I cant help but wonder at the sequence of events following the massive water outage in Male yesterday. With just a phone call, the Indian government unfailingly offers water to meet the shortage, as they often do whenever there is a crisis in paradise. Now, as a Maldivian citizen this makes me immensely grateful. It makes me smile at the love, and empathy that neighboring countries (regardless of race, religion etc) can exhibit at times of difficulty. Then I hear about a foreign worker getting beaten up at one of the long queues that had gathered to receive water distributed by the local military and police forces at one of the public schools. As it also happened, he was actually getting the water not for himself but for the use of some Maldivians who hired him. Not that this mattered to some Maldivian patriots waiting in line, clearly agitated at the whole ordeal of being forced into a refugee situation, having to collect rationed water. Social media picked up the story almost immediately, and people offered sympathetic sentiments to the expatriate. I was happy that at least a sizable number of people condemned the act of violence as completely uncalled for. So there are different social attitudes in Maldivians to the same event. This left me thinking hard. Heaven forbid that natural disasters wreck this land, but when they do it is the international community that ushers in to relieve our problems. So then, is it not time to treat that expatriate worker with a humanly, dignified attitude, or is the Maldivian race still somehow worthy of an upper class distinction? When international pressure mounts up on human rights issues, is it not time to let go of the rusty excuse, meddling in our internal affairs? Is respecting the internationally accepted codes too much to ask for?
Posted on: Fri, 05 Dec 2014 08:57:22 +0000
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