Maldivian domestic politics have made global headlines again, this time for censorship and black magic. A documentary about the personal sorcerer of Maldivian President Abdulla Yameen was banned in the Indian Ocean archipelago. The documentary, first aired on 5 February 2016 by the pro-opposition television channel RaajjeTV, features secretly recorded conversations between Yameen and Sri Lankan national Asela Wikramasinghe, prior to the 2013 presidential election.
Yameen can be heard discussing how to use black magic to remove his opponent, former President Mohamed Nasheed, by making him go "temporarily crazy" or taking his life. Yameen, in the recordings, ultimately rejects murder as an option, protesting, "But Asela, human life is so precious. So precious."
Traditional Maldivian black magic practices, such as sihuru and fanditha, merge elements of animism and voodoo with Quranic verses and Islamic rituals. Yameen's belief in fanditha has been long suspected. In August 2015, he abruptly ordered the rerouting of traffic around the main mosque and Islamic Centre in Malé, and the uprooting of two 20-year-old pine trees in Republic Square. At the same time, a monument in Sultan Park was also taken down. Rumours spread about how Yameen believed Nasheed's Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) had laid a spell on the trees and monument to make him ill. The official explanation for rerouting traffic was that it would facilitate mass prayer sessions with 25,000 or more people at the Islamic Centre.
The Maldives is a country where the death penalty is rarely carried out, but the last person to be executed was Hakim Didi in 1953 for the crime of attempting to assassinate the president with black magic. While black magic, according to the penal code, is no longer explicitly a criminal offence on the islands, since November 2015 nearly a dozen alleged 'sorcerers' have been arrested. Police arrested a 66-year-old man on the island of Villingili in Gaafu Alif Atoll on 25 January 2016, and confiscated as evidence 90 of his books. His daughter explained to Maldives Independent that the books taken were prayer books written in Arabic, which the Dhivehi-speaking police had probably not been able to decipher.