Sunday, April 30, 2017

Yameen Rasheed's legacy

I started this blog in the beginning of April, 2017.

On the 23rd day of the same month, Yameen Rasheed, who was among the most prolific and well-known bloggers in Maldives, was brutally murdered in his home.

I feel compelled to address this atrocity before I continue to write here.

I first came across Yameen's blog sometime around 2009-2010. I've been reading it religiously since. His writing was always the best - a brilliant mix of insight, humor, compassion, criticism, and an unflinching position on the importance of human rights.

In a country like Maldives that's ruled by dictators and despots, Yameen Rasheed had the courage to speak out against injustice using his own name, and he made us laugh along the way. That's why so many freedom lovers in this country and beyond admired him.

I only knew Yameen Rasheed through his writing. But his loss - the way he was taken from us with such senseless brutality - has affected me greatly. Surely this feeling would be magnified a thousandfold for his friends and family, whose tweets and statements I've been following since his passing.

Yameen's murder follows a pattern of political hits in this country that goes without investigation from the authorities. We know this because when the authorities are not actively derailing these investigations they have been known to outright lie to the public about them.

I will not list all of their lies here. They are too many and already known to anybody who gives a damn. They have been exposed too many times to be excused as mistakes.

Suffice it to say, authorities refused to investigate the constant death threats Yameen had received for years, the murder scene was cleaned spotless and all of the blood was painted over immediately after the murder took place, and they claimed to know the identities of the killers at first, only to recant it a few days later.

To say that this is alarming is an understatement. It follows the same pattern of lies, derailment, cover-ups and impunity for politically motivated killings that we have seen before in this country.

Whomever it is that killed Yameen their message is quite clear: "Shut up or end up like him."

But they don't realize that by killing him they've only made his voice louder. I will never shut up and they will never win because they can't kill us all.

___________________

Yameen Rasheed's website - The Daily Panic, Twitter. 

Never forget.

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