Tear gas and Sustainable Tourism?

I hadn't planned on beginning this post with a rant, but rant, it seems, I must.

The subject of my rant is a bit dated, but I feel all the more justified in ranting about it, as my anger has not subsided in the weeks since the event. Our story begins next to the river Niger, in the town of Segou. The setting is a music festival. According to Mamou Daffe, the director of said spectacle, its "goal is to contribute to the development of sustainable tourism, safeguarding our natural and cultural riches."

The word sustainable remains, in my naive world, a very powerful concept, but in most other areas of life, like Daffe's, it is a qualifier that you can throw in front of just about anything, but preferably "tourism" or "development," and, as it turns out, even in front of "tear gas."

In my opinion, for tourism to warrant as noble a title as sustainable, it has to not only reward the local population and the people whose culture is being showcased through tourism (as opposed to, say, big tour companies based in the capital), but also somehow affect incentives surrounding, e.g., resource management and the upholding of culture. Based on what I saw in Segou, the festival on the Niger does none of the above.

One of the ways in which a festival could affect the local population is through job creation. Sure, the festival created some 1500 jobs this year (to be compared to last year's figure of 958 jobs created by the festival, of which "44 were directly and 914 indirectly created"), but based on my observations working behind the scenes as a volunteer, a large percentage of those directly employed spent their time avoiding work, an even larger percentage of employees spent their time directing anyone who might imply work to someone else, or, even better, to "the office over there." "What office?" "Over there, out there, just walk out the door," "...But where?" "Oh, just leave!" Some might say that this is to be expected in Africa, in Mali, etc, but I prefer to write it off to badly designed job descriptions and a complete lack of incentives.

The employees who took the prize, however, may or may not have been directly employed. The most absurd people on the payroll were... drum rolls... the gendarmes, who, on the second night of the festival, fired several canisters of tear gas over a crowd of young people who were illegally listening and perhaps trying to get into the festival grounds. Apart from the obvious abuse of power that this constituted, a staggering amount of stupidity got added to the record the moment they fired the canisters without taking into account the direction of the wind...

The organizers were spectacularly lucky, though: no one panicked, the crowd did not trample over each other to get out, and the wind dissipated the gas rapidly enough to only disturb the spectators closest to the incident. The fact that panic was avoided could not be attributed to the escape routes provided by the organizers -- they had been blocked by VIPs whose seating had not been secured early enough in the evening -- nor was it thanks to the professional handling of the situation, which included closing the exit closest to the accident, without adequately explaining to the crowds wanting out where they could find an alternative.

Although the first night showed off Mali's musical diversity in a grand way, I did not even stay the second night through, and only heard second-hand accounts of Toumani Diabate's spectacular show, featuring guest stars, among them Amadou et Mariam. I doubt that many tourists, apart from those already very hooked on Malian music, would come back, based on the exorbitant entrance fees and the tepid list of performers on the last night of the festival (turning the entrance into 100 Euros for two nights of music, instead of -- as the organizers claim -- four days of festival)...

I doubt that anyone has the right to complain as much as the Guinean Peace Corps Volunteers, though. They had just been evacuated from Conakry's increasingly violent general strike, and were taken to the festival as a special evacuation-vacation. From dealing quite well with protests and strikes, they were transported to peaceful Mali to hear music and get tear gassed...