By Himanshu Bhatt.
MENTION Malacca and Penang in the same breath, and most people may well conjure up an image of two historic townships with a rich shared heritage wedged along the Straits of Malacca. Both still house ancient monuments built centuries back, testaments to the enduring legacy of communities that were once part of the exotic Straits Settlements.
Malacca boasts its most prominent icon -- the remnant of the 16th century A Famosa fort built by the old Portuguese military. And in George Town in Penang, the 18th century Fort Cornwallis, the first ever structure to be built by British soldiers who landed in 1786, now greets tourists along the Esplanade.
But while both structures survived a string of military attacks and civil unrest, their builders could certainly not have foreseen that some day in the 21st century the sites would become the focus of a battle of a very different sort.
Just last week, modern Malaysia's Tourism Minister Datuk Seri Dr Ng Yen Yen, a leading member of the MCA party that is part of the federal government, fired a salvo at the state government of Penang, decrying plunging tourist arrivals in the state. In particular, Ng compared tourism statistics for Penang with those of its old sister-city of Malacca.
Malacca, she said, had overtaken Penang as among the leading tourist destinations in the country. Ng flaunted statistics that Malacca had attracted some 8.9 million tourists throughout last year, while Penang managed only 5.96 million in the same period.
"The statistics speak for themselves," she was quoted as saying. "Tourist arrivals in Penang have dropped from 6.3 million in 2008 according to statistics from our research division."
The Penang government, she concluded, needed to do more.
But Penang, ruled by the rival Pakatan Rakyat, fired back. State Tourism Committee chairman Danny Law, a veteran DAP man, expressed surprise at Ng's statement.
Of all things, he flashed figures from the Tourism Malaysia website (www.tourism.gov.my) itself, that showed Penang was only behind Kuala Lumpur, Pahang and Sabah in tourist arrivals in 2007 and 2008. In fact, the ministry website showed that Penang's tourism standing had actually risen to be third highest in the country last year, ahead of Malacca, which garnered only 3.76 million tourists in 2009.
"Even based on the statistics for the first quarter of this year, Malacca is still in sixth place, while Penang is in third," Law said, showing data that Penang had brought in 943,491 tourists, as compared to Malacca's 558,668.
"Perhaps," he said, not unemphatically, "the minister has misread her figures."
So the question that begs to be answered is how did the good minister get her numbers in the first place which seem to contradict those displayed on her own ministry's website?
As though the situation wasn't confusing enough, Gerakan took the opportunity to jump into the fray, bandying another set of statistics it had found that highlighted a decline in Penang's tourism industry. Citing a report by the Socio-Economic and Environmental Research Institute, Penang Gerakan youth chief Oh Teong Keong pointed out, among other things, that the hotel occupancy rate for the state had dropped by 6.1% -- from 64.7% in 2008 to 57.6% in 2009.
Oh even gave a sharp jab at the current government for relying on tourism events, almost all of which were initiated during the tenure of the previous Barisan Nasional government, while failing to introduce any significant new projects for tourism since taking over the state administration in March 2008.
Mind you, the press conference saw a bit of a satire when reporters noticed that Gerakan's prepared statement on the issue was riddled with errors. For example, the Visit Penang Year campaign was consistently referred to as a "champagne" in the statement; and a sentence in Malay that contained the line "pelancong dating (instead of 'datang') ke Pulau Pinang" had pressmen chuckling.
But perhaps the most telling part of this whole episode was the Penang government's assertion that there was actually "no glory" in comparing one state with another. It is not just that the federal government has given greater allocations and support to Malacca than to Penang which is ruled by a rival political party. "To say we are better than Malacca, what is the use? It's shiok sendiri (self-praising)," Penang Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng, a Malacca boy himself, commented.
Meanwhile, if the two old battle-scarred forts that stand today, under siege by tourists in Malacca and Penang, were able to speak, they may be forgiven for wondering if they would be able to survive this new war, of a vastly different kind, presented by the eccentricity of Malaysiaís modern politics.
** Republished with permission. This article first appeared in the November 11, 2010, issue of theSun. Himanshu is theSun's Penang bureau chief.
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