Is This Burma?

Should I Go?

Let me explain why I strongly believe it is the right thing to come to a country that very few people know much about from the inside.

Travel - and I write here with a conviction based on no shortage of extensive and diverse experiences - is an incredibly powerful force for good. Both ways. It can be extremely effective in raising awareness, deepening understanding and broadening knowledge and sharing vital insights.

Travel, tourism and trade, if conducted with a sufficiently open, well-informed mind, independent thought, cultural sensitivity and a discretionary purse, can affect things in a very positive way and do a great deal to open up a country. In particular, travel and tourism can afford a country’s people the precious opportunity to open up their lives to the outside world.

To some people, just by going to the country I am effectively contributing to the human rights abuses of the Burmese government. Of course a small amount of money is likely to unavoidably end up in their pockets. But I am extremely discreet and careful where I choose to spend my dollars. I always try to travel as locals do. I try to eat where they eat and so on.

And I talk to people, lots of people. I listen eagerly and respectfully to what they tell me. I am offering an income to them and an opportunity to opine which they would not otherwise have enjoyed.

How exactly can people ever be free when we keep them isolated? You tell me in which other ways are we going to so fully and comprehensively inform ourselves about a country whose regime thrives on being 'isolated'?

This country is anything but isolated to those who run it and the sooner we stop pretending that sanctions - over twenty years worth now - are doing anything good for the ordinary people insidde Burma, the better. Lives depend on it. They depend on us being well-informed, realistic and genuinely open-minded. What has occurred, or been allowed to occur, over the last half a century has been the sad dilapidation of a proud country.

Under which of the following circumstances do you think a government is more likely to repress its people?

a) with no one allowed in to see anything?

b) with international visitors, like me, walking around asking awkward questions, probing for answers, taking photos, recording memories and conversations, interacting with local people...?

If people want to feel ethically better about themselves for choosing to boycott and to help massage a troubled conscience, that’s up to them. But do you know what most boycotts and sanctions tend to do? They make the poor poorer while the rich and powerful elite drive fancier cars and live in more luxurious houses. The people at the top show not the slightest inclination of being particularly discomfited by gaping discrepancies in wealth. They thrive.

Burma is a country where the government seeks to do all it can to stop outsiders going to places it doesn’t want them to go. Having been arrested for riding my motorbike all the way up to the Chinese border, that is something I have first hand experience of!

The generals want to stop people looking and seeing, hearing and reporting. Western governments, pushed on by noisy lobbyists, have kept adding the cement of sanctions to the immovability of an unpleasant dictatorship.

How exactly am I legitimising a nasty government when I intend to do no more than share with you what I see, hear and what people I meet tell me?

Who really pays the price of isolation? Who really has to make the big life-changing sacrifices of having sanctions imposed against them. You've guessed it, the people at the bottom. Who really gets punished? The people who don’t matter and are easily forgotten about. The people you rarely read about in your newspapers or hear on your televisions and radios.

So why keep pushing a country, any country, backwards? The only things we end up sanctioning - if we take a long, hard, cold and critical look at the effectiveness of sanctions - are the regime's own propaganda, when we should be doing all we can to help demolish it and blast it open.

Besides, it matters very little what we ethically chose to do about Burma anyway because of one word: China. China controls much of the economy here already. It quietly got on with asserting itself and because we all stayed away, held our noses, put our fingers in our ears and covered our eyes, we are near blind to the realities.

Through apathy, misguided and ill-informed ideology and complacency we have left an entire people in near muted silence. We should be encouraging as many people as possible to go and see and listen for themselves.

Its like one Burmese man said to me:

"We are alive and I can feed my family because of tourists. Why is my country so neglected and forgotten? Please ask more people to come and speak to us."

And the words of another:

"Go and see for yourself. Listen for yourself. Then you can decide. What will you know, or anyone know, if you never come and never speak to us, and us to you?"

Many people in my own country might think that we are isolating or punishing the nasty generals through sanctions. The reality is that the people who are being isolated and punished the most are the ordinary people trapped inside the country. But who will, or who can, come and speak to them and listen to them?

I am not aware of many government representatives, or indeed journalists, either willing or able to go out of their way and come and find out for themselves the realities of life for these isolated people inside their own isolated country.

Because most people never have been and probably never will be exposed to the realities of life inside a country as foreign and exotic as Burma, our understanding of it (and similarly closed off places like Iran and Afghanistan) will inevitably be limited and simplistic. For me, this is a strong part of why I like to travel: to try to see a country and its people as they really are, from the inside.

As well as having as many conversations with as many people inside Burma as I could, it also occurred to me to ask other Western travellers or tourists, when I encountered them, why or how they had chosen to be in a country which plenty of people thought it was wrong to visit.

I met a man who had been travelling extensively in Burma nine times in nine years. Not once in all that time did any person in the country tell him he shouldn't have come.

‘How can it be wrong to be giving an income to ordinary people?’ one woman told me. ‘How can it be wrong to talk to them, to listen to them and share information and experiences?’

‘It doesn’t make sense to punish them, normal people, just because they don’t have a very nice government. In fact, can you tell me a country that does have a nice government, a perfect and well behaved government?’ I couldn’t. ‘I mean if people were only allowed to travel to countries with nice governments there wouldn’t be many countries in the world we could go to!’

Ordinary people everywhere just want the freedom to get on with their lives. They don’t particularly care about governments. They do care about their families and they do care about having enough money to eat. They care about being able to work and live without fear. When we, on the outside, inadvertently or unintentionally, make life harder for the ordinary people, we risk not only making them worse off but also losing their support.

As a Burmese friend of mine said to me,

‘Go and see for yourself. Listen for yourself. Hear our stories. Then you can decide. Tell me, what will you, or anyone else, know if you never come and speak to us? What will you learn from staying on the outside?’

And, as one of the brilliantly effervescent Moustache Brothers told me with startling candour,

‘We are alive because of tourists. We want you all to come. We want a Trojan horse!’

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Is This Burma?: