Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
His other big idea to expand Cambodia's tourism appeal was to promote “dark tourism,”
or genocide tourism. The Ministry of Tourism wants to create an official tourism “geno-
cide trail” of the sites where the Khmer Rouge once tortured, murdered or buried their
victims. Tourists are already drawn to them, he said. “More foreigners go to Tuol Sleng
(the torture center) than Cambodians. We want to promote that . . . train guides in Lon-
don . . . bring in more tourists.”
Instead of erasing Cambodia's reputation as a home of the dark side of human nature,
the home of the killing fields, as Roland Eng once wanted to do, the Ministry of Tourism
is turning it into a profit point for tourism.
• • •
Tuol Sleng was a high school that became the Auschwitz of Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge
transformed the quiet tree-lined campus in Phnom Penh into the regime's central interrog-
ation and torture center after their victory in 1975. At least 14,000 people were murdered
there after being whipped, raped, water-boarded, hung upside down and forced to watch
the execution of their loved ones. All victims were photographed when they were booked,
mothers often holding a child. I knew some of the Cambodians killed there.
When they invaded in 1979, the Vietnamese preserved Tuol Sleng as they found it,
modifying a few details to turn it into a museum. They left the classrooms that had been
divided by brick walls into cells as well as the instruments of torture that had replaced the
school desks on the classic red-and-white-tiled floors. The Khmer Rouge had left extens-
ive records of each victim and these were kept filed away in cabinets. The Vietnamese
mounted photographs of the victims on the walls and opened the museum with the clear
propaganda goal of justifying their occupation of Cambodia.
Today, Tuol Sleng is the single most popular destination of foreign tourists visiting Ph-
nom Penh, averaging five hundred visits a day. It is the centerpiece of the dark tourism, or
genocide, trail that the minister of tourism is promoting. Cambodia is now on the circuit
of dark tourism that includes the Nazi death camps at Dachau, Germany, and Auschwitz,
Poland; Sarajevo, Bosnia, and Kigali, Rwanda. Travel agents now specialize in those tours.
There is a thin line between memorialization and manipulation when creating mu-
seums to honor the victims of genocide or a mass attack. Questions were raised when a
Pennsylvania farmer charged $65 a person to tour the site of the crash of United Airlines
Flight 93 on September 11, 2001. Similar issues have been raised in Cambodia about
making money from foreign tourists following a trail of genocide.
Other curators of genocide museums have wrestled with those questions. Holocaust
museums and memorials routinely reject the idea of operating to make a profit and instead
say they are dedicated to peace and understanding. One rule of thumb is to put the dignity
of the victims first, identifying them by name and telling their stories as much as possible.
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