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Tours of Burma by university alumni
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The alumni associations of the Universities of Wisconsin, Southern California, Washington and Michigan are organizing tours of Burma despite evidence that the tourism industry helps to support the brutal military junta. Your voice can help change their minds about going ahead with these ill-advised tours. Recently, concerns raised by you and other activists about the financial support that tourism provides to the Burma military regime caused three U.S. institutions – the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, the Asia Society and the Smithsonian Institution – to cancel their planned trips. The alumni groups plan to visit Burma from Oct. 2-14, and fast action by advocates is needed to convince them that the tours are ill-advised. According to their websites, they will visit Burma for six days including a four-day cruise down the legendary Irrawaddy River. These alumni associations should follow the lead of the three respected cultural institutions mentioned above and cancel the Burma trips. Nowhere in the alumni associations' literature do they mention the ruling Burma military regime's torture chambers, prisons, and forced labor camps or the fact that the leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD), Aung San Suu Kyi, is under house arrest. Nor do they talk about the thousands of ethnic women who have been raped as part of a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign. The Burma Democracy Movement led by Nobel Peace Prize recipient Aung San Suu Kyi, has called for a boycott of all travel to Burma as a way of expressing their opposition to the military regime. The NLD says, "Burma is in economic, social and political crisis. The regime spends more than 50 per cent of its budget on the military, far more than it spends on health, so the people are now facing starvation. There is inflation of 400 percent.” The United Nations has linked forced labor to Burma's tourism industry and the government receives over 30 percent of the funds spent on tourism. |
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