By Prof. Rahmat Karim Baig
A foreign mountaineering expedition was on its way to Terich Mir peak last week, and they were two stages from the peak when there was a tourist disaster in Swat. The victims of the calamity were domestic tourists who had no proper knowledge of travelling and camping in the riverbed, nor were they guided by the hotel management where they were putting up.
It was lamentable, and the performance of the local administration was zero in light of rescue operations. This became a nationwide bereavement. The higher authorities issued orders to the local police to take necessary action as part of their duty.
The directive was not clear, and all the tourists in the region were driven back down to the district headquarters as a step to protect tourists. The directive should have been clear regarding whom to treat and how to treat them. The local police officials drove down the foreign mountaineering teams from around Terich Mir, where they had reached after months of hard homework, physical preparation, and payments such as royalties. There was no forecast of cloudy weather, let alone rain, in the Chitral area – the entrance to the High Hindu Kus – during that week.
This affected team of climbers had spent a good amount of money on food, porters, camping gear, kits, and transportation. They had taken leave from their employers, spent time on purchasing, packaging, and transporting their equipment – all of which had taken months of preparation for a peak like Terich Mir. They had fulfilled all requirements of documentation in the offices of the Government of Pakistan and dealt with the red tape involved in getting permits after tiresome paperwork. But when they were at the base of the peak, they were stopped and driven back. Just imagine the frustration of the climbers. They are now back on their way and will surely share the negative experiences they had due to our bureaucracy, which unfortunately knows nothing about such foreign teams and the months of effort put in long before they decided to climb a specific peak on a fixed date.
This is not a joke. The team will go back and tell others about this irrational decision by our bureaucracy and the negative behavior of those dealing with tourism in Pakistan. This mistreatment will appear in the media of their country and discourage potential adventure tourists in the coming years, casting a dark shadow on the tourism policies of Pakistan. The senior officers who issue such negative instructions should be given refresher training on rules, regulations, issues, problems, results, impacts, image, and the future implications of such shortsightedness. This kind of hasty decision causes great damage to the fragile image of the country because the officers are irresponsible and fail to understand the implications of their decisions.