The dark side of the Maldives

With tourism responsible for 90 per cent of its tax revenue, the Maldives is keener than most to welcome international visitors. Each year the tiny island nation (population 524,000, or roughly the size of Manchester) spends tens of millions promoting itself with one simple message: come on in – if you can afford it.

Now that offer comes with a caveat: no Israelis allowed. This weekend, Mohamed Muizzu, the country’s sixth elected president, announced to the world that his government would pass new legislation to ban anyone entering the Maldives on an Israeli passport.

The move is part of Muizzu’s wider push to bolster his pro-Palestinian credentials in the face of the ongoing conflict in Gaza.

According to Maldivian government numbers, around 11,000 Israelis visited the Maldives last year, accounting for 0.6 per cent of total arrivals.

While the move might be blatantly discriminatory, it probably isn’t causing tourism bosses to lose sleep just yet – even if some Jewish campaigners have pushed for a wider boycott on social media.

But could it backfire in the long run?

For the average tourist, the Maldives remains synonymous with high-end lagoon resorts, peppered with dreamy overwater bungalows and stylish beachside restaurants. Yet away from the private islands and honeymoon jaunts sits the real Maldives: a hardline Islamic state with tempestuous politics.

For years, the country has sought to keep these worlds separate. But has it now shown its hidden side?

This duality may even be a surprise for people who have visited the Maldives, many of whom will have flown into Male’s charmingly ramshackle airport to find themselves met by reps ready to whisk them off to an island resort.

But how many of the tourists sipping their cocktails by their overwater bungalows realise that, on the other side of the blue waters, they could be fined or even flogged for doing the same thing?

Funnily enough, it isn’t something that most resorts or brochures care to mention. But with the country in the headlines for its anti-Israeli stance, could it inadvertently draw attention to “real” Maldives?

A country where everything from conservative dress codes to public displays of affection and same-sex relationships (both banned) are enforced by criminal law, and where politics occasionally spills over into violence.

In his excellent book The Maldives: Islamic Republic, Tropical Autocracy, the British journalist JJ Robinson (who edited the country’s only independent, English-language newspaper) compares Maldivian politics, at least to outsiders, to an episode of Game of Thrones.

Rather than classic left-right divides, parties are based on personal vendettas, with administrations seeking to weaponise the levers of power against their opponents.

In recent years, the country’s politics appear to have taken on a more strident and nationalistic turn to outsiders. “Recent developers have definitely focused more on prioritising the Maldives’ own interests and sovereignty,” says Viraj Solanki, a researcher at the International Institute for Strategic Studies which has hosted security dialogues across South Asia and the wider region.

Indeed, in the run-up to last year’s presidential election, current president Mohamed Muizzu rallied behind a Trump-esque “Maldives First” platform, campaigning against the Indian military’s longstanding presence in the country’s waters.

By contrast, Muizzu has been more welcoming to China, which has not gone unnoticed by the US.

Could populism pose a threat to tourism? Unlike in Mallorca and the Canary Islands, Maldivians aren’t taking to the streets to complain about an influx of visitors (most of whom jet off to their bubble islands within hours of arriving and aren’t going to be partying in the local restaurants).

That said, the avenues for angry protests are somewhat more limited in the Maldives than in a European social democracy.

Then there’s the elephant in the room: terrorism. “On a per-capita basis, more foreign recruits to the Islamic State came from the Maldives than any other country,” says Viraj Solanki.

Indeed earlier this year, the Maldives repatriated 21 of its citizens (mainly women) who had gone to join Jihadi groups in Syria. They will now undergo anti-extremism training.

Given all that, do tourists need to think twice about the Maldives after all? For all the geopolitical intrigue, for the vast majority of visitors, it’s probably plus ça change.

Cocooned on your own island, ignoring Maldivian politics is as easy as tuning out of Westminster or Holyrood. Sure, it might not be the most enlightening approach to tourism, but it evidently works for plenty.

But in recent years more tourists have been looking to escape the highly-curated luxury of the corporate resources. The Maldivian government, which oversees the entire tourism industry, has given locals permission to open small guesthouses on residential and fishing islands, offering visitors the chance to see real Maldivian life.

While popular with backpackers, this hasn’t been entirely without incident. In 2014, there was a skirmish when an Israeli surfer staying on the island of Thulusdhoo vandalised a poster equating the Star of David with the swastika. The action drew an angry backlash from locals with the police choosing to evacuate a group of Israelis for their safety.

Incidents like this have even prompted one Maldivian human rights activist to bravely sound the alarm about anti-Semitism. Ahmed Shaheed served as the Maldives’ foreign minister before becoming a UN special rapporteur on religious freedoms. In 2022, he told a reporter: “I grew up in a country which wasn’t anti-Semitic to begin with, but then turned anti-Semitic over time.”

As well as the small fishing islands, there are the two city islands of Male and Hulhumale: the equivalent of the Maldivian mainland. When I visited the Maldives in late 2022, I made a point of bookending my resort trip with a stop on each. With 500,000 or so residents in just a few square miles, they’re as far away from the typical “fly-and-flop” experience as you can get. All the better, I thought.

Hulhumale in particular may have passable hotels and very good South Asian restaurants. But tourists get none of the exemptions that they do on the resorts. Anyone caught with alcohol faces arrest and deportation and public displays of affection, even between married couples, could result in prosecution or an angry blowback from locals. Trudging through the moped-dominated streets, you often feel like an inconvenience at best.

A small handful of visitors have had far worse. In 2021, a British tourist was caught in the blast of an explosion intended to assassinate former Maldivian president Mohamed Nasheed. One year earlier, three foreign visitors (two Chinese and one Australian) were attacked by a knife-wielding terrorist affiliated with a local offshoot of the Islamic State. Luckily, all four survived.

Tales of knife attacks in particular, no matter how rare, will inevitably send a shiver down the spine of any traveller. Yet visitors can at least make a cynical appraisal of the situation: given that tourism accounts for one third of the Maldives’ GDP, its government isn’t going to take any threats to travellers lightly. Anyone joining a terrorist group faces decades in prison or even death.

Still, while the risks to tourist safety may be reassuringly low, the Maldives remains a complicated and conflicted country, at least to anyone who bothers to do their homework. To bring that fact to the attention of the world, all for the reward of scoring some anti-Israel points, seems a serious own goal.