/CORRECTED REPEAT/DEVELOPMENT: Pattaya a Reminder of What War Has Cost Sri Lanka

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

SATTAHIP, Thailand, Sep 17 2002 (IPS) - If the Sri Lankan ministers talking peace with Tamil Tiger leaders here were to pause from the negotiations and drive to the nearby seaside town of Pattaya, they would find in its teeming number of tourists a poignant reminder of Sri Lanka’s huge economic losses due to its 19-year ethnic conflict.

The contrast between Sri Lanka’s and Thailand’s tourism picture is enormous.

Thailand’s mecca of mass tourism, Pattaya, has gained at the expense of battle-scared Sri Lanka. This has been so particularly since 1983 — the year hundreds from the Tamil minority community were killed by rampaging mobs from the Sinhalese majority, triggering the rebellion in search of a separate Tamil homeland.

That year also marks the date when Sri Lanka fell off the tourist map, a fact reflected in its dwindling number of tourist arrivals, hotel room availability and tourist dollars.

With its offerings of sun, sea and sand by day, and throbbing clubs, pubs and go-go-bars by night, Pattaya draws nearly three million of the close to 10 million foreign tourists who visit Thailand every year.

This sprawling resort town, washed by the waters of the Gulf of Thailand, has over 10,000 rooms on offer for tourists, ranging from the plush comfort of up-market hotels to guesthouses for the backpacker crowd.

Located about 150 kilometres south-east of Bangkok, Pattaya earns about “three billion baht (69.77 million dollars) a year, through both the formal and informal tourism sector,” says Brendan Richards of the ‘Pattaya Mail’, a local English-language weekly. “There is everything available for everyone.”

Sri Lanka, by contrast, only attracted around 430,000 tourists in 1999. That is, to date, the highest number of tourists to arrive in the country in a single year, say officials of the South Asian island nation.

The entire country has only 13,500 rooms in which to house tourists, according to Sri Lankan tourism authorities. In 1999, the country’s best year in tourism, Sri Lanka earned close to 20 million rupees (U.S. 208,400 dollars).

“Sri Lanka was a major long-haul tourist destination like Thailand, because it offered the similar conditions,” says Anita Pleumarom of the Tourism Investigation and Monitoring Team, a Bangkok-based non-governmental organisation (NGO).

“But due to the conflict, the tourist flow has been redirected to Thailand,” Pleumarom explains.

But now, with the first round of peace talks between Colombo and the Tamil Tigers underway since Monday, Sri Lankan government officials are desperately trying to use the climate of peace to get the country back on the global tourism radar screen, both in terms of tourism and other activities to boost the country’s sagging economy.

“The circumstance in the country have changed since the ceasefire,” Gamini Lakshman Peiris, minister of constitutional affairs and chief negotiator on the Sri Lankan peace team, told IPS on the sidelines of the talks.

“The most important thing is for tangible benefits to flow in, helping the people of the country,” Peiris says.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), as the Tiger rebels are formally known, and the Sri Lankan government formally signed a ceasefire agreement in February as part of their journey towards striking a peace deal.

The seven-month lull in the war has been the longest such period the country has enjoyed since hostilities first broke out almost two decades ago.

Over 60,000 people have died in this civil war, which has pitted government forces against the LTTE, and over two million people have been forced from their homes.

Much of the fighting has occurred in the country’s north-east region, where the Tigers have been battling to establish an independent state, Tamil Eelam, for the Tamils living there.

Sri Lanka’s new political climate has also attracted the interest of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which has joined Colombo in unveiling an “Investing-in-Peace” campaign.

This initiative aims to invite captains of finance and industry to “rediscover Sri Lanka” and “invest in peace,” states a UNDP press statement.

“The campaign’s premise is that the support of the business community — domestic, international and Diaspora — will be indispensable for kick-starting the economy and accelerating and sustaining the peace momentum,” the UNDP statement says.

And as part of this drive, Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe flew to New York this week to seek support from a range of corporate, finance and political figures.

“The first stages of outreach to the business world coincides with the start of formal peace talks in Thailand,” adds the UNDP statement.

On the cards thereafter will be a series of “Invest-in-Peace” programmes in other regions that have economic interests in Sri Lanka. Then, these events will lead up to a Colombo Investors Forum in the spring of 2003.

Colombo’s desperate bid to revive the economy can be understood in the wake of the country’s dismal economic numbers.

Last year was the Sri Lankan economy’s worst since independence in 1948. It recorded its first contraction with a negative real growth rate of 1.4 percent, the Sri Lankan Central Bank stated in April.

“The economic slowdown was widespread, with negative growth rates recorded in all major sectors,” according to the bank’s report.

All of this is why “attracting tourists back to Sri Lanka is one way of reviving the economy,” says Hewa Palihakkara, the Sri Lankan ambassador to Thailand. “There is a lot we can learn from Thailand, one of the great success stories, if not the best one, in the hospitality industry,” he adds.