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Urgent: Kevin Heppner on Tourism



NOTES ON BURMA TOURISM
(Notes by Kevin Heppner, also of Karen Human Rights Group)

Despite the situation in Burma, a growing number of tour groups
are planning tours capitalizing on SLORC's "Visit Myanmar Year
1996". Some tour companies appear to have picked up on the
SLORC's promotions and are fervently promoting these tours. In
the USA, one such tour company is:

Thomas P. Gohagan and Company
224 South Michigan Ave., Suite 220
Chicago, Illinois 60604
Tel: (312) 922-3002

Gohagan has mainly been targetting University Alumni
associations, getting them to offer tours to their members in the
$5,000-7,000 range, centred around a cruise up the Irrawaddy
River from Rangoon to Mandalay on the MV "Road to Mandalay".
There are currently reports that Alumni Associations at
Northwestern (Evanston, IL), Yale, Michigan (Ann Arbor), Indiana
(Bloomington), University of Southern California, and many other
Universities are currently promoting the tours to their Alumni (a
full list would be useful if available). UCLA was also planning a
tour, but cancelled it after being briefed on the situation in
Burma. Gohagan is not only hitting Alumni Associations, but is
also hitting groups interested in Art and Culture - the Chicago
Art Institute is reportedly also planning a tour.

Gohagan is supplying the glossy literature for the Associations
to use, customized with the Association's name inserted. Of
course, no mention of any problems is made - "Myanmar" is
characterized as a beautifully "serene" country coated with
flower blossoms and gold. The first sentence reads "To find an
unspoiled country today may seem impossible, but Myanmar, called
Burma in the days of the Raj, is such a place." Is that Ne Win's
Raj they mean? But Gohagan encloses an explanation for the name
change: "Within the last decade, the government, wishing to
preserve the nation's indigenous character, has reverted to
calling the country and the main cities by their original Burmese
names, which may cause confusion." People from Burma may be
interested to read that "Myanmar has absorbed the best of its
neighbors' cultures and, poised between India and China, has
developed a character that is distinctly its own." You can "Visit
the villages of Mingun and Sagaing, their hillsides decorated
with temples and fragrant blossoms. Marvel at the 12th- and
13th-century temples and pagodas along the Bagan (Pagan) plain."
And so on. A photo of a monk on a quiet street is captioned
referring to the "serenity" of the country, noting that the rural
areas are "especially serene". No war. No military. No politics.
No problems. These words don't even occur once - except in the
fine print on the back page, where Gohagan includes a standard
disclaimer stating "We can assume no responsibility nor liability
in whole or in part for any delays, ..., acts of God,
circumstances beyond our control, force majeure, war, quarantine,
political conditions, ..., accident, sickness, injury or death to
person or property, or mechanical defect, failure or negligence
of any nature howsoever caused ..." - about 50 things are listed
for which Gohagan refuses to be responsible, but I'll leave them
out for brevity. You'd think, though, that since the traveller
assumes full risk and responsibility in the event of war, they
might appreciate being told that Burma has been at civil war for
the past 47 years.

In order to stop these tours, Gohagan is an obvious target, but
there is probably a greater chance of success by going after the
Alumni and other associations who are planning to go. This
approach already worked with UCLA. While Gohagan probably has no
ethics whatsoever, the Alumni Associations are vulnerable to
pressure from their own members and from the student body at
their Universities (after all, student fees probably support the
Alumni Association in most cases). It is imperative that action
begin IMMEDIATELY, as many of these tours are scheduled for
Jan/Feb 1996, and by December bookings will probably be fairly
solidly confirmed. Gohagan's tour includes short stops in
Thailand and Hong Kong (where you can "Attend a specially
arranged presentation at the exclusive China Club to learn about
the changeover in governance in 1997."!) - so maybe you can push
them to replace Burma with India or some other place. The best
way to start is to check at your own University or Alma Mater
whether they have a trip planned, and if they do then get to
work. Usually there is a Professor who gets a free trip to be the
"expert" guide along the way.

Of course, they will probably try to come back with the usual
arguments people use to rationalize their visits to poor
countries, like "If lots of tourists go then this will improve
the situation in the country, because the government will have to
hide its abuses from the tourists, and because I'll learn about
the situation and tell my 3 friends when I get home and this will
be a big help to these poor people." So here are some
counter-arguments:

1) SLORC tightly restricts where you can go, so you still can't
see the supposedly "serene" rural areas or meet the people who
live there. In popular places like Pagan, the SLORC forcibly
relocated 5,000 people off their land specifically so you
COULDN'T meet them. If people try to talk to you, they face
possible arrest and interrogation under torture. The Gohagan tour
is exactly what SLORC likes best: a group of people led by guides
with an interest in hiding the dark side of the situation,
spending great chunks of cash in a short time period and
travelling on a luxury cruise ship up the river - thereby
ensuring that they will have no contact whatsoever with local
people.

