Word: amins
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Soon after the gentle people of the Maidive Islands abolished their centuries-old sultanate and elected Amin Didi their first President (TIME. Jan. 12, 1953), they began to regret it. Amin Didi was chock-full of reform plans-he wrote a new anthem to the tune of Auld Lang Syne; he abolished purdah and designed a new Mother Hubbard for women to wear; he forced the men to elect women to the legislature; he built an elaborate handicraft shop, despite the fact that rarely more than a half dozen tourists a year visit the isolated island chain...
...last fall, the Maldive islanders had enough of their President. Two of Amin Didi's cousins, Ibrahim Mohammed Didi and Ibrahim Ali Didi, quietly plucked the President out of his palatial residence one night and imprisoned him on the nearby island of Doonidu. The two cousins installed themselves in charge. Piece by piece, some details of the bloodless coup reached Ceylon. The deposed President, said Ibrahim Mohammed, was still being kept under guard on Doonidu "for safekeeping"; the main islands apparently were thick with people who wanted to chop Amin Didi's hands off, preferably at the neck...
...Ocean, these things are done more calmly. Last January, after centuries of autocratic rule under a sultanate, the Maldives became the world's youngest republic by simple popular vote (TIME, Jan. 12). There was no trouble whatever; the sultans had long since tired of their confining work, and Amin Didi, the man the Maldivians unanimously elected to serve as both President and Prime Minister in the new republic, was next in line for sultan anyway. Just to keep it all in the family, Ibrahim Mohamed Didi, a cousin, was elected vice president...
Last week the Maldives passed smoothly into another stage of political evolution. Ibrahim and another cousin, Ibrahim Ali Didi, tossed cousin Amin Didi in jail and took over the government themselves. Just what the political stage was at that point no outsider knew, since the Maldives' only connection with the world is through still another cousin, Ahmed Hilmi Didi, who promptly quit his job as ambassador to Ceylon. "I have been kept completely in the dark," said Ahmed Didi last week. "All I know is that Amin Didi has resigned...
Last year the islands voted 99 to 1 to abolish the Sultanate altogether and establish a republic. Amin Didi was unanimously elected first president. Amin, 43, who visits London twice a year and rules with a firm but fair hand, accepted the job because, as he himself said, he could find no one else as worthy...