered under his autocratic regime for more than 30 years, to hear the Dictator Gayoom talk about Human Rights is like hearing the Devil express sympathy for the human race.

However, Gayoom’s harping about the “The Human Face of Climate Change” to the international community has a more sinister agenda. It has nothing to do with the fact that the Despot has suddenly developed a soft spot for the rights of the human being. No. It is all to do with the fact that he is canvassing for the Nobel Prize for Peace for his record on “human rights”. His daughter Dunya Maumoon (Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs) is the one who is driving this campaign to get her father the Nobel Prize.

“He was the first world leader to raise this issue at international fora in 1987” writes darling daughter Dunya Maumoon, praising the Dictator. However, his human rights record at home is inexcusable. Abusive powers by the security forces, arbitrary arrests, unfair trials and torture of prisoners, and murder in custody are some of Gayoom’s human rights credentials. For 30 years the people of Maldives had to suffer at his abusive hands. Where were our rights as human beings for the last 30 years? Where was his concern for our human rights when anyone who dares to dissent was thrown into solitary confinement in Dhoonidhoo and tortured? Where were our human rights when he was shooting our own people in Maafushi? Where were our human rights when his police were beating us up on the streets of Male’?

Concerned Maldivians have now started a Petition http://www.ipetitions.com/...e4_Gayoom/index.html and a Facebook Group http://www.facebook.com/...up.php?gid=24733497218 to lobby the Nobel Committee from making such a horrendous mistake.

It would be a mockery to those past winners if Dictator Gayoom is given this honour, especially for his so-called “human rights credentials”.

One Maldivian summed up pretty much the feeling of the majority when he said, “We would rather drown with the rising sea levels than let this Dictator win a Nobel Prize for Peace for his ‘human rights work’ ”.

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