Travel & Tourism as a movement for peace

Renton de Alwis

If travel & tourism is considered an enterprise that moved people from one destination to another for seeking pleasure, then that is not the activity that I knew for over three decades and sought to serve in from time to time. Tourism is about the creation of human understanding, about making this world of ours’ smaller, more beautiful and meaningful. It is an instrument that facilitates our appreciation of each other’s ways, the diversity of the environments in which we live, appreciating the common bondage that exists among all of this and the need to ensure its sustenance. It is about love, peace and caring.

When I wrote and published this column in November 2011, it was a time when the conceptual basis, I held dear to my heart about travel and tourism was under threat. Fear, suspicion and terror had overtaken the goodness we had sought. I leave you to be the judge and leave you to determine the why, how and what of it.


As far as I know the former President of India Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam is not only a renowned aerospace engineer and scientist. He is the chief proponent of the idea of making India a fully fledged knowledge economy by 2020 and is indeed a simple, unassuming and prominent man of peace. We heard of him being frisked for an inspection to determine if he was in the possession of explosives at New York’s JFK airport recently. Upon intervention at the highest level, an apology has been rendered by the US government to him personally as well as to the government of India for appropriate procedures for expedited screening of dignitaries had not been followed.

Checkmate

As the Bard had it if “All’s well that ends well” we could rest with that apology. Yet, what is significant about this event and several others like it from all over the world, at airports, ports, boarder crossings, entrance to buildings etc is that a fear psychosis has leaden over, our otherwise rational behaviour. Events leading to and the post 9/11 and events that have unfolded in the terrorism front have been the cause and effect of what I would deem at the very basic level, as a clash of civilisations for ownership and/or control of vital resources, restraining the subduing influence on the once dominant belief systems, socio-economic systems and it has become the like of a game of chess, where intelligent manoeuvring of black or white pieces lead to an end game of checkmate or stalemate.

In this context, unlike what is intended in the chess game’s outcome, mistrust is growing in heaps and bounds between nations, people within nations, the 1% and the 99% of the ‘Occupy’ movements, the marginalised and the powerful. We live in times where uncertainty is at a peak all around us. Although we have not had wars the magnitude of the ‘World Wars’ now for several decades, there is not a single day when a battle for supremacy is not fought somewhere on this earth. Presented with different labels i.e. ‘wars on terror’, ‘wars for democracy’ or ‘wars for justice’ they all signify the same need and greed for power, maintenance of the status-quo in ownership of vital resources and establishing dominance over others.

We had hope of ‘change we can believe in’ but that has now fizzled into being ‘business as usual’ and the same games are being played but with different strategic thrusts.

Bold initiative

It is here that I commend the initiative of three of my colleagues in travel and tourism. At the recently concluded World Travel Market (WTM) in London, Imtiaz Muqbil,   Executive Editor of Travel Impact Newswire, John Bell, London-based travel editor/broadcaster/director and former chairman of the British Guild of Travel Writers and Don Ross, the Bangkok-based Editor of Travel Trade Report have taken on themselves to touch the conscience of the travel and tourism industry in issuing a joint statement on the issue of a ‘potential attack on Iran’ as had been highlighted in the London Evening Standard (LES) thrust into the hands of delegates on the closing day of the WTM.

Upon page after page reportage of the Eurozone crisis, the LES had a story with the heading ‘A military strike on Iran’s secret nuclear facilities might be the “least bad option”, the head of Britain’s intelligence and security committee said today.’

More crisis

This statement is significant for it refers to the potential unfolding of another crisis. According to the statement “the first crisis is already here, and the travel & tourism industry is feeling the pinch. Europe is no longer what it once was. Times are hard, debt is soaring, people worry about their jobs. There is palpable worry about what the future will bring.”

They questioned if the travel & tourism industry can afford a second potential crisis? Iran? and went on to state “let the record show that the WTM, one of the largest global gatherings of industry decision-makers, ended with not a word being said about the consequences of an attack on Iran, and certainly no mention about even trying to do anything to deter or prevent it.

I first heard of the potency tourism had for peace in 1983. It was a conference of the World Tourism Organisation held in Manila, Philippines and the key note speaker was our own then tourism minister and speaker of our Parliament, Dr. Ananda Tissa de Alwis. His skills in oratory were superb and is said to have held the audience spellbound with his plea for tourism to be a movement for and of generating peace on earth. The speech was later published in full and was widely circulated among members of the international tourism community.

Go-look-see

Ironically, later in the same year we in Sri Lanka saw our own peace being violated. That breach was to last for nearly three decades deeply hurting our nation’s conscience and ethos and impacted negatively on the day to day life of our people. Tourism was indeed one of the first victims of the terrorism that was unleashed. It is only now, that we are able to breathe a sigh of relief with that phase of overt terrorism and separatism behind us. We see covert attempts at rekindling ill feeling, placing blockades on the road to reconciliation and peaceful coexistence emerging, making it necessary for us as a nation to be vigilant and careful at all times in dealing with such. As brethren of all races we need to understand that dignity, peace and honour are not easy to come by and it takes lots of hard and honest work by many to ensure that we re-establish these values.

Many other movers and shakers of the travel and tourism industry and concerned leadership of the global community have often pointed to the benefits travel and tourism can bring, to the larger human community. When people travel and interact with others from different cultures, both internationally and locally, it not only enhances the understanding and the levels of appreciation they will have of each other but will help minimise mind-made barriers we have as nations, regions, races, holders of allegiance to faiths, cultures and systems. It also helps promote economic and trade-ties where sharing and caring can be a hallmark quality.

To make this happen we need to look at tourism beyond the statistics, growth rates, resorts and the dreamy good-life offered. We need to look at its core as a movement of peace and make that an integral part of the conscience that guides this industry.  

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Steps at Mihintale, Sri Lanka