LAND OF ABANDONED TREASURES [Archives:1999/03/Law & Diplomacy]
January 18 1999
Yemen’s tourist industry was recently badly hit by a series of unfortunate incidents. Kidnapping, terrorism and other forms of violence have driven away the visitors.
Mr. Zoreda visited Yemen twice over the last few weeks. On his second visit, Hatem Ba-Mehriz of the Yemen Times talked to him and filed the following interview.
Q: Could you tell us about the WTO?
A: The WTO is an International organization founded by 130 countries which are represented in it. That is the government side. It also has another side which brings representatives of over 400 of the most important companies in the world dealing with tourism and International Association and organizations and major Airlines. The basic
A: Not many people know that tourism is the biggest job provider industry and in most cases an average of about 10% of the gross national product in over all comes from tourism, in some countries they exceeded that figure and in some it was smaller, but in average tourism is a 10% of the gross national product in major number of countries.
Q: How do you measure up Yemen with other destinations?
A: I don’t have the figures of the tourists arrival in Yemen, although I have heard that you still are working on a reliable manner how to measure the statistics of the number of tourist arrivals. In terms of the product I can say Yemen can be categorized within the countries that provide a mixture of everything, in other words if we agree that tourism is a way of satisfying emotion, I would say Yemen has all the ingredients for satisfying people interested in culture, those interested in adventures and people interested in contact with people in short Yemen has a lot of potentials, but honestly speaking it needs to improve its product. The cultural heritage that you have is astonishing but also in a very poor conditions, that is the question of bringing together the local communities more into the picture that tourism can be an important source of income for them complementary or substitutely.
Q: What do you think are the problems the Yemeni tourism market faces?
A: A purpose of the council is to bring together the private sector with the public sector in order to make tourism a better recognized industry among society and among other governmental authorities which in some cases lacks understanding of the importance of tourism as one of the major and fundamental sector to encourage development and prosperity.
Q: Is this your first visit to Yemen?
A: Yes, this is my first visit to Yemen. I am on a completely private visit. I came with my wife for a pure tourism purposes, I had heard a lot about Yemen from friends who had come here. My wife is a Historian and we both are very ken in cultural oriented travel trips and Yemen was our missing country to come, I must say that we have enjoyed your beautiful villages, houses and the beautiful small towns and we think Yemen is a country that deserve much more attention in terms of tourism attraction and has an enormous potential if the authorities and the private sector here believe in tourism and put all the efforts so that tourism becomes everyday a more important sector, Yemen has all the ingredients in order to become a very highly successful tourist country if they want so.
Q: Do you have any specific comments?
A: When I was in Shibam (Hadarmut) which is one of the wonders of your country I was touched by it, but at the same time it was extremely dirty. It is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen but I must also say it is one of the most dirtiest places I have seen, it is a pity such a wonder is not a little bit more taken care of in a hygienic and cleanliness aspect, which is not very difficult if the local community is educated little by little that a lot more of income could come if we could provide a more appealing environment, where the tourist not only goes quickly and goes back but stays there have a coffee or eat in a nice clean small place with no plastic bags of rubbish all over the town, tourist would have stayed and consumed more and people will see that their income is increasing little by little, imagine I wanted to have a cola but there was no way. Another problem is Visas problem for example take my own case I came here and from here we went for a week to Ethiopia and we came back for a couple of days more I had to organize two visas, this is not going to help in encouraging tourism to come back and spend more days. All countries are competing with each other, the concept of distance is demolishing the cost of air transport is gone down and Yemen is competing with other countries which may offer the same product, therefor you have to improve the competitivity of your product. Kidnapping is a very unfavorable issue for the development of tourism, any action that threaten the safety and security of tourism is a very negative threat e.g.; last year the killing of tourists in Egypt had made it loss half a million tourists. Yemen must eliminate these kind of activities in order to have more tourist coming to this beautiful country. I am sure that Yemen is going to suffer in the coming few months of major cancellations because of what had happened. Yemeni government and the Yemeni private sector most believe in tourism.
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