Tourism to Myanmar up 18 per cent – despite 'ethnic cleansing' of Rohingya

Balloons over Bagan
Balloons over Bagan

Myanmar has faced condemnation over its ongoing persecution of the Rohingya people, with the United Nations branding it a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”.

The country’s State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, once a global human rights icon, has been accused of lacking “moral leadership” for her failure to deal with the violence, which has forced more than 600,000 refugees to flee to neighbouring Bangladesh in recent months.

However, despite suggestions that travellers should consider boycotting the country, the crisis doesn’t appear to be having any negative impact on the country’s burgeoning holiday industry.

Myanmar welcomed 3.44 million visitors in 2017, its tourism ministry has said, up from 2.9 million in 2016 - an 18 per cent rise.

That’s still down from the record 4.68m that visited in 2015, but shows that demand for trips to the temple-filled Bagan, the floating gardens of Inle Lake, and the majestic Irrawaddy river, has not diminished.

Inle Lake
Inle Lake

Myanmar’s emergence as a popular travel destination in the last 30 years has been remarkable. It welcomed just 21,000 overseas arrivals in 1990, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organisation. That rose to 120,000 in 1995, 660,000 in 2005 and 790,000 in 2010. But the release of Aung San Suu Kyi, a political prisoner for 15 years, in 2010, coincided with an even greater surge in arrivals. More than three million visited in 2014, and 4.68 million in 2015.

That rise from 21,000 tourists in 1995 to 3.44 million last year is an increase of 16,190 per cent. Only one country, Cambodia, where arrivals have gone from 17,000 to 5.01 million over the same period (+29,470 per cent), can trump it.

And it’s not just backpackers discovering Myanmar. High-end holidaymakers are also driving the boom, lured by the opening of a spate of luxury hotels and resorts.

The Rohingya crisis has put the ethics of visiting the country under the spotlight. In January, the Canadian ambassador to Malaysia faced a Twitter backlash after posting photos of a private holiday with the caption: “First day of 2018 unfolded on a Myanmar beach where the great surf is pleasingly turquoise coloured, warm, clear and clean – perfect for snorkelling to visit with nature and the fish.” Exasperated responses followed, before the ambassador was ordered to delete the post.

Nevertheless, if the official statistics are accurate (the quality of Myanmar’s financial statistics was called into question by the World Bank last year), tourists are still flocking to the country in significant numbers.

Should tourists boycott Myanmar?

Gill Charlton, Telegraph Travel’s Myanmar expert, believes tourists should continue to visit.

“It’s important to keep the fledgling tourist industry alive as so many small poor communities rely on it,” she said. “Staying away isn’t going to change the government’s treatment of the Rohingya community as tourism from Britain and other Western countries is a very small part of their revenue.”

Justin Francis, CEO of Responsible Travel, agrees. “Our view, for now, is that if we can continue to benefit local communities and help keep Burma visible to the international community through tourism, then we’ll continue to sell [holidays there],” he said. Myanmar is the only country the tour operator has ever boycotted, when it was ruled by a military junta and NGOs were concerned that money from tourism was supporting the dictatorship.

Does a poor human rights record ever hinder tourism?

In February 2016, Amnesty International said the world had “reached a nadir” for human rights and highlighted 10 countries where it believed attacks on human rights had been most profound: China, Egypt, Hungary, Israel, The Gambia, Kenya, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Syria.

Syria is not a viable travel destination, and recent statistics for Pakistan are not available, but of the other eight, three (Russia, Egypt and Saudi Arabia) witnessed a fall in arrivals between 2015 and 2017 (while global travel across most of the planet was growing fast). Drawing conclusions is difficult, of course, and there are myriad factors that could have affected their respective falls.

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