Hostage crisis takes a big bite out of
Philippines tourism
MANILA, Sept 5 (AFP) - the
Philippine tourist industry is reeling from an international hostage crisis, with arrivals
seen plunging at least nine percent this year due to the acts of a small band of Muslim
extremists in a remote corner of the country, an official said Tuesday.
The United States, its biggest
tourist market, slapped a travel advisory on the southwestern section of the Philippines
last week after Abu Sayyaf guerrillas kidnapped a young American Muslim, Jeffrey
Schilling.
Visitor numbers were down 1.49
percent from a year earlier to 1.07 million in the six months to June after the separatist
gunmen raided the Malaysian resort Sipadan and shipped 21 tourist and resort staff
hostages to their southern Philippines stronghold of Jolo island.
"We are really very
worried because the United States is still our biggest market," Tourism Secretary
Gemma Araneta said over radio station DZMM.
Tourism is a key source of
foreign exchange for the Philippines, which still has to fully recover from the Asian
crisis.
Araneta said it was now
"unlikely" that the full-year target of 2.3 million arrivals would be achieved
"because of all the things that are happening in the different areas of
Mindanao," the southern third of the Philippine archipelago and the homeland of a
sizeable Muslim minority.
Aside from the Abu Sayyaf, the
government is also fighting a larger Muslim separatist guerrilla group, the Moro Islamic
Liberation Front, on Mindanao island.
The government now hopes to
attract two million tourists this year, down nine percent from calendar 1999 and 13
percent off the target, she added.
Following the August 28
abduction of Schilling, the US State Department warned US citizens "to avoid travel
to the southern and western areas of the island of Mindanao."
"It's quite unfair"
because few tourists or investors visit the hotbeds of the Philippines' lingering Muslim
insurgency, Araneta said.
But she conceded that "in
the eyes of the world, everytime somebody is kidnapped there are no distinctions on
whether the victim is a tourist or not."
She said US travel advisories
also had the distinction of being "very general" unlike Japan, she said, which
maps out precise locations to avoid and rates them by degree of danger.
The kidnappers threatened to
behead the American hostage unless Washington freed the convicted World Trade Center
bomber Ramzi Youssef and two other Islamic militants from US jails.
His abduction was a blow to
government efforts to fully resolve the Sipadan kidnappings.
Aides of chief government
negotiator Roberto Aventajado are scheduled to fly to the southern Philippines later
Tuesday to pave the ground for the release of two Finns, a Frenchman, a German and a
Filipino from the Sipadan group, as well as two French journalists by the end of the week.
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