Burma tourism plummets 50 per cent
YANGON – Tourist arrivals in Burma almost halved in the last three months of 2007 after the military junta crushed popular monk-led protests, killing at least 31 people, a weekly journal reported last week.
The English-language Myanmar Times said the number of foreign visitors fell 24 per cent in October, immediately after the crackdown, and were down 44 per cent in the last quarter of the year from the same period of 2006.
“Tourist arrivals during the whole year fell by 8.8 per cent in 2007 from a year ago,” deputy tourism minister Aye Myint Kyu, a brigadier-general, was quoted as saying in an article which gave no further details.
Reuters reports that according to the government-run Central Statistical Organisation, 349,877 tourists came to the former Burma in 2006 and arrivals in the first eight months of 2007 showed a slight increase.
However, the suppression of the monk-led protests, including the secretly filmed shooting of a Japanese journalist on Sule Pagoda Road in Yangon, caused worldwide outrage and led to groups cancelling tours out of fear.
The junta blamed the foreign media and dissident reporters sneaking footage and pictures out via the Internet for causing the plunge in arrivals.
“Some foreigners attempted to tarnish the image of Burma by posting in the websites the photos of the protest walks,” Aye Myint Kyu wrote recently in state-run newspapers under a widely known pseudonym.
Speaking at Asean Tourism Forum in Bangkok last month, Htay
Aung, director general of the Ministry of Hotels and Tourism, said the situation in Burma was back to normal for international tourism.
“The long-haul market especially has returned,” he said, “and those visitors will spread the real word about the country’s safety.”
He said the tourism ministry was forecasting a 25 per cent lift in arrivals this year.
Ian Jarrett
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