Characteristically, from Bali in Indonesia
to Phuket in Thailand to Laos, Western backpackers
led the Southeast Asian tourist charge that began
in the 1960s. Spending little but staying long,
even the most chauvinistic destinations were able
to accommodate this cohort in tourism planning.
They were not, of course, the only
tourists.
Famously, as well, during the
Vietnam War Bangkok emerged as
the
American military's "rest and recreation"
destination of choice. Still, Thailand was then
only attracting some 200,000 tourists a year. For
Cambodia, the figure was some 60,000 before 1970
when war closed in.
But as tourism
increased dramatically with cheap air travel in
the 1980s, countries such as Thailand and
Indonesia began to cash in, upgrading
infrastructure, offering visas upon arrival and
other incentives. Mass tourism had arrived,
drawing in visitors in the millions. Westerners
were soon joined by Japanese and other Asian
travelers, including those from the rising middle
classes of the newly industrialized economies.
Today they are being joined by perhaps the largest
wave of tourist-travelers to descend upon the
region, those from China.
The concept of
resort and package tourism came to be replicated
across the market economies of Southeast Asia,
trading upon exoticism, tropical climate and often
the (false) promise of security offered under the
mix of military/authoritarian regimes that ran
these countries. I recall being handed an
emergency tourist police phone number at Manila
airport during the Marcos dictatorship in the
early 1970s.
On the demand side, tourists
were serviced by the production of increasingly
informative and sometimes sophisticated
guidebooks. Tourist dollars began to figure high
in the economies of the region. Multiplier effects
rippled through the service industry, rewarding
investors but also often reaching into local
communities, as in Bali. International tourism
became a matter of high-stakes state policy.
Across Asia even language change was engineered to
communicate with outsiders.
Cambodia, Laos
and Vietnam were not part of this boom, and I,
plausibly, in August 1974 was the last visitor to
Siem Reap, site of the fabled Angkor temple
complex, as the communist Khmer Rouge took over.
Laos and its communist ally Vietnam long held the
tourist invasion at bay by simply not issuing
visas. (I was evicted in December 1975 though
re-invited in 1980.) In Laos that policy lingered
into the mid-1990s. While pro-market Vietnam has
gone even further than Cambodia in wooing foreign
investment and rides an economic boom, tourism in
Laos, albeit rising, pretty much languishes along
with its economy.
But in Cambodia, it
would take almost two decades - three and a half
years of death and trauma under Khmer Rouge rule
(1975-1979) followed by several years of
Vietnamese occupation and armed resistance and,
commencing in 1992 a major UN peacekeeping
operation, before even the basic security
conditions were met for tourism recovery.
Notoriously, the UN mission and
accompanying aid workers - the first returning
tourists as it were - also bequeathed unintended
infrastructure in the form of "karaoke bars" and
hotels, and veritably launched the organized
prostitution that has in recent years given
Cambodia the dubious reputation of premier sex
tourism, even child prostitution, destination. A
culture of corruption was also born out of
international aid largesse, whether from loose
accounting, naivety or other reasons. Still, the
"peace" gave pause for pioneering restoration work
on parts of the Angkor complex by Indian and
Japanese experts, leading to its inscription as a
world heritage monument in 1992. All that was
missing were the expected tourists.
Cambodia attracts
investment Just as post-conflict Cambodia
ditched state socialism in favor of market
capitalism, so the first foreign investments began
to trickle in, including in the hotel and tourism
industry. The expansion of tourism in the new-born
Kingdom of Cambodia has matched the nation's
political vicissitudes. By 1993 "tourism" had
arrived, at least in the capital, Phnom Penh,
though still not without its dangers as more than
one foreign entrepreneur met with "accident" or
even execution, in one case at the hands of
renegade Khmer Rouge.
Memories are
undoubtedly short but when, in July 1997, the
Cambodian strongman, Prime Minister Hun Sen,
launched a preemptive coup against co-Premier
Prince Ranariddh and extrajudicial killings
continued for more than a week, certain categories
of foreigners - Japanese civilians included -
scrambled aboard Australian evacuation flights
mounted from Malaysia. Thai visitors will,
however, remember the rampage against Thai
property in the Cambodian capital in January 2003
following the alleged national slight by a Thai
movie actress who claimed that Angkor was stolen
from Thailand. That time around, Thai nationals
were evacuated by Thai military aircraft.
