With the crucial multi-party elections looming on the horizon, intensity of debates and humiliating each other in the political arena is increasing. A few days ago a friend of mine asked if the Maldives National Defence Force would jump in and rule the country if things get ugly after the elections. Unfortunately this wasn’t the first time I had to deal with the question.
Even being just a pawn in the MNDF chain of command, I could answer the question. No. That was a very satisfactory answer I have developed to the unpleasant question. These questions provoked this article to be born on my blog. I decided to share the cons of such a dreadful situation.
Justification of the coup would be to bring civil order and political stability. Bloodless coups are usually brought about through declaring a state of emergency. So can our MNDF do this? Are they capable of such heavy-handedness on the people now?
The current MNDF has well trained soldiers and sailors. A number of the senior enlisted personnel and officers are trained in some of the world’s most prestigious military training academies, namely from the US, UK, India, Pakistan and China. This variety of military academics when combined has made a very professional manpower in MNDF.
This manpower combined with the resources may or may not provide a combination for a coup. The next question is would there be cohesion in MNDF if a coup is launched? A big question to ask, but there will always be skeptics who aren’t easily persuaded. If the majority in the top brass falls into this category, the coup will fail. Hence, this is a risk that may not favor coup happy leaders. Being a small island nation and relying on international community immensely, the other question is, how long would the country survive for?
Military coups aren’t recognized in the international community. We would get punched out of the Commonwealth on the first week and then expect repeated stabbing on our economy by leading democracies in the world. This would follow civil uprisings and more force being used to stop them, hence more crimes against civilians.
Democracy is beautiful. There is nothing better born to govern a nation than power of the people. Militaries should always be ready to take a bullet to protect these civilians and their interests including their choice of democracy. The mandate of MNDF should be to protect and defend the national integrity, its civilians and interests, not to govern them. I know for a fact that this is exactly what they will do, as professionally demonstrated in the past.
In other words, a military coup in the Maldives is out of the question.
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