Not long ago, a mass grave containing 57 bodies killed by Serbs in 1993 was discovered in Bosnia. What is so unusual about this is that the department of tourism in Bosnia asked the government if the mass grave could be used as a tourist attraction! Before we register our revulsion at the suggestion, we ought to remember a few things. Marketing cemeteries is an old custom and was done long before the existence of tourism. Tourism, after all, depends on marketing what people want to see. If the Bosnian government agrees to the idea, Bosnia will not be the only country to promote cemeteries as tourist attractions.
When I was in Belgium some years ago, I went on a tour to the location of the Battle of the Somme where thousands of soldiers died in both World Wars I and II. It is a beautiful area with the Somme River running through it. No one would ever imagine that this area witnessed one of the most horrible battles in history. The first battle in June 1916 was between Germany on one side and England and France on the other. In five months more than 650,000 Germans died; in the same period, more than 620,000 English and French were also killed. In World War II, another battle was fought there in which half a million soldiers died. Because neither side would allow the dead to be collected, the ground is unusually fertile.
In Munich, a beautiful German city, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party rose to power. In 1933, they built the first concentration camp for killing Jews outside the city. Today, you can visit the site; it has been left as it was at the end of World War II. People can visit the gas chambers and the factories where things were made from human body parts. The site has a museum which shows films every half hour of what happened there.
The king of all such sites, however, is in Cambodia. Between 1975 and 1979, the Khmer Rouge killed more than three million people. This number looks modest compared to those killed by Hitler and Stalin but we should keep in mind that three million was a third of Cambodia’s population. Those who were killed included everyone who could read as well as those who wore glasses which were seen as the sign of an intellectual who was not a communist! Today Cambodia is a major tourist attraction which people flock to for two reasons: The ancient temples and city of Angkor Wat in the jungle and the killing fields where thousands of people were massacred. The most famous site in the middle of the field is a pyramid made of 800 skeletons. It is visited by eight million tourists every year.
Arab News From the Local Press 27 February 2003
