VIEWS FROM A BRIT By MIKE WOOTTON
This does lead to question, is the Philippines a particularly
dangerous place for foreigners? In general I think it is not.
The prospect of walking around Charing Cross station in central
London at 11:30 at night is to me a much scarier prospect
than walking on Makati Avenue at the same time.
I was interviewed last week on the subject of non-Philippines
government travel advisories on the Philippines. These are
the guidance notes produced by the Foreign Affairs Departments
of various countries and available to their citizens who may
be traveling abroad. Because I knew in advance what the subject
of the interview was, I was able to do a bit of research—they
make a pretty horrifying read on the Philippines. In fact,
if I was an infrequent traveler and was considering a trip
to the Philippines, I would certainly think twice about it.
This makes me wonder who the writers of these things perceive
as their audience—“we advise you to exercise a
high degree of caution in the Philippines because of the high
risk of terrorist attack . . .” “. . . Terrorists
are planning attacks against a range of targets including
places frequented by foreigners . . .” “some reports
suggest that terrorists could target sites in Metro Manila
. . .,” and so on and so on. There is a great similarity
between the advisories of the Western nations. Because of
this I checked out the Australian travel advisory for Australians
visiting the UK—“we advise you to exercise caution
and monitor events that might affect your safety in the United
Kingdom because of the risk of terrorist attack!” Travel
advisories have to be read in context, i.e., compared to other
advisories for other places.
This does lead to question, is the Philippines a particularly
dangerous place for foreigners? In general I think it is not.
The prospect of walking around Charing Cross station in central
London at 11:30 at night is to me a much scarier prospect
than walking on Makati Avenue at the same time. There are
different types of threat, of course, the risk of being subjected
to random violence in the UK is greater than is the risk of
being a subject of terrorist action, whereas I suspect that
this is the other way round in the Philippines, i.e., the
risk of being subject to a terrorist attack is probably greater
than the risk of being subject to random violence, for a foreigner.
But the risk is fairly small.
It is this sort of negative news about the Philippines that
reaches the media in the West. I do think that people can
be lead to believe that the Philippines is a fairly dangerous
and risky place. Anybody traveling anywhere in the less developed
world puts themselves at risk of some sort of physical injury—all
that is needed is to use some common sense, much as any Brit
would in the United Kingdom—people know that if they
go to a soccer match they are putting themselves at risk,
if they walk around Charing Cross station at 11:30 at night
they also know that they are putting themselves at risk. Terrorism,
on the other hand, is by definition random, and is intended
to terrorize. Its whole purpose is to make people think twice
about going somewhere or doing something, and to disrupt the
normal patterns of society. There have been and still are
terrorist activities in the Philippines as there have been
recently terrorist actions in the UK, but these things should
not be allowed to stop or greatly disrupt normal business
activities, if they do then they succeed—probably to
the longer term disadvantage of the terrorists themselves—it’s
difficult to create jobs in environments where people won’t
invest for fear of terrorism!
So, it is right and responsible to give warnings to those
travelers going to foreign parts—the Philippines being
the case in point here, but please let’s get the well
intentioned advisories in perspective and hope that we don’t
actually dissuade potential investors from coming to the Philippines
for fear of terrorist actions, otherwise the terrorists will
have prevailed . . .
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