Dictatorship is coming back to the Maldives and democracy is slipping away This is definitely not how Mohamed Nasheed imagined he would be promoting a new film about his campaign against climate change. The documentary follows the charismatic young leader of the Maldives, an island nation slowly sinking into the ocean, as he lobbies world leaders, addresses the UN, and makes international headlines by conducting the world's first underwater cabinet meeting. But now that The Island President beginning to appear in cinemas, Nasheed is no longer the island's president. Ousted from power in February, and now a quasi-fugitive in his own country, he arrives for our interview via Skype dishevelled and breathless, following another dramatic day. The Island President Production year: 2011 Country: USA Runtime: 101 mins Directors: Jon Shenk More on this film "Well it's been fairly challenging today," he admits, lighting a cigarette and composing himself with a rueful grin. First there was this scuffle inside parliament, but mostly there were a number of people who were demonstrating outside. The military charged at the crowd and therefore there were disturbances throughout the day. And after sunset the police and the military moved down to where we have been having our rallies and gatherings, and they ransacked and dismantled that place, and cordoned off almost a good half of Malé town. Nasheed is no stranger to high drama, but even by his own standards the past two months have been quite extraordinary. Born into a middle-class Maldives family in 1967, and educated in England, on graduation Nasheed - known as Anni - returned to a country in the grip of what many regarded as a dictatorship under Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. Nasheed set up a magazine, began publishing articles accusing the regime of corruption and brutality, and was promptly arrested, imprisoned, held in solitary confinement and tortured. Jailed 16 separate times, he missed the births of his two daughters and became an Amnesty International Prisoner of Conscience, before fleeing into exile in 2003. But after 30 years in office, in 2008 Gayoom yielded to pressure and held the country's first democratic elections, which swept "the Mandela of the Maldives" to power. Quickly claimed by David Cameron as "my new best friend," the young president became an international folk hero, and the face of a nation that, as he warned the UN, will be underwater "before the end of this century" unless the world acts now on climate change. The Maldives' transition to democracy was, however, ominously incomplete. According to Nasheed, elements still loyal to Gayoom were undermining reforms, and in response to repeated constitutional crises many opposition MPs and officials were arrested and detained during Nasheed's administration. In January, frustrated by the judiciary's attempts to thwart his reforms, Nasheed ordered the arrest of chief justice Abdulla Mohamed. Protesters loyal to the old regime took to the streets, supported by factions within the police, and on 7 February, after weeks of unrest, Nasheed was confronted by armed military officers. "There were guns all around me and they told me they wouldn't hesitate to use them if I didn't resign," he told reporters that evening. It wasn't a resignation, he says simply, but a coup d'état. The picture since then has been, to say the least, highly confused. A warrant was issued for Nasheed's arrest, and he has been threatened with life imprisonment, but for now he remains at liberty - just about - in his family home in the capital, orchestrating protests and demanding fresh elections. "Well basically the arrest warrant is there," he explains, "but they haven't moved on with it simply because there's always so many people around me, so I suppose they don't want to risk it yet. But they tried to do it today, and they will continue to try, tonight and tomorrow as well. I wouldn't put anything beyond them. What's curious is that he says all of this with an almost jaunty air of amusement. "I must say," he adds, making the unrest sound practically festive, "I think some very good music has come out of this. Of course people must get tired at some point of talking and talking - so all the artists have come out, they want democracy back again, they really had it good. And all of them are there, they are singing and playing their music and coming out dancing. And then we have our speeches in between. Part of Nasheed's popularity has always rested on this boyish levity; cheerfully unguarded, both humble and yet dauntless, he is by far the jolliest politician I have ever interviewed. But the chaos that cost him his presidency has led some to wonder if he was ever enough of a proper politician to manage the transition from grassroots activist to head of state, or cope with the constitutional constraints of high office. Some of his critics even characterised him as a classic case of the oppressed turned oppressor - of, in the words of one former minister, using the tactics he "would no doubt have similarly criticised his predecessor for." So I ask if he himself ever worried that he might be falling into that trap. Well, I don't think people actually believe it when they say that my government was oppressive. I don't think the people saying it really believe it. I am always worried and mindful of all syndromes associated with torture and ill treatment. I'm always very, very, very mindful about them. Human rights is a belief that I have had for a very long time; it comes from hundreds of years of what has happened to ancestors in my country, and me also. How did he feel about Amnesty International calling for the release of the chief justice? I didn't like arresting a judge, and as a long and dedicated Amnesty member I must say yes, Amnesty's point was that I must try and find a procedure within the system to deal with this another way. And I was asking everyone, can you spot that procedure? But I just couldn't let him sit on the bench. There is a huge lack of confidence in the judiciary, and I had to do something and the constitution calls upon me to do that. It's not a nice thing to do. And it's not a thing that I would want to do. And it's not a thing that I liked doing. But it had to be done. Just days after he was ousted from his position as president, Nasheed is carried by his supporters at a political meeting/ Photograph: Dinuka Liyanawatte/Reuters The problem, according to Nasheed, is that the constitutional reforms that followed the first democratic elections failed to dismantle Gayoom's control of the judiciary, and what he saw as the old elite's network of corruption. There wasn't enough focus placed on these institutions; everyone was just focused on getting rid of Gayoom. And yet the deposed president has received strikingly patchy international support; India's prime minister conveyed his "warm felicitations" to his successor, the former vice-president Mohammed Waheed Hassan, and Nasheed admits: "I was very shocked and confused by that. And not just India - the US did the same thing, the UN did the same. I think I find it very strange and shocking that they were not able to understand what was going on. I think the international community is coming