Genocide Tourism

I have traveled all over the world and I continue to struggle with visiting sites where massacres and/or genocides have been turned into museums.  On the one hand I am fascinated to be in a place where so much history happened.  On the other hand, it seems disrespectful to be a tourist in a place where so many people suffered.  I think it's so important to bring back pictures of these places to share with my students but I don't want to trivialize the importance of the place by walking around snapping pictures.  I struggled with this in Dachau when I visited the site of the concentration camp, in Soweto when I saw the bullet holes from the police massacre of black schoolchildren and