These notes compiled by Kevin
Heppner, also of Karen Human Rights Group
October, 1995
[Note: All exchange rates are based on the rates at the time of printing.]
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 hit you 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 list of reasons not to go to Burma as a tourist can only grow longer.