The point is that tourists are notoriously
risk averse. Following the terror attack in Bali
of October 2002, hotel occupancy slumped to 5%
from 70% and, following significant recovery, took
another hit with the second terror bombing of
October 2005. The impact upon the service industry
was vast, leaving many of the local victims to
lament the relative decline of agriculture and
fishing, which had sustained their livelihood and
distinct culture since time immemorial.
Notoriously, in the Bali case, outsiders,
including the family of former president Suharto
and military interests, came to dominate prime
land and hotels at the expense of locals. The
World Bank, which pushed Indonesia to develop this
industry in the early 1980s, would have no answer.
The SARS outbreak in 2003 further
depressed Asian tourism, just as the great Asian
tsunami of December 2004 devastated the resorts
and livelihoods around the Bay of Bengal and
Andaman Sea. The benefits of tourism can also be
counter-cyclical, as demonstrated during the Asian
economic crisis of 1997-98 when Western and
Japanese tourist arrivals in such hard-hit
countries as Thailand and Indonesia actually
peaked, in part taking advantage of cheaper
currencies.
Having emphasized the
increasingly Asian character of mass tourism, it
is noteworthy that, in the case of Cambodia, it
was only in 2002 that Japanese arrivals (at least
as recorded at Phnom Penh International Airport),
overtook those of the US, the Association of
Southeast Asian Nations countries, France and
China. Out of a total of about 1.4 million
international visitor arrivals to Cambodia in
2005, Japan registered 137,849, ahead of the US,
France, UK and China (59,153). Surprisingly, South
Korea topped the list at 216,594 arrivals. To
offer some perspective, the number of Japanese
tourists visiting Indonesia peaked in 2000 at
643,794, eclipsing Australia (459,994) and South
Korea (213,762), and far ahead of the US
(176,379). In that year foreign visitor arrivals
in Indonesia exceeded 5 million. Thailand, which
drew more than 11 million tourists a year before
the tsunami, now actively targets Chinese tourists
(1 million in 2005), second only to Japanese, long
the dominant market.
The down
side The down side of international
tourism, from environmental pollution to cultural
loss to human trafficking to the spread of
HIV/AIDS is now well established, the subject of
international forums, public hand wringing and
non-governmental organization activism. Cambodia
and the Siem Reap area is no exception. Still the
facts are stark in the case of Angkor tourism.
Rescued by UN intervention from temple robbers -
or "tomb raiders" in the Hollywood version - the
fabled monument complex now risks being
overwhelmed by human predators and their detritus
along with degradation from auto emissions, unless
serious planning and policing kicks in. The same
goes for environmental planning amidst a hotel
construction boom. But, policing and planning in
Cambodia?
Consider the facts. Given that
US$5 billion has been dispensed to Cambodia by
international creditors over the past decade, the
record is spotty. After the 1997 coup, some donors
such as the US suspended aid. Others such as Japan
continued existing aid programs but refused to
initiate new ones. With aid resumed by 1998,
donors meeting in Tokyo focused upon fiscal
reform, public administration, demobilization, and
forestry and environmental reform. Political
reform was absent. It was only in 2004 that the
World Bank called on bilateral and multilateral
donors to link aid to Cambodia with economic and
political reform. According to foreign policy
analyst Ronald Bruce St John, growing donor
attention to corruption merely addresses the
symptoms of the problem rather than the causes. In
this argument, the buck stops with the executive
power and the political elite, which has it in
their hands to manipulate national resources.
Some analysis of who gets what, why and
how in Siem Reap would also be illuminating in
light of new top-end luxury hotel expansion and in
light of the experience of Indonesia (Bali) where
lack of transparency and accountability led to
wide-ranging abuses across the development and
class spectrum. As Matt Gross wrote of tourism
development in Cambodia in the travel pages of the
New York Times, "Villagers are routinely evicted
at gunpoint from their land by the wealthy and
well connected ... "
Enjoy your stay, the
natives are really nice, but don't ask too many
hard questions.
Geoffrey Gunn is
Professor of International Relations, Nagasaki
University and a specialist on Southeast Asia.
