Can “Dark Tourism” Help Cambodia Heal?

[geovalin]

 

The jungle hideout where genocidal dictator Pol Pot made his last stand could become the country's next grim attraction.

 

By Brent Crane

September 15, 2016

Deep within the Dangrek Mountains of northern Cambodia, on a cliff at the end of a rugged jungle path barely wide enough for a motorbike, stands Pol Pot’s house. Blanketed in moss and moldering in the tropical swelter, the two-story ruin is a monument to two decades of neglect. The air, heavy and humid, buzzes with cicadas.

 

 

A man emerges from the overgrowth and begins picking leaves from a handful of green shrubs. “For my rabbits,” he explains. A former government soldier who fought for 22 years against Pol Pot’s guerrillas, Kuch Khemara owns the area’s only restaurant, located four miles back up the path. Like others in the remote mountain region of Anlong Veng, he hopes that sightseers will one day flock to this old building in the jungle, bringing a much-needed economic boost to one of Cambodia’s poorest districts, the final stronghold of the Khmer Rouge.

The idea of tourists making a pilgrimage to a genocidal dictator’s jungle hideout might seem distasteful. But such destinations are already a major part of Cambodia’s tourism industry. Besides the Angkor Wat temple complex, the biggest tourist draws in the country are the infamous “killing fields,” where hundreds of thousands of Cambodians were murdered from 1975 to 1979 under the Khmer Rouge regime, and the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, housed in the former S-21 Prison, where thousands were detained, tortured, and killed. Together, the sites sell hundreds of thousands of tickets a year, introducing visitors—many of them foreigners—to the Khmer Rouge’s brutal excesses.

 

Destinations like these are part of a worldwide market known as “dark tourism,” which promotes travel to places associated with death and suffering. There has always been a ghoulish fascination with death and destruction; visitors have flocked to the ruins of Pompeii for more than two centuries, and after Pan Am Flight 103 crashed near Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, curious onlookers flooded the roadways to the wreckage site, tying up traffic and hampering emergency services. Some tourist sites use biased narratives to rewrite history: For years, a display at the Cottonlandia Museum in Greenwood, Mississippi, explained how plantations “employed” slaves to harvest crops. But from Hiroshima and Ground Zero to Chernobyl and Auschwitz, memorials to atrocities can play an important role in the process of healing and national reconciliation. Sites like the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin and Remembrance Park in Buenos Aires attempt to harness “the power of social memory to come to grips with past abuse,” says Louis Bickford, a human rights scholar and the former director of the International Center for Transitional Justice, who has studied memorials in Cambodia and elsewhere.

 

 

 

read more https://newrepublic.com/article/136310/can-dark-tourism-help-cambodia-heal

[Torrens54]

Well, it worked for former Nazi Death Camps and the Thai/Burma Death Railway so why not?