Chicago Tribune, United States
Aug 5 2007
Genocide tourism: Tragedy becomes a destination
By Steve Silva | Special to the Tribune
August 5, 2007
Since visiting the former Nazi death camp at Dachau in 1997,
Dermansky, a 40-year-old from Santa Monica, Calif., has seen the
killing fields in Cambodia, walked through mass grave sites in Bosnia
and stood among human remains in Rwanda. She is, in her own words,
obsessed.
"Why go to Club Med," Dermansky, a photographer, asks, "when you can
witness this kind of history?"
She is not alone. An increasing number of tourists are traveling to
places of horrific human catastrophe. In Rwanda, Bosnia and Armenia,
travelers pay their respects to victims of genocide at popular
memorials and cemeteries. Even Kurdistan in Iraq, scene of an ethic
cleansing campaign during the 1980s, is promoting its horrible past
with a genocide museum. Tragedy has become a destination.
Nearly a million tourists visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum in
2005, up from half that the year before. Other former death camps
have seen a similar increase in recent years.
Lately at Auschwitz, the growth in tourism has made for some odd
juxtapositions. Visitors dine in a newly renovated cafeteria built
within the large room where thousands of Nazi victims were processed
upon arrival at the camp. This blending of modern tourist convenience
and the apparatus of organized death disturbed Dermansky.
"It’s a tourist jungle," she says.
While they are perhaps the best known, the concentration camps
scattered across Germany and Eastern Europe are not the only genocide
sites seeing an increase in visitors.
To accommodate the swelling tourist trade, the Cambodian government
last year hired a Japanese firm to build a visitors center and hotel
adjacent to the Choeung Ek killing field near Phnom Penh. When the
visitors center opens next year, the new company will charge a $3
admission fee rather than the current 50 cents. The town of Anlong
Veng in northwest Cambodia is building a genocide museum in the
renovated houses of former Khmer Rouge officials to attract tourists.
Tourism Cambodia, a private travel company based in Phnom Penh,
offers an assortment of tours specifically geared to genocide
tourists. In addition to Choeung Ek, the company highlights
excursions to the Tuol Sleng Museum, a school-turned-prison where
some 17,000 people were killed between 1977 and 1979; the Kamping
Puoy Reservoir, a Khmer Rouge work project made famous by the late
Haing S. Ngor in his book "Survival in Cambodia’s Killing Fields";
and the civil war museum in Siem Reap. The Tourism Cambodia Web site
warns that these sites are "not for the squeamish."
Bosnia on the list
Sarajevo, Bosnia, is another center for genocide tourism. According
to the Bosnia-Herzegovina Tourism Board, visits to the country were
up 25 percent in 2005 from the previous year and are running nearly
20 percent ahead this year.
"We’ve come to terms that there are places in our country that
attract tourists because of war history," Arna Ugljen, the tourism
board’s director of public relations, said.
Teri-Lynn Spiteri is one such visitor. She was deeply moved by the
plight of Bosnians during the war in the 1990s, especially the
massacre of 8,000 civilians at Srebernica in 1995. Watching the news
at the time, Spiteri, who has been to the former Nazi death camp at
Dachau twice, was reminded of the Holocaust.
"I recalled hearing over and over during history class in high school
how ‘nothing like this will ever happen again’ and ‘those who forget
the past are bound to repeat it,’" she says.
Spurred by the 10th anniversary of the massacre at Srebernica and
compelled to see for herself the impact of the events she’d witnessed
on television, Spiteri, 42, traveled to Sarajevo in 2005. Her friends
and family didn’t understand why she needed to go. And although
Spiteri regularly traveled alone, they were also concerned for her
safety. Seeing the anniversary coverage on the news, Spiteri’s mother
was convinced that the war was ongoing and tried daily to talk her
into staying home.
"Once I left," she says, "I had to call every day, and if I missed a
day I paid dearly for it on my next call home."
While she did not get to Srebernica on that trip — NATO peacekeepers
she met in Sarajevo warned her that something was "brewing" in the
area — Spiteri did encounter a Serbian general being interviewed by
Italian television. Speaking through an interpreter, the general
expressed his surprise that she was a tourist.
A need for reflecting
For Spiteri, the trip to Bosnia was the culmination of a decade of
fascination with the struggle and recovery of the local people. She
says she worries that other travelers bent on visiting genocide sites
might not be so reflective.
"If you are going just for thrill seeking, hoping to find ‘remains,’
or perhaps get a kick out of others’ misery, I’m disgusted by that,"
she says.
Not everyone is sanguine about the development of genocide tourism.
Tessa Somerville of the Kurdistan Development Corporation, a private
commercial investment firm working with the Kurdish government, is
repelled by the idea of dark tourism.
"How can people vacation when mothers are giving birth to babies who
are affected by the chemicals which rained down during Saddam’s Anfal
Campaign and there are many people still searching for loved ones who
have disappeared?" she asks.
Some in the travel industry are ambivalent about the spread of
genocide tourism.
"To each their own," says travel agent Steve Murphy of Kumuka
Worldwide in New York. "I guess people wouldn’t offer it if there
wasn’t a market for it, whatever your own decision on it."
Murphy is afraid that genocide tourism exploits the local population
while enriching a few tour operators.
‘He cried like a baby’
Rajan Tiwari, director of Kiboko Tours & Travel in Kilgali, Rwanda,
shares some of Murphy’s feelings about genocide tourism and prefers
to point out more conventionally uplifting attractions — like a
temperate climate and endangered gorillas.
"The genocide was and still is painful," he says, "Personally I feel
it is quite important that visitors visit to understand the Rwandans
better, and they do."
Tiwari remembers an American accountant who while at the genocide
site in Ntaramta broke down and collapsed in Tiwari’s arms. "He cried
like a baby," he recalls.
For Tiwari the genocide exists in two worlds — a heartbreaking past
that lingers each day and a future that holds the promise of
understanding and recovery.
Standing in a church in Rwanda where Hutus murdered 5,000 ethnic
Tutsis in 1994, Dermansky faced a similar quandary. As she surveyed a
scene of horror — disintegrating clothing and shoes scattered among
bones and other scraps of human remains — she thought about the
visitors who would come after her.
If the local authorities cleaned up — or "sanitized," in her words
— this place, would future visitors feel the same sense of horror
that she felt? Was she being selfish in her desire to witness such
devastation?
Dermansky is already planning her next trip. It’s simply a matter of
where to go next.
"Nowhere has a monopoly on injustice," she says.