round now, they are understanding that this is the dictatorship coming back and that democracy is slipping away and it has to be restored and got on track again. I think now they understand. They didn't understand that it was Gayoom's doing. Now they are understanding it. He says he wouldn't want British tourists to boycott the Maldives in solidarity; "No, I feel that we can get out of this with no lasting damage." But he'd like the Commonwealth to threaten expulsion unless fresh elections are held, and the EU to impose a travel ban on Maldives officials. He observes wryly: "All of them have their second homes in London." I ask which international leaders have been in touch with him since the coup, and he laughs. Er, well, William Hague. I know where you're going with this! He's quite right; I'm waiting to hear if his new best friend Cameron has been on the phone, but Nasheed just smiles. You can't take me there! Which makes me think that's probably a no. In The Island President we see Nasheed haranguing leaders of countries such as India over the urgency for action against climate change, so I wonder if he suspects they may have been privately happy to see this energetic nuisance thrown out of office. "Well, I was a bit of a nuisance," he agrees, laughing again. I think that's all I'm saying. Which sounds to me like a yes. You might think climate change would be of less immediate concern to Nasheed right now, but he switches seamlessly from talk of the coup to carbon emissions. "I always expected the environment to be far, far more important than any other issue we had to deal with," he explains, adding: "If you live in the Maldives it's not easy to be unaware of the environment. I spent a lot of time in my 20s in banishment or in jail, so therefore had a lot of time to contemplate. Watching The Island President, however, it's impossible not to notice an obvious irony; the Maldives' economy is almost entirely dependent upon the very long-haul tourism that contributes to carbon emissions. Some 100,000 Britons visit the Maldives every year. If they don't want to see the country sink, should they stop going? "Ah," he smiles, readily acknowledging the conflict. "Well, for our adaptation work," - by which he means measures to adapt to rising sea levels - "we need your holiday. Now, the minute you start flying, our adaptation costs rise higher. So it's a very difficult call. And as president you have to compromise on strict principles. But I would hope and I would argue that if the Maldives becomes carbon neutral, and if present trends in other more green fuel continue, I think we are almost on the threshold of finding some solution. Link to this video A pledge to make the Maldives carbon neutral within a decade was one of his most audacious declarations in office. Was it a plausible plan, or an attention-grabbing gesture? No, it was a very, very plausible plan. We did all the calculations, we did all the models, we'd done a carbon audit of the country. So if we stick to the plan, and we don't spend all the money on the president or the police or the military, we could do it. That's a big if, isn't it? "Well, the [new government] don't believe in it," he admits. They simply don't believe in it; they laugh at it. The documentary follows his increasingly frantic attempts to secure a meaningful deal on carbon emissions at the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference. But he thinks the opposition he encountered there had little if anything to do with genuine scepticism. I don't think it was anything much to do with the science of it, or the impact that it would have on their economies. I thought most of it was breaking down because of the huge amount of mistrust among nations. Then again, so much has happened among nations and it's not so easy to just simply ignore it. So these difficulties will be there. I was hoping that there can be an understanding. But there is a sense that these people actually hated each other. In the film we see Indian leaders asking Nasheed how on earth he thinks they could possibly sell any deal to their own population that would in effect deny them the same opportunities for economic growth that the west has until now been free to enjoy with impunity. Didn't they have a point? My point is that they can sell renewable energy. Carbon emission does not equal development. That is the thing the Chinese and Indians and Brazilians and other developing countries will have to come round to. We do not want to go back to the middle ages. We've just got to be sensible. We just want to be normal. And I think there should be good science and good technology, and there should also be responsible and sensible living. So I don't necessarily see us going to extremes in order to solve these issues. Nasheed has called for the public to engage in "direct affirmative action, 1960s-style," but some scientists argue that changes individuals make in their behaviour can achieve nothing more than making them feel better about themselves, and will have no meaningful impact on emissions. "Well, I believe international decisions are made because of small decisions," Nasheed counters. And if the small decisions are not made, we will never get international decisions. Small decisions - solar panels, wind farms, windmills - these will have an impact on decision-making. So small decisions are necessary to build a bigger understanding and agreement. They're necessary to the politics, if not the science, of the solution? Yes, exactly. What the more immediate future holds for Nasheed and the Maldives is anybody's guess. Nasheed is not even sure what his arrest warrant accuses him of. I don't know, one time they said it was terrorism, another time they said it was acting against the constitution, another time they said it was alcohol. Quantities of alcohol were allegedly discovered in the presidential palace, fuelling his opponents' claims that he is insufficiently Muslim, in a country that is 100% Sunni, but Nasheed points out that "I don't bring things in, the military brings it for me, and no one gets in there without being searched. It's their place. In one of the many surreal ironies of his predicament, the judge who would preside over a prosecution would be the very chief justice Nasheed had arrested. He believes there will be fresh elections this year, and that his party will win. The option of fleeing into exile is, he says, out of the question. He is so indelibly optimistic by nature, however, that it's hard to judge the reliability of his prediction - which will depend to some degree on the international community's willingness to regard him as an unjustly deposed democratic leader, as opposed to a failed activist who proved scarcely any keener on democracy in practice than his predecessor had. I ask Nasheed which is now more important to the Maldives - democracy or climate change. Well, now I must say climate change. I've been thinking about this one, and we must have a planet before we have democracy. We must have a planet. We must have the Maldives. I ask what odds he would give on his country drowning in his grandchildren's lifetime. He pauses to think for a moment. Fifty-fifty. The Island President is on limited release now theislandpresident.com