Podcast: Should you go to Iran? (Script)

Listen to the podcast

 

You’re listening to Iran’s Weekly Wire; I’m Roland Elliott Brown.

*

Before the 1979 revolution, Iran was full of foreign travellers. People came for the splendors of antiquity, and for the best modern art collection in the Middle East.

Hippies passed through on their way to Pakistan and India.

Even Frank Sinatra and Elizabeth Taylor turned up in Tehran.

But after the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War, most people stayed away. Iran’s tourism industry never really recovered.

Now, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani says he wants to double tourist numbers to Iran. And he’s  succeeding. Last year, tourist numbers jumped by 35 percent--to about 4.5 million people.

So it looks like Iran is opening up. And western countries are starting to relax their travel advisories. Rough Guides, a travel book publisher, has made Iran its top country to visit in 2015.

Meanwhile, Iran’s human rights situation keeps getting worse. As tourist numbers spike, so do executions.

So this week, I’m going to look at what Iran’s tourism boom means, both politically, and ethically.

*

To start, I spoke to Tim Littler. He’s the founder of Golden Eagle Luxury Trains, and he started running trips from Budapest to Tehran last year.

I asked him why he decided to get involved in Iran.

[Tim Littler] We were looking for a destination for a new train that we had just take over management of, and it seemed to coincide with the opening of the Bosporus Tunnel, which allowed us to get from Budapest, where the train is based, to Eastern Turkey, and logically from there we could get to Tehran. So as things seemed to be improving in that direction, we decided that the first train that we'd run would be between Budapest and Tehran, which we did in October last year.

I also asked him what he meant when he said things were improving.

[Tim Littler] Well, since the election of President Rouhani. They had been making statements saying that they wanted to increase tourism, so that was an indication that things might be improving in terms of access to Iran, and certainly as soon as we started asking questions, all the doors opened.

At the same time, western governments are starting to relax their travel advisories on Iran. Last month, the British Foreign Office lifted its warning against going to Iran.

That’s made a huge difference for tour operators. Here’s Nasrin Etemadi, from the tour company Persian Voyages.

[Nasrin Etemadi]  You know the UK foreigner advice since 2011 was not to go to Iran. Now this rule has changed and they said now it's okay for UK national to go to Iran. So since then the number increased. And since then also we had some problem with that advice because people couldn't get insurance, or if they could get insurance, it was really expensive. And some of them didn't want to go unless this foreign office advice changed for the favor of traveling to Iran. Most of our clients they go on a package tour with a national guide, and they never have such a problem. I'm not sure about people who go individually. Our clients go on a group tour, and they are very well supported by their guide, and the guide just look after them.

So, what’s in it for Iran to promote tourism? Michael Rubin is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He sees a pattern repeating itself.

[Michael Rubin]The Iranian tourist trade has always had its ups and downs, since the end of the Iran-Iraq War, Iran started welcoming back tourists, although they focused on higher-end tourists who would take package tours and stay in top notch hotels, paying rates at some points ten time what Iranians would be forced to pay. But what it in it for the Iranians, clearly, they would like hard currency, so long as they can actually control the tourist trade instead of simply opening the floodgates.

Rubin is busy these days arguing against the nuclear deal Iran has signed with the US. I sort of expected him to cast doubt on Iran’s appeal as a tourist destination. Not so.

[Michael Rubin] Certainly Iran is attractive for any number of reasons. I lived for four and a half months in Isfahan, and I wouldn't trade that time for anything in the world, and it is just a beautiful city, a beautiful civilisation, and it's not simply a single civilization. Of course you have Seljuks, you have ...Safavid ruins, for those interested in more modern history, you have Qajar ruins. You have the ancient Achaemenid ruins. There is really something in Iran for everyone. The landscape in Iran is also starkly fascinating, starkly beautiful. It is an undiscovered tourist mecca. There is lots of room for religious tourism should Iran be open minded. Biblical Susa or Shoush of Daniel and the Lion's Den fame is down in Khuzestan. Likewise you have Hamedan which is the site of biblical Esther from the Jewish Purim story. So you really have any number of aspects. Religious tourism also applies to the Shiite world, I mean going to the shrine of Imam Reza... in Mashhad can be a once in a lifetime experience.

Both the US and the UK advise people to carefully consider the risks of travel to Iran. Neither country has an embassy open to provide consular assistance.

The US warns that Iranian authorities have unjustly detained and harassed US citizens.

The UK warns that security officials may be especially suspicious of people with British connections.

But they are not saying don’t go.

And most people who do go, don’t have any problems.

On the other hand, Iran may still prove choosy about what kind of tourists it wants.

[Michael Rubin] The Iranians want to have their cake and eat it too. They only want to attract the benefits of tourism in terms of some of the hard currency windfall, but they don't want to suffer the consequences, which would be too many mixing, or the wrong kind of tourists, from the Iranian perspective. I do think it's important to recognise that the hard currency you're spending in Iran isn't going to help ordinary people as much as many believe it will. Many of the hotels have been confiscated by the Bonyad e Mostazafan, the foundation of the oppressed, and that money goes directly into the pockets of the hardliners. When I went to Iran, I was very careful to network myself so that I was spending money disproportionately among the Jewish, Christian and Baha’i communities, simply so that I knew my money wasn't going to support groups like Hezbollah. I'm not sure that other tourists will be as careful.

This is where the question of ethical tourism comes in.

So I decided to get in touch with Jeff Greenwald at a California-based non-profit group, The Ethical Traveler.

In the mid-1990s, he supported a travel boycott against Burma to help free the opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. He asked tourists to “vote with their wings,” and stay away. She was released in 2010.

Iran’s opposition leaders, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, are also under house arrest.

But Greenwald says a travel boycott would never work with Iran, since tourism is such a small part of its economy.

He travelled to Iran in 1999, and he’s more inspired by the prospect of people-to-people diplomacy.

[Jeff Greenwald] We are behind a media curtain with Iran very strongly, and we have our impressions that we glean from our newspapers and magazines, but the situation on the ground, and what it's like to meet people face to face and speak to them is completely different. Aldous Huxley once said that to travel is to realise that everyone is wrong about other countries, and I don't think that came through anywhere more clearly than Iran. I am in favour of travel to any part for the world for educational purposes. That is the only way to understand what is going on with your fellow earthlings on this planet, and that as long as you're not travelling with a group, in a state of complete unconsciousness about where you are staying, where your money is going, that travel in the long run does more good than harm.

But whether all sides of the Iranian political spectrum will see that contact as good, is another question. Here’s Michael Rubin.

[Michael Rubin] If Hassan Rouhani is sincere in his desire to open Iran, and I'm not so sure he is, then what we could expect are some of the tourists to become targets for those recalcitrant elements in Iran that don't want to see that opening. Whenever you have a period of high profile rapprochement, there is always a spoiler element as well. So for example back in 1998, as the so-called dialogue of civilisations gained steam, a busload of American businessman was invited by the US chamber of commerce along with the Iranian presidency then under president Mohammad Khatami's control. That bus of state sponsored tourists were set upon by a vigilante group, Fedayeen Islam, Iran has other high profile vigilante groups like Hezbollah as well, simply as a way to embarrass the Khatami regime on its opening.

Greenwald ran into similar trouble around the same time. But in his case, it turned into a great anecdote about Iranian hospitality.

[Jeff Greenwald] My experience in Iran in 1999 was I was in the main square in Isfahan...preparing to watch the total eclipse of the sun. There must have been 30 to 50, 000 people in the square, and a lot of media from all over Europe, and about an hour before the total eclipse, an anti-American demonstration erupted in one part of the square. It was small, maybe 20 to 25, I don't know if I want to call them jihadis, but people who are radically anti-American, began burning American flags and attracting the attention of the cameras, and at that moment spontaneously, all the people seated around me, all the men, women and children, all the Iranians within sight of  me spontaneously without a word stood up and created a protective circle around me. They stood there in a circle around me to make sure that nothing would happen during this demonstration. I was so moved. I thought never in my life will I forget this. And that to me was the purest expression of what the Iranian people were like.

There is no doubt that most travellers leave Iran warmed by the famous hospitality.

Even so, every responsible traveller is going to notice the human rights situation--not least because their Iranian friends will tell them about it.

And that is going to start some important conversations about Iran’s new relations with the West. Here’s Michael Rubin.

[Michael Rubin] Certainly that is going to be a debate, and once we get over the giddiness of the potential opening up of Iran to tourism, this is something that is going to really come to the forefront. Public executions have increased dramatically under Hassan Rouhani according to Amnesty International, and the way public executions are done in Iran is to slowly strangle people being hung from a crane. You're not being dropped from a platform, you're being strangled. The first time tourists start bringing back pictures of those, all the more so if the cranes are German cranes, American cranes or British cranes being traded with Iran under the so-called new openness of the trade, then that is going to raise a debate.

I asked Tim Littler what he felt about doing business in a country with the highest per capita execution rate in the world, and prisons full of political prisoners.

He sees value in helping Rouhani to open Iran up.

[Tim Littler] Somebody did point out that Rouhani is treading a very narrow line, a bit like Yeltsin had to at the end of the Soviet Union. Somebody explained to me that what Rouhani's problem was that -- it’s more than 50 percent but just for the sake of argument -- 50 percent of the population are saying thank god we're going to join the 21st century, and the other half are trying to go back to the 13th century. And those are the people who have got quite a lot of power. So if Rouhani goes too far one way, it could very easily be a backlash that takes them back to a situation that is even worse than it was before.  I suppose it's where you draw the line. Lots of countries that people travel to around the world have varying human rights records. Zimbabwe, South Africa certainly. There's a long, long list. If things are improving in Iran, and they appear to be, these things are not going to change completely overnight, but if it's going in the right direction, we should surely be encouraging that.

But can travelers really influence Iran’s politics? Michael Rubin has his doubts.

[Michael Rubin] I don’t think actually that's true, although I agree it’s the conventional wisdom. And I don’t think we’re going to see a moderating effect, and the reason is simple: m ost of the Iranian people are already quite moderate. That said, in a country like Iran, it's the guys with the guns that matter, and if the supreme leader is technically the deputy of the messiah on Earth, I don't think having a bunch of shorts-clad German tourists or Hawaiian shirt-wearing Americans is really going to change his mind for the better. Ditto the Revolutionary Guard.

Even so, the more people know about Iran, the more they’ll care what happens there. Here’s Jeff Greenwald.

[Jeff Greenwald] The best thing that people can do on an individual level as travellers is to see what the situation is like, become informed, maybe take action in groups like Amnesty International or other groups that are working to free or to help prisoners of conscience, or to work against the death penalty, and that work is most effectively done when you are informed about the situation that is happening on the ground, and to be informed, there is no better way than to be on the ground and to speak with people. What I found there in Iran was that many Iranians shared the same concerns I had about their country, and really were eager to repair friendship and ties with the United States and were looking for reform.

So whatever Rouhani’s intentions are, his claim to be a reformer, his claim to want to open Iran to the world, may yet prove self-fulfilling.

*

That’s all from Iran’s Weekly Wire. If you want to find out more about this issue, join us on Twitter or Facebook, or visit IranWire.com