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'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
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