Tony Wheeler talks guidebooks and coups

Last month the British Sunday Mirror, reporting on a forthcoming BBC documentary, revealed that the 1994 edition of our Middle East guide had been used for planning the Iraq invasion. ‘Former American ambassador Barbara Bodine, who was given the job of helping to reconstruct Iraq, said: “It is a great guide book, but it should not be the basis of an occupation.”‘

Well yes, particularly since they used the wrong book. An older edition, our 1990 West Asia guidebook would have been a much better tool for invasion and rebuilding. We’d sent intrepid Englishwoman Rosemary Hall to research Iraq for that edition and, at the time, we were even thinking about a stand alone Iraq guidebook. Then Saddam invaded Kuwait and it all ended in tears. For him and for us.

To be perfectly honest we don’t write our books with invasion, coups, revolutions and general mayhem in mind. Not that they aren’t regularly used for such non-touristic purposes. In his book Zanzibar Chest, Reuters correspondent Aidan Hartley reported that as the Ethopian rebels closed in on the Soviet-backed dictator Haile Menguitu, the rebel tank drivers were guided into

the capital using the Addis Ababa map photocopied from the reporter’s dog-eared copy of Africa on a Shoestring.

I’m happy to hear we played our part in getting rid of one awful dictator (Mengistu’s now in Zimbabwe where Mugabe, another awful African leader, looks after him), but I have to admit our books sometimes get used in ways I don’t approve of. On one occasion a Kashmiri separatist organisation bought a copy of our India book to select a hotel to kidnap Western visitors. Fortunately the resourceful travellers they captured soon managed to escape. In 2003 a Weekend Australian story headlined ‘Terror with help from a Lonely Planet guide,’ reported that two misguided young British Muslims used our Israel guidebook to choose a hostel before making a suicide bomb attack on a beachfront bar.

- Tony Wheeler, co-founder of Lonely Planet

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