Former MDP President Abdulla Shahid has warned that the Rasmale project in Fushidhiggaru Falhu could once again strain the Maldives’ relations with a friendly country.

Speaking at the MDP’s fifth congress, Shahid described the project, for which the government recently claims to have signed an agreement, as a moment that leads Maldivians into a diplomatic situation they must think carefully about. Because no one knows what the agreement contains, he said, the public has been left to speculate, and one bitter outcome of this could be a falling out with another friendly state.

Shahid noted that the world is becoming more integrated by the day, and that diplomatic relations between countries are now the lifeline of the global economy. If that lifeline is cut, he said, a small country like the Maldives would face an economic shock beyond imagination, and the burden would fall on private businesses and ordinary citizens.

He described the Maldives’ geographic location as its greatest diplomatic asset, more valuable than gems and jewels, but said its true worth can only be realised by maintaining close ties with neighbours, defending the nation’s independence and sovereignty, and not allowing room for competing rivalries in the Indian Ocean. Recalling the COVID-19 pandemic, Shahid said that while Indian states were under lockdown, medicines needed by Maldivians were brought in with the help of the Indian Air Force, a result of genuine friendship built through diplomacy.

Shahid called on the government to stop keeping secret the agreements made on Rasmale and with large foreign companies and states, and to make them public. Public trust, he said, grows only as much as transparency does.