2) US$300 buys 2,500 assault rifle bullets. Each person has to
hand over US$300 in hard currency to SLORC on arrival. In return
you receive "Foreign Exchange Certificates", which you generally
exchange for Kyat with street traders. Either way, SLORC keeps
your $300. To carry your 2,500 bullets to the frontline or rural
areas, SLORC will conscript 1.2 adult males (average load for an
adult male porter is 2,000 bullets), or 2 women, or 2 children
under 15, or 2 people over 60, as forced porters. These porters
may die along the way from the ordeal and have to be replaced. In
the rural villages, your bullets will be loaded into the
magazines of SLORC soldiers and fired, usually at unarmed
civilians. Many will be used to kill livestock and uncooperative
villagers in areas where there is not even any fighting. SLORC's
soldiers are mainly conscripted teenagers, so we will take a very
conservative estimate that they will only hit people with 1 in
100 bullets. That still leaves 25 people maimed or killed with
your $300. Of this 25, a maximum of 5 will be ethnic opposition
soldiers. The rest will be defenceless villagers. Anyone who
believes this is worth it as long as they tell 3 friends about
Burma when they get home had better have Boutros Boutros-Ghali,
Bill Clinton and Colonel Sanders high on their list of friends.
Better yet, why not just tell your 3 friends and NOT go?

3) Tourism causes forced labour in Burma. The forced labour to
clear the muck out of the bottom of the Mandalay Palace moat for
the viewing pleasure of tourists has been well-documented. At
least 20,000 civilians and close to as many convicts in shackles
have been used for this. When commenting on the use of convicts,
don't ignore what they are in prison for: I have met many
convicts who have escaped such forced labour projects, and the
following is a list of some of the most common "crimes": trying
to sell goods on the open market without a SLORC "license";
getting in an argument with a policeman or soldier in a teashop;
throwing a rock at an army truck; writing graffiti; being a
retired opposition soldier; being out after curfew; or being
caught with pro-democracy magazines. Other forced labour projects
for "Visit Myanmar Year" currently ongoing include: the
construction of a ring road around Mandalay, construction work on
the Rangoon-Pegu road (where mostly women and children are
breaking rocks), work to develop the airports at Mingaladon and
Bassein, and dozens of other forced labour projects, each
including thousands of people. Forced labour was stepped up this
year on the southern (Tavoy-Ye Pyu) section of the 110-mile
Ye-Tavoy railway in Tennasserim Division.

The railway, which has enslaved over 100,000 villagers in
rotating shifts since 1993, is far from finished - but labour
intensified in this southernmost 10-mile section this year so
that SLORC could officially "open" this section. SLORC officials
told the villagers this was so tourists flying into Tavoy in 1996
would think SLORC has built a railway all the way north to
Rangoon. There is even a sign at the beginning of the railway
saying this. Of course, tourists are not to be allowed to go up
this railway.

4) Tourism projects are causing forced relocation. It is well
known that 5,000 villagers from Pagan were forcibly relocated by
SLORC a few years ago to keep them away from tourists. Similar
relocations continue to occur. SLORC is now confiscating or
planning to confiscate prime farmland in some parts of the
country to build golf courses and beach resorts, evicting the
villagers without compensation. In Rangoon and Mandalay, SLORC
has forcibly relocated entire neighbourhoods out of the city into
"New Towns" (swamps and dustbowls with no facilities far from
people's jobs in the city) with little or no compensation, and is
bulldozing the neighbourhoods to make room for foreign-financed
hotels and factories. The new hotels are given priority access to
the already insufficient water and power supplies, causing
surrounding neighbourhoods to suffer water shortages and
blackouts.

5) SLORC is reportedly conducting forced relocation to build a
"Human Zoo" near Rangoon. SLORC does not want to allow tourists
access to remote areas, so it is forcing some ethnic people from
remote areas to move to the human zoo so tourists can photograph
them. Possibly the worst case of this involves Kayan women (also
known as Padaung, the women often put brass rings around their
necks and legs starting in childhood, eventually leading to an
exotic "long-neck" appearance).

Being from remote highland forests, these women will suffer
severely from the hot and dusty lowland climate - but worse yet,
the emotional and psychological effect of being uprooted from
their villages, forced into a foreign society and paraded like
circus animals in front of tourists will be devastating if not
fatal.

6) People are suffering from SLORC's attempt to "beautify" the
cities for tourists. Everyone in cities and provincial towns is
now subject to SLORC orders forcing them to paint their houses to
specification and build fancy cement walls and iron gates in
front of their houses to impress foreign visitors. Families who
cannot afford to do this are evicted from their homes and forced
to "New Towns" and their house is given to a military family, for
whom the SLORC pays for the work to be done.

To avoid eviction, many families must go into multi-year debt to
comply with this order. In Mandalay, SLORC wanted to widen the
avenue in front of Mandalay Palace so tourists would have a
better view - so they brought in heavy equipment and bulldozed
the front half off of all the houses across the street,
reportedly without compensation.

7) Some of the hotels being built in Rangoon are owned by Lo
Hsing Han, a Chinese warlord from Shan State with close ties to
SLORC. Lo is known worldwide as one of Burma's leading heroin
traffickers, and there is evidence that several of the tourist
hotel projects in Rangoon are being used to launder heroin money.
Burma now supplies about 60 percent of the world's heroin.

Any points which can be added to the above list would be
appreciated. Just to make all of this worse, SLORC's Tourism
Minister Lt. Gen. Kyaw Ba even went so far as to announce that
1996 might have to start in October instead of January, simply
because all of the (forced labour) tourism projects won't be
finished in time. As long as SLORC sees tourism as a potential
cash cow, the reasons not to go to Burma as a tourist can only
grow longer.

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