EDITORIAL – Travel advisories

With the deadly bombing in Bali, Indonesia and continuing reports about Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda moving its base of operations to Southeast Asia, no foreign government is going to revise its travel advisory on the region. It is the job of di-plomats, who recommend the issuance of the advisories, to warn their nationals about the risks of traveling to certain areas. We saw what happened after the Bali bombing: Australians blamed their government for not giving them proper warning about the possibility of such an attack. And we saw what happened in the United States after the attacks on Sept. 11 last year: security agencies were blamed for failure to detect the terrorist plot. No government functionary wants blame laid at his doorstep for terror-related deaths.

Governments that issue such warnings, however, should consider what the World Tourism Organization and affected countries have to say. Millions of people in the developing world rely on tourism and its downstream industries for their livelihood. Tourism has suffered enough since the global economic slowdown in 2000, and if the situation worsens as a result of the terrorist threat, it could aggravate poverty. As experts have pointed out, poverty creates fertile ground for terrorist recruitment. Those travel advisories, if sweeping and issued indiscriminately, could drive desperate people into the arms of Islamists.

For now the best that affected countries can do is to work so that coverage of travel warnings can be limited to particular areas – those where terrorists and kidnappers have struck, for example. In our case, these include Basilan, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi, which aren’t tourist destinations in the first place, as well as Zamboanga City and Metro Manila.

The affected countries must then show the world their determination to fight the terrorist threat. This requires effective intelligence gathering and law enforcement, which should lead to the arrest of suspected terrorists before they can wreak havoc. This requires keeping arrested suspects detained, giving them no chance of escaping, and then pro-secuting and convicting them. The battle against terrorists requires top-caliber work from the military and police as well as an efficient criminal justice system. The lack of these elements in our country poses a bigger problem than any travel advisory.