Three years is a long time in politics anywhere, but in the Maldives, it’s enough for everything to come full circle, with time spare for another few spins around the island, making it hard to distinguish true progress from simply going round in circles. Within a year of taking office, President Solih’s government had used its Majlis supermajority to complete an unprecedented overhaul of the Supreme Court, which Judge Kriegler described, in a final withering assessment, as ‘a major threat to democratic rule’. The JSC documented seventeen instances in which the court had violated the Constitution since 2008, resulting in five sitting members being replaced and two restored. The bench even broke new ground by including its first female judges.Returning to a well-trodden path, in November 2019, former Raees Yameen was jailed, receiving a five-year prison sentence and a $5 million fine for money-laundering offences. His reprieve soon came around, however, and two years later the sentence was annulled on a technicality. After being named as the PPM’s candidate for the 2023 elections, Yameen was imprisoned yet again in December 2022 on bribery and laundering charges, this time for eleven years with a further $5 million fine.Daniel BosleyDescent into Paradise: A Journalist’s Memoir of the Untold MaldivesPan Macmillan, 2023While the former president remains defiant, his former partner in vice Adeeb expressed remorse for his crimes and apologized to the Maldivian people. His original sentence, absolved following the 2018 election, was re-investigated, leading to a twenty-year prison term for laundering and embezzlement. This was after he also attempted to flee the country on a tugboat and was caught by the Indian Intelligence Bureau in Tuticorin.The Maldives’ sad spiral into violence continued. On 6 May 2021, as Nasheed walked from Kenereege to a waiting car, an explosive device attached to a parked saikal detonated, leaving him with life-threatening injuries. He underwent sixteen hours of surgery to remove shrapnel that had shattered bones, perforated organs and lodged within an inch of his heart. The invincibly stubborn Anni was flown to Europe to recover, returning to take up his chair in the Majlis just five months later. A twenty-six-year-old Islamic State sympathizer named Adhuham Ahmed Rasheed was arrested and sentenced to twenty-three years, with six more suspects on trial at the time of writing.Eighteen months earlier, the new police commissioner, Mohamed Hameed, had revealed that the police knew of at least 1,400 extremists in the country who ‘would not hesitate to take the life of the person next to them’. He reported that 173 Maldivians had crossed into Syria, with almost sixty in the country at that time. In an alarming first, three tourists were stabbed (none fatally) in an attack in Hulhumalé in early 2020, which was also claimed by the Islamic State. The government has thwarted a number of further attacks and arrested Mohamed Ameen, an Islamic State recruiter, who was also being pursued by US authorities. In August 2023, the US treasury also placed sanctions on twenty Maldivians it considered to be al-Qaeda or ISIS operatives, including Aalif Rauf, alleging that he and his brothers used Kuda Henveiru for fundraising and recruitment. Concerns persist, however, over the apparent inability to root out these malicious networks. Their political influence was demonstrated when the Maldivian Democracy Network was banned on charges of blasphemy in late 2019, after conservatives took issue with its fouryear-old report on radicalization. Demonstrations across the country called for the authors to be executed, as the Adhaalath-dominated Islamic ministry declared them apostates who deserved the death penalty and forced them into exile, where they remain.The government’s attempt in 2021 to criminalize just this kind of takfiri rhetoric as hate speech, including the use of the term laadheenee, met ferocious opposition, with conservative networks labelling it the ‘Secular Bill’. The MP who presented it was bombarded with death threats, and the bill was watered down. DDCom announced on the seventh anniversary of Riz’s disappearance that they had started work on the country’s first witness protection scheme.In the murder trial of Yameen Rasheed, after agonizingly slow progress, life sentences were handed to two men in early 2022: twenty-one-year-old Ismail Haisham Rasheed and twenty-two-year-old Ahmed Zihan Ismail. Four more were acquitted, and the family continues to press for the ringleaders to be brought to justice. In Riz’s case, more foreign investigators were eventually brought in, and three men were arrested in July 2022: the alleged gang leaders Ahmed ‘Gatu’ Muaz and Ahmed ‘Ahandu’ Ismail as well as the man seen following both Riz and Yameen, Ismail Abdul Raheem. At the time of writing, all are awaiting trial for acts of terrorism. DDCom alleged one of those involved in the murder had met with Raees Yameen, receiving assistance to join fellow suspects in Syria – a claim rejected by the former president.Daniel Bosley.Attempts to break the cycles of failed justice resulted in the passage of the Transitional Justice Act in 2020. With a remit to investigate everything from torture and the Maafushi prison shootings during Maumoon’s presidency to the Suvadive revolt and Amin Didi’s death, the task of the new ombudsman’s office is vast in scope. With its term running only until the end of President Solih’s term, though, transitional justice could easily prove to be transitory once again. Stalled progress in the ‘Stealing Paradise’ investigation is a continuous reminder that in small island societies, attempts to unravel such tangled webs are never simple. The historic corruption scandal has been predictably divisive, and the loudest critic of the Solih government is both surprising and unsurprising. From the moment the 2018 election was won, it was obvious Nasheed would struggle to take a backseat role. Disagreements between the president and Speaker began almost immediately, barely slowed by the 6 May attack. Soon after the blast, following the Speaker’s repeated threats to publicize details of the flagging investigation, a list of individuals allegedly involved was leaked. Those said to have benefitted from the scam included 119 people currently or formerly serving in government jobs, including sixteen sitting MPs (five from the MDP), one former and one current cabinet minister, and a state minister. The latter two remained in their posts, because only former Raees Yameen, Adeeb and two others have been prosecuted at the time of writing.Excerpted with permission from Descent into Paradise: A Journalist’s Memoir of the Untold Maldives by Daniel Bosley, published by Pan Macmillan.