‘Room Service? Forced labour please’
By Mark Thomas

The media and Lonely Planet are getting really upset about this campaign. Ahhh, I’ll give them some tissues, poor things. People have been writing to the newspapers saying ‘I went to Burma and I didn’t see any forced labour.’ Well really? What the hell did they expect? That the military generals would send it to them with room service?

Lonely Planet are squealing like stuck pigs, retorting that we’re censoring information just like the military. Lonely Planet’s publisher, Tony Wheeler, has written back to MPs saying ‘I was deeply shocked to receive your letter aligning yourself with people who believe in censorship and suppression of information’- meaning us – the campaigners! Huh? So we make children work on railway lines? So we torture people in prison for telling political jokes? We force people to labour on cleaning up temples for tourists sites? That’s like saying that Aung San Suu Kyi is as bad as the military because she’s asked the international community not to invest in her country until they get democracy. Nobody would say that, so why say it about a campaign which is simply asking people to make an informed choice about which guidebook to buy?

Lonely Planet talk as if they’re the guardians of human rights in Burma. That by publishing their guide they’re providing people with vital information that they can’t get anywhere else. Which is just crap. And the thing is, you have to say that some human rights are of greater importance than others, like the right to live without torture and intimidation. The right to freedom of movement in the tourist sense – that’s got to be pretty low.

The fact is that Tony Wheeler is squealing ‘cos he’s hurting - I stood in a bookshop looking for a walking book the other day and didn’t buy the Lonely Planet one. And there must be loads of people like me. ‘Going on holiday? Don’t buy Lonely Planet – wherever you’re going’. He stands to lose loads of dosh and that’s it – his outbursts are because he’s pushing a product, that’s all he’s doing. Does he think he’s challenging the state of Burma by publishing his guide? Ask him how he thinks he’s defending human rights when people have specifically asked tourists not to go to Burma. It’s impossible to defend.

This article was first published in 2000