In a 1977 news interview, Maldives President Ibrahim Nasir announced to the world the basic Maldivian foreign policy and diplomacy: rejecting a Soviet offer to lease Gan Island, he and his entire cabinet (including his successor Maumoon Abul Gayoom, who reaffirmed the policy a year later) declared that Maldives was NOT for sale. What President Nasir told me, as the first accredited foreign correspondent in the Maldives, was that he and his full cabinet made their decision based on their conviction that Maldives, as a non-aligned nation, did not want its neutrality questioned by leasing an island to a foreign country for military purposes. This is now part of Maldives’ history. Maldives’ foreign policy and all its multilateral diplomacy are founded on the principles President Nasir clearly stated that day in telling about rejecting the offer.
There’s also another interesting element from that interview that comes to mind now as Maldivian and international news has focused on the latest Indo-Pacific superpowers’ drama involving the small island state of Maldives welcoming a Chinese “spy ship” (or “research vessel”). It caused a global brouhaha, even though most commentators did not know it was not new or unusual for Maldives. The Maldives Ministry of External Affairs issued a statement last Tuesday, January 23, reaffirming the island nation’s long-time policy of welcoming ships, civilian and military, visiting for peaceful purposes from friendly nations
Here’s the related story from the actual interview I conducted with President Nasir in the President’s Office in Male’ on October 26, 1977:
The Maldives president waved his arm, gesturing at the view from his office toward a mysterious-looking, all-black, windowless-seeming ship anchored in the harbor just outside. It was rumored on the capital island Male’ to be a so-called Soviet “spy ship” that, like some similarly described American vessels shrouded in black, showed up from time to time in the Maldivian archipelago during the Cold War years of USA-USSR rivalry in the Indian Ocean. The superpowers called them “research vessels” not “spy ships,” but they were often seen in the Indian Ocean. Rumors always flew fast around Male’ whenever such ships were in port.
The news around Male’ was also that the government had rejected a high monetary offer from an unnamed power to lease an island. I finally got my courage up in this first interview to ask the President to reveal the name of the rebuffed bidder.
“You ask what country offered us a million dollars to lease one of our Maldives islands? The ship there comes from that superpower—the Soviet Union,” President Ibrahim Nasir stated, nodding at the hulking ship outside his window. “We refused—the whole cabinet voted unanimously to turn down their big offer. We said, ‘No, thanks, we are non-aligned. Maldives is not for sale.’” He added, “A million dollars may be a lot of money, but we’re not for sale to anyone, not even the Soviet Union or any superpower.”
Pointing again toward the hulking “spy-ship” right out the window on Male’s waterfront, he smiled and remarked that the Soviets and other superpowers were welcome as friends to visit the Maldives port for peaceful purposes but not to lease Maldives islands.
The Maldives Government under President Nasir that October 1977 rejected the Soviet bid to lease the Maldivian southern island of Gan vacated by the British RAF since early 1976. The story of the little country turning down a superpower made world news waves later that day after I telexed my “scoop” interview out to Reuters news’ regional Delhi bureau. My story went out on the country’s newly opened first telecommunications system in the Cable & Wireless satellite earth-station in Male’ and soon made headlines in newspapers around the world.
President Ibrahim Nasir, through his interview with me as the first accredited foreign correspondent in the Maldives, announced to the world the basic Maldivian foreign policy and diplomacy that continues today. Today I still remember how he dramatically and proudly revealed the name of the rejected Soviet suitor by waving his arm toward the USSR’s “spy ship” docked just outside his presidential office window.