BOOK BURNERS AGAIN ATTACK LONELY PLANET OVER ITS MYANMAR GUIDE BOOK
May 3rd 2008 11:27
The book burners are at it again: Lonely Planet's guide to Myanmar has been attacked by human rights groups who say income from tourism helps keep the generals in business.“I am not going to be an ad agency for Burma, but going there is doing more good than bad," Lonely Planet founder Tony Wheeler said in an interview in Bangkok during a conference on tourism and global warming.
He argued that many tourists put money directly into the hands of individual Myanmar people rather than the state coffers and also help open up a society largely shut off from the world.
"If BBC decides to withdraw the guide, it would be a deal breaker," Wheeler said, indicating he would sell his remaining shares. BBC Worldwide is the commercial arm of the London-based British Broadcasting Corporation.
Wheeler said his Planet Wheeler Foundation has started a health clinic and a number of other humanitarian projects in Myanmar and intends to fund more.
Wheeler told MediaBlab in Melbourne in 2006 that he was stunned by the outcry against the book when he first published it, but he added that such attitudes only made him more determined to keep publishing the Myanmar guide.
MediaBlab editor Peter Olszewski encountered similar hostility toward his book, land of a Thousand Eyes which was an account of the period he worked in Yangon for the Myanmar times as a journalism trainer.
The Irrawaddy Journal, for example, ran an extremely hostile review in which it distorted and misrepresented passages from the book.
The editor of the Irrawaddy Journal agreed to print an apology but failed to keep his word.
The Irrawaddy Journal last week ran a piece about Wheeler and the Myanmar Lonely Planet guide book, which prompted well-know South Esat Asian journalist Nic Dunlop to post the following comment on the magazine’s website.
“Friday, May 2, 2008 No More Book Burning
Regarding “Lonely Planet Founder Defends Burma Guidebook” [The Irrawaddy online; May 1, 2008; URL: http://www.irrawaddy.org/article.php?art_id=11691 ]:
This is an old and irrelevant debate. Tourism in Burma is virtually non-existent, particularly after the violence last September. The kinds of tourists that use the Lonely Planet in Burma are the more interested and generally more politically astute than most. Far too much attention is placed on an old argument that is more than 10 years old. Things have changed, but not because of debates like this, and not for the better either. As far as Wheeler's defense that tourism actually helps the people of Burma in their quest for freedom is obviously self-serving. That's what I think the campaign really objects to. But the reality if no tourists went to Burma, or were permitted to go, then no journalists and human rights workers would get in to report on what is happening there first-hand either (remember the reporting from September?). My own view is that the energy and focus of so much debate would be better placed elsewhere, perhaps on Burma's neighbors who do business with the junta and are potentially more sensitive to campaigns of this kind—but not on a small guide book. (What would the US and European Union sacrifice in their relationships with China and India to use what leverage they have with the junta for example?) What, in my humble opinion, should be considered a great success, from the activists’ point of view, is the fact that the Lonely Planet actually raises much of the debates surrounding Burma's situation in the first few pages of the guidebook in question. That is all that they really can expect. Anything more is simply Breshnevian. Thant Myint U warned of a scenario where Burma's woes will deepen and worsen, "through an unholy alliance between those outside who favor sanctions and inside hardliners who advocate a retreat from the global community." I fear that banning books would be the next step in that direction. After all, banning books is what the regime does.
Nic Dunlop.”
Another reader, Diana Smith, posted this comments:
“I heartily concur: ‘..going there is doing more good than bad.’ I was in Burma a few years ago and fell in love with the country, the culture but mostly the people. Feeding the local economy is a plus for the folks on the street, as is conversation and communication. I've never been a believer in economic boycotts—they just deprive the poor folks of a decent life.”
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