Myanmar: is it time for tourists to return?

21.07.2023 - 08:33 / roughguides.com

The largest, most diverse and least-known country in Southeast Asia, Myanmar is now firmly back on the tourist map after decades of isolation.

It lures visitors with its stunning temples, sublime landscapes and time-warped traditional culture – but the considerable ethnic unrest still affecting parts of the country cannot be ignored.

So, is it ethical to visit? And, if you do, what’s the best way to make sure both you and your hosts get the most out of your time in the country?

Here, co-author of The Rough Guide to Myanmar Gavin Thomasshares what you need to know before a trip:

In 1996 the National League for Democracy, led by Aung San Suu Kyi, asked for a tourism boycott of Myanmar in protest at the despotic military government then ruling the country – and as a way of depriving it of much-needed foreign funds.

Most would-be visitors and overseas tour operators respected the call to stay out of the country until democracy returned.

Myanmar, Bago, the huge statue of the reclining Buddha (Shwethalyaung Buddha) © Gimas/Shutterstock

That’s right. The NLD lifted its boycott in 2010, and Myanmar’s unexpectedly rapid return to democracy – with an NLD government elected in 2015 in the first free and fair elections in half a century – has gone faster and more peacefully than anyone might have dared expect.

No, sadly not. There’s still considerable ethnic unrest in remote areas of the country, with fighting continuing sporadically between the government and Shan and Kachin separatists.

Most alarming, however, is the long-running oppression of the Rohingya, a stateless Muslim people living in northwest Rakhine state, who are denied citizenship and almost all basic human rights.

Most Rohingya families have been living in the country since colonial times, but the government considers them illegal immigrants and insists they go “home” to Bangladesh. The Rohingya have been suffering staggering oppression for many years, although the situation has recently dramatically worsened, with thousands killed and many more displaced.

Any hopes that the Rohingya would find justice under the new NLD government have also been swiftly crushed. Aung San Suu Kyi’s own party appears as uninterested in their desperate plight as the previous military regime.

Indeed the Rohingya might plausibly ask for a tourism boycott of the country to protest their brutal treatment under Aung San Suu Kyi – a savagely ironic turn of events, given the years she spent fighting against government oppression and human-rights abuses.

Fishermen in Inle Lake at sunrise, Inle, Shan State, Myanmar © lkunl/Shutterstock

Dodgy businessmen linked to unsavoury army figures certainly haven’t vanished overnight – some might argue that they only allowed political reforms