Burma guide blacklisted

[darnott@xxxxxxxxxxx]

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH(LONDON)
  May 27, 2000, Saturday

Travel: Burma guide blacklisted

By Paul Miles and Rosemary Behan


A charity that promotes sustainable tourism is calling for the public to 
boycott the publisher Lonely
Planet because it has issued a new guide to Burma.

Tourism Concern says that visits by foreigners to Burma lead directly to 
human rights abuses. Local
people are forced to labour on tourism projects and resettled to make way 
for them, and revenue from
hotels goes directly to the pockets of the country's military dictators, it 
argues.

As well as dumping hundreds of Lonely Planet guides on the company's 
doorstep, the charity has
produced a postcard depicting a beach scene with the word Burma across it, 
reading: "The cost of a
holiday to Burma could be someone's life." It says it will send "thousands" 
of the cards to Lonely Planet
"until the Burma guide is withdrawn".

Lara Marsh, a spokeswoman for the London-based charity, said: "Lonely 
Planet hopes that its new
Burma guide will double previous sales figures. This means more people will 
visit Burma - providing
further fuel for abuses of Burma's people." Tourism Concern is organising 
the campaign in conjunction
with a pro-democracy pressure group called The Burma Campaign UK.

Lonely Planet, which has been publishing guides to Burma since 1979, and 
sells 12,000 copies a year
worldwide, acknowledges that human rights abuses are committed under the 
military dictatorship, which
seized power in 1988. "We are extremely clear about human rights atrocities 
and we say that if you do
go and stay in big hotels [in Burma] then people are supporting an 
oppressive regime," Jennifer Cox, a
spokeswoman, said. "We know people will go to Burma whether we produce a 
guidebook or not."

Ms Cox said she hoped the campaign would highlight the government 
atrocities in Burma. "We're giving
people as much information as we can and that's the responsible thing to 
do. There are human rights
abuses in many countries across the world, but we don't stop them by 
stopping people going there." She
added that Lonely Planet last week donated pounds 4,600 to the Burma Relief 
Centre, which supports
refugees on the Burmese border.

Tour operators maintain that some of the money brought by tourists to Burma 
does reach local people
and that a boycott would be counter-productive. A spokesman for Andrew 
Brock Travel, which has
been taking tourists to Burma for 18 years, said: "If we care about forced 
labour we should also care
about forced unemployment."

Sue Ockwell, spokeswoman for the Association of Independent Tour Operators, 
said Tourism Concern
had adopted "a totalitarian approach".