"Tourism, In Addition to its direct Economic Benefits, can also serve as a catalyst for the Expansion of Agriculture & Fisheries", Minister Amna NurhusienBy Dawit Ghebre.
It is a common fact that tourism is one of the most dynamic socioeconomic sectors of the world.As tourism is the world’s fastest growing industry, it is accepted and adopted as an important economic activity, particularly by the developing countries. In almost all countries, tourism is an important source of income. Minister of Tourism Ms. Amna Nurhusien said, “The economic development policy adopted by the Government of Eritrea identifi ed the opportunities and constraints for the economic growth”. She also said that the Government of Eritrea is investing considerable amount of money in building tourism infrastructures through its Warsai-Yikalo national development plan. As a result, various development achievements have been accomplished. A number of hotels have been built in different parts of the country and some of them have started their operations. Roads have been constructed, which are also very vital for the development of tourism.
According to Minister of Tourism Ms Amana Nurhusien, the ministry is working according its 20-years development plan program, which was drafted in 1998. Depending on its long and short term development strategies, the ministry is working to encourage foreign investment and activate domestic tourism. Minister Amna said, “We are working to develop domestic tourism, because it provides recreation opportunities for Eritreans and it will also help them learn about their own rich environmental, historic and cultural heritages. It also distributes economic benefi ts more widely through the country, especially from urban to rural areas”. For example, last year, to encourage domestic tourism the ministry organized a package tour for about 17,000 kindergarten students who were gathered from all over the country. Their families and teachers also traveled with them. It was commendable achievement. Here the ministry covered all the transport, food, and accommodation expenses. In relation with foreign visitors, previously most of them were from North America and Europe. However, currently the number of visitors from these countries is decreasing. To address the temporary obstacle the ministry is engaged in exposing the reality of the country through different ways, i.e. participating in international festivals. In cooperation with the embassies and councils of the State of Eritrea abroad, the ministry has been organizing different exhibitions that refl ect the values and traditions of the Eritrean people. “Instead of expecting visitors from Europe and North America only, we are searching optional markets from Far East and Middle East”, she added. Currently, priority is being given to build fi t and skilled manpower in order to achieve the goals of the ministry so as to enable the ministry to arrange continuous training programs for its staff starting from elementary courses to diploma level. As a practical example, the ministry has beenm giving elementary courses relating to tourism for more than 1,400 people. In collaboration with Eritrean Management Institution, the ministry has been giving training opportunity for those who are managing government hotels. In addition to this starting from last year the ministry is also teaching students in Eritrean Science and Technology Institution in a diploma level on fi elds of management and for the future, there is a plan to up grade it to degree program. Minister Amna added, “Eritrea is full of adventures for visitors. We have desert areas, unpolluted coastal areas, and chains of mountains with different geographical and climatic conditions. Also Eritrea could be very interesting destination center for scientifi c marine researchers specialization and complete qualifi cation on every aspect of the sector. In fact, it may not be easy to reach at the edges of this stage, however; we will not have any other option except that”. Eritrea has political and economic stability. Moreover, Eritrea is free from any crime. In addition, what makes Eritrea very attractive for tourists is its kind and hospitable people, which, is very diffi cult to get in other countries in Africa and probably in the world.
Eritrea is very attractive for tourists in many and different respects. When we are saying this, we are referring to the invaluable landscape, archeological and historical sites, the spectacular seacoast, and many more tourism resources. The landscapes including the high and low lands, incorporate magnifi cent mountain chains that lend themselves to hiking expeditions; escarpments with steep slopes that descend to the coast of Red Sea are also impressive sceneries. They are also good for tourist attractions due to their favorable climate, traditional villages. Rugged plateaus, wild river valleys, fertile plains, sandy expanse of geographical diversity of Eritrea. Besides, the islands in the Red Sea are one of the world’s unspoiled tropical attractions. Minister Amna Nurhusien concluded by saying that, Eritrea with its many natural, archeological, historic and cultural attractions and advantages of location relatively near major tourist markets in Europe and Middle East, can potentially participate in the growth and benefi ts of tourism being experienced globally. She added, fortunately, the Government of Eritrea has given priority to develop this sector, because in addition to its direct economic benefi ts, tourism can also serve as a catalyst for the expansion of griculture and fi sheries.
Jonathan Glancey encounters a piece of Italy that Mussolini left behind Saturday June 11, 2005The Guardian
Cinema paradiso ... The Impero on Martyrs Avenue is a beautifully restored art deco monument. Photograph: Jim Whyte
Far too many of the strikingly good looking young women of Asmara spend far too much time hanging around the Intercontinental Hotel, an overwrought, air-conditioned behemoth gobbling up a nowhere land between the Eritrean capital and its modest airport.
Here, they drink Coke and flirt with well-fed Italian UN soldiers, who, when not carousing, perform important duties like flexing and oiling their gym-pumped muscles by the hotel's pools. That's pools: plural; in a country that has been suffering a five-year drought. This is a country overrun by well-cushioned foreign soldiery, 4x4-borne charities and NGOs. There are so many of these that sometimes theirs are the only cars on the dusty roads leading into and out of this extraordinary, and largely bypassed, city set high on the East African escarpment; high enough to set your heart racing if you rush about on your first day here.
