President's drive to survive makes a splash

Ministers gear up to govern the nation from beneath the sea. Photo / AP

On a humid, airless night last March, the 42-year-old president of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, opened up his palace in Male for an unusual public event.

A projection screen was hung at the back of a ballroom and brightly coloured chairs were arranged in rows. Then the audience was shown in: lawyers, Cabinet members, presidential advisers and journalists, and a sizeable chunk of Maldives society.

Nasheed, dressed in an open-neck striped shirt and dark chinos, sat in the front row.

The lights dimmed and scenes of environmental mayhem unfolded on the screen: Sydney Opera House in flames, ice sheets crashing into the seas, deserts spreading and forests burning.

Thus the people of the Maldives had their first glimpse of Franny Armstrong's documentary, The Age of Stupid, in which Pete Postlethwaite plays the last man left alive in a post-apocalyptic, climate-fried world.

It is a scrappy but passionate, a classic example of agit-prop cinema. But in the dripping night heat of Male, the film had a very different effect on its audience than it has had in the West.

Its message seemed direct and immediate, a call to arms. Nor is it hard to understand such emotion. The islands that make up the Maldives are threatened with inundation, probably by the end of the century, as ice sheets melt and sea levels rise catastrophically, thanks to global warming.

The islands are less than a couple of metres above sea level. Their highest point, at 2.3m, is the "lowest high point" for any nation on Earth.

It won't take much to inundate them. Hence the impact of the film, which left its audience desperate for reassurance from their President as he moved to a microphone stand in the centre of the ballroom.

"If man can walk on the moon, we can unite to defeat our common carbon enemy," Nasheed said. "And so today, I announce that the Maldives will become the first carbon-neutral country in the world."

The announcement was a typically slick PR exercise by Nasheed. He had been propelled into power a few weeks earlier in a national vote that had made him "the world's first democratically elected president of a 100 per cent Muslim country", as he puts it.

Yet he was already revealing himself to be an adroit and effective operator. The former investigative journalist, jailed six times by his authoritarian predecessor, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, and made an Amnesty prisoner of conscience in 1991, has begun making waves - in every sense.