Police crack down after eight nights of youth protests in Malé following a woman’s unexplained fall from an apartment building. The protests represent a new generation raising its voice against the Maldives’s compromised political culture.
Police crack down after eight nights of youth protests in Malé following a woman’s unexplained fall from an apartment building. The protests represent a new generation raising its voice against the Maldives’s compromised political culture.Alwan Ibrahim
Politics

Youth protests take on the Maldives’s political culture after a woman’s fall

A woman’s unexplained fall from a Malé building has set off protests against “nepo-babies” and an alleged cover-up as a new generation confronts the Maldives’s political culture
J J Robinson

J J Robinson is a media-development expert and the former editor of Maldives Independent (previously Minivan News). He is a Fulbright scholar and the author of Maldives: Islamic Republic, Tropical Autocracy.

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AT 7.23 AM on Friday, 18 April, a young woman was discovered face down and unmoving on the tin roof of a warehouse in Malé. She had evidently fallen from a nine-storey apartment building next door. Gravely injured, she was taken to the government-run Indira Gandhi Memorial Hospital in the city, then transferred a few days later to a hospital in Malaysia. How the fall had happened remained unexplained.

In the aftermath, hundreds of young people brought the Maldivian capital to a standstill every evening for over a week, determined to know the truth and seek justice for the injured woman. Occupying the central avenue of Majeedhee Magu, outside the police’s Criminal Investigations Building, the demonstrators – most of them aged under 30 – have so far forced the removal of two police chiefs in a single night as well as the appointment of a presidential commission to look into the woman’s fall, and have alleged police misconduct in the investigation around it.

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Maldives
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