Decline of tourism

World Tourism Day fell on September 27, but passed with barely a ripple in Pakistan which once had a thriving tourism industry. It was a popular destination for adventure tourists trekking in Northern Areas (now Gilgit-Baltistan) and cultural and religious tourists from the world over who would come to the shrines at Uch Sharif, the Thatta necropolis and the ruins of Mohenjo-Daro. Hunza had an entire economy that was largely dependent on tourism and banks lent freely to those wanting to build hotels and guest houses. Most of those that were built are ghosts of their former selves now, and the tourism industry nationally, both domestic and international, has all but collapsed. The Swat valley was a minor idyll, and one of the few places in Pakistan where ski-tourism was well established. The Taliban put an end to that, as they have done for much of the mountaineering that foreign groups used to enjoy, contributing as they do to a sense of insecurity and fear when it comes to selecting Pakistan as a destination.

Swat has enormous potential for tourism. It is more accessible than Gilgit-Baltistan, is home to a vast range of historic artefacts, and between 1988 and 2004 tourism was a backbone industry. Today, not only is tourism stumbling year-on-year but local people say that the government has no interest in preserving and maintaining the very cultural objects and sites that bring in the tourists in the first place. Some of them are simply decaying and neglected; others are being wilfully destroyed by those who see them as relics of an idolatrous past. What the Taliban have not desecrated, natural disasters such as the floods of 2010 — which destroyed about 128 hotels — have. It is still possible to re-invigorate tourism in Swat and elsewhere in the country, but that needs political will, something difficult to find in these distracted days.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 29^th, 2014.

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