I mention the girls, the soldiers and the Intercontinental, because this unholy triptych representing contemporary Asmaran life prompted me to wonder if Eritrea has ever truly shaken off its colonial yoke. This was an Italian colony from 1898, when the first governor was appointed, until 1941 when the British won control of this blisteringly hot Red Sea country. It later became an Ethiopian dependency, until after a 30 year war, Isiais Afewerki and his plastic sandal-wearing Eritrean Peoples Liberation Front won control of their own country.
For the next seven years, Eritrea basked in a reputation of being one of the most open and tolerant countries in Africa before a renewed clash with Ethiopia led to a presidential clampdown and a return to the country of all those UN troops spooning with the local girls, and NGOs by the baffling-acronym load.
Even so, Asmara itself is one of the most enchanting cities in Africa. I nearly typed "Italy", for this is a city largely created by the Italians over a very short period, and one in which the surprised visitor will find astonishingly similar to some in southern Italy and especially those built on the Pontine marshes by Mussolini in the 1930s.
Here you can eat all the pizza, pasta and ice cream your stomach could possibly desire, along with goat stew mopped up by injera, a sponge-like local pancake that may, or may not, be made with wheat. Pavement cafes proffer cappuccino and espresso from vintage Italian coffee machines along with saccharine-sweet Arabic mint tea and refreshing Asmara (formerly Melotti) beer.
At sunset, the city sets out on a passegiatta, old men in double-breasted suits doffing Borsolino hats as they stroll along wide pavements under royal palms. They address foreigners in the Italian they learned as boys when what is now an utterly convincing Italian modernist city of the 1930s was a frenetic building site. Between 1935 and 1941, young Italian architects, and seasoned contractors working to a detailed urban plan, built somewhere between 400 and 500 fine new designs here: theatres, cinemas, hotels, churches, mosques, covered markets, city halls and, of course a Casa del Fascio.
The Casa del Fascio, shaped in the guise of a giant rendered-concrete "F' is now a part of the ministry of education. It broods, although in ice cream colours, so it can't be all that broody, at one end of Harnet, or Independence Avenue, the broad thoroughfare that characterises and sets the pace for this would-be east African Rome and which has changed its name with each new regime, indigenous or imperial.
Mussolini's architects did a fine job. Whatever the outrages and injustices of his Fascist regime, Asmara is a thoroughly well planned and good looking city. Here is one place in the world where surely anyone might allow themselves to give in to the sometimes cold and remotely intellectual charms of modernism. Coloured like confectionery, bejewelled with purple jacaranda and red bougainvillea, and set under high blue skies, how could anyone take offence and wish for more obviously romantic "colonial" or mud-hut architecture?
This Italian modernism is, in large part, Asmara's saving grace. Many of the city's buildings might be 70 years old, yet they remain incorrigbly Modern with a capital M. Asmara is not wealthy - far from it - and yet with its lively cafe culture and the natural grace and good manners of its people, it feels absolutely nothing like the desperate and downtrodden African cities we know all too well from TV news reports and the fund-raising efforts of well-meaning pop stars.
There is something, too, very special, despite the current clampdown on civil liberties, in the tolerant way Asmarinos share their lives. Here, Muslims, Catholics, Coptic and Greek Orthodox Christians and a handful of Jews live and work cheek by jowl. They all have fine buildings to celebrate their God: a 1920s Gothic cathedral, which seems much older, on Harnet Avenue for the Catholics; the twin-towered and richly mosaiced Coptic Mariam cathedral; the handsome Al Qurafi al Rashidin mosque at the head of the central market buildings dating from 1937; the pretty Greek Orthodox church of St George; and a modestly scaled neoclassical synagogue.
Ancient and hard-held beliefs exist alongside the ice cream world of 1930s Italy. If you want to see a film, try the Impero Cinema on Martyrs Avenue, a beautifully restored art deco monument, robed in the rich colours of a Roman emperor's toga. If you want music and nightclubs, there is plenty of that and those. As for restaurants, you can eat Sudanese and Indian as well as Asmarino-Italian.
To watch the city go by, sit at one of the outside tables at the Bar Impero or Pasticeria Moderna on Harnet Avenue. In fact, you will be watching the world go by, too. The Asmarino diaspora has been on a biblical scale in recent years. My mid-morning coffee at the Moderna was paid for one morning by a man who had lived the past 30 years in Oslo, and missed the snow, while, across from us, a young man, recently back from New York sported baseball cap, hood, saggy trousers, high-rise trainers, mobile phone and a big, pouting sneer as if downtown Asmara was somehow da South Bronx. This look, by the way, is thought eccentric: smiles, smart dress and good manners, even when there is so little money, are the norm rather than pouting, sneering, global brand culture.
How the city has been so well preserved might seem something of a miracle in poor country especially after so many decades of war. Fighting, though, has nearly always been in blisteringly hot rural areas, along desert borders, up and down the coast, and through devilish mountains passes. When the British took Asmara in 1941, they had bombed just one building. Mind you, the miserable sods stripped the city of much of its industrial machinery along with essential parts of its infrastructure. Although ordinary soldiers had been delighted, and amazed, to find a modern city, all ice cream, cinemas, Alfa-Romeos and gorgeous girls, their superiors considered Asmara too good for the locals. Their attitude was that the Italians had overspent and that it was only right to strip the city of modern machinery that could be used more profitably elsewhere by insatiably business-minded Brits.
To this day, many of the seemingly modern buildings in the city centre lack running water, bathrooms and lavatories. While, at the edge of the city, the choking Medeber market is witness to huge numbers of Asmarinos recycling absolutely anything that can be turned into something useful: beds from lorry springs, chairs and tables from oil cans.
|
