The following article originally appeared on the National Times on December 22, 2009.
Rangoon could be Asia's Havana. Crumbling colonial architecture quietly decays in the tropical heat while patched-up automotive relics lumber around pot-holed streets. But the former Burmese capital is resolutely off most travellers' itineraries.
Instead, stray dogs growl menacingly at passers-by on the wide boulevards of the city's colonial quarter. The few foreigners taking tea at the impressively restored Strand Hotel are on government business. The other Westerners you see darting out of the 1970s Mazda B400 taxis are reluctant to stop and talk, presumably because they are involved in the less noble trade of sanctions-busting.
Even old South-East Asian hands shun Burma. The reason is the well-funded Burma Campaign, which counts among its supporters high-profile politicians such as former British prime minister Tony Blair and Hollywood A-listers including Jennifer Aniston, Woody Harrelson and Jim Carey. Tourism brings an unacceptable veneer of respectability to a vile regime, runs the campaign's logic.
The group also uses media-friendly guerilla tactics. Its activists recently hijacked the Qantas annual general meeting in Perth over Jetstar's decision to include Rangoon in its route network. Lonely Planet is another high-profile Australian company to feature on the campaign's "black list" of companies "propping up the regime".
Yet there has been a shift in recent years from other pro-Burmese pressure groups away from this hardline approach. The Free Burma Coalition, comprised mainly of exiled Burmese, now fully supports tourism and travel to Myanmar, believing the benefits of contact to outweigh the implied show of support travel brings. In August, Aung San Suu Kyi, the jailed beacon of Burmese democracy and postergirl for freedom activists around the world, appeared to reverse her previously vocal opposition to tourism in comments leaked to the international press.
It is likely that Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) will stop short of a full u-turn until such a policy shift can be used as a bargaining chip to guarantee next year's planned election. Unlike the Government's big foreign currency earners, petroleum exploration and logging, tourism's economic impact is tiny. But its political impact is huge and any NLD endorsement has the potential to unlock the pent-up demand for travel to this unspoilt, quintessentially Indochinese land.
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