Hostage crisis takes a big bite out of Philippines tourism

MANILA — The Philippine tourist industry is reeling from an international hostage crisis, with arrivals expected to plunge at least 9% this year due to the acts of a small band of Muslim extremists in a remote corner of the country, an official said on Tuesday.

The US, 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% 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 US is still our biggest market," Tourism Secretary Gemma Araneta said on the 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.

The government now hopes to attract 2-million tourists this year, down 9% from calendar 1999 and 13% off the target, she said.

Aside from the Abu Sayyaf, the government is also fighting a larger Muslim separatist guerrilla group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, on Mindanao island.

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.

However, 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 Centre 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.