RP tries to shed off bad int’l image

Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier fought the "Thrilla in Manila" in 1975, the Pope visited in 1981 and 1995 and the Miss Universe pageant was held in 1994.

Next year, Oscar-nominated American actor Brad Pitt will be in town for location shooting of another of filmdom’s endless war epics.

Rated low as a tourist destination among the Asia-Pacific’s sun-and-sand destinations, the Philippines has launched a campaign to shed its image as a land of kidnapping and violence.

"If Hollywood actors are able to live here and shoot (movies) peacefully, it will bolster our efforts to promote the Philippines internationally," Glodell Medina, a senior official at the Department of Tourism, told Reuters.

But it may be a long, hard climb for a country dubbed the "kidnap capital of Asia."

Eleven days after US missionary Martin Burnham and Filipina nurse Edibora Yap, held hostage by Abu Sayyaf guerrillas for over a year, were killed during a military rescue operation in the jungles of Mindanao, the rebels snatched four Indonesian crewmen of a tugboat passing through the country’s southern seas.

"People are too scared to travel to the Philippines after hearing about the recent cases," a tour consultant in Singapore said.

In Manila itself, residents of one neighborhood awoke one June morning to news that a South Korean diplomat had been found dead on a street in Marikina City hours after a Filipino befriended him and invited him for drinks.

Later in the month, 13 people were wounded in a shootout between police and armed criminals during morning rush hour on EDSA, one of the metropolis’ busiest streets.

Unsafe image

"The Philippines definitely does not rank in the top 10 destinations for travel in Asia-Pacific," Alicia Seah, assistant general manager of Sino-America (UIC) Tours in Singapore, told Reuters. "The majority of tourists have a perception that it is unsafe."

"It is not so much that the Philippines is unfamiliar, as it is that the adverse publicity that the country has received in the last couple of months that is negatively affecting tourism there," she added.

The manager at the Dos Palmas resort in Palawan, where Burnham and his wife Gracia were abducted in May 2001, said his foreign clientele had fallen by more than half since the kidnapping, which was staged by guerrillas linked to Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network.

"The fact that we were in the headlines was damaging," Dos Palmas general manager Ivan Lim said, adding that security around the resort had since been tightened to prevent future raids.

Police have also bolstered security around other popular resorts as part of Manila’s effort to rid the archipelago of its image as an unsafe tourist destination.

"We have 5,870 college graduates who are going to go into the police force this July. We’ve tightened up. Our airport has been selected as one of the safest in the world, in the top 10... Beach resorts are alerted," Tourism Secretary Richard Gordon said.

In the wake of the Korean diplomat’s killing, police set up a special force of 1,700 men to protect embassies and other key foreign establishments in Manila.

Kidnap for ransom has become a thriving business in the Philippines, with gangs collecting P211 million pesos in ransom from families of 240 victims during 2001, according to anti-crime watch groups.

While statistics related to kidnapping may be declining this year — 92 victims and ransom payments totalling 64 million pesos from January to mid-June — the country’s unglamorous image has persisted, largely because the media have played up high-profile cases, officials say.

A touch of hollywood

This is where Manila hopes Brad Pitt will come in.

"I went up to Hollywood and I spoke with some producers there and they seemed very enthusiastic about coming down to the Philippines," Gordon said in an interview. "We’re expecting these movies to start filming here by January 2003."

He said Pitt had signed up to do a war film entitled "Fertig" for Sony-Columbia Pictures.

Another movie, "Great Raid" by producer Paula Wagner, was to be filmed extensively in Corregidor and Bataan, historic World War II battlegrounds just west of Manila.

"I think it (tourism) is going to be improving," Gordon said. "The Abu Sayyaf has nowhere to go. They’re going to be chased everywhere they go. They don’t have a future."

Gordon downplayed fears that the Burnham kidnap tragedy would scare foreign tourists.

"This is the jungle you’re talking about. This is a place where tourists don’t go...Why do we make it sound like the Philippines is the only one with a problem?" Gordon asked.

About 1.8 million tourists visited the Philippines last year. "I can’t complain... It shows that there are people who are still loyal to us," Gordon said. "I’d like to think that we can hit three million by 2003. It’s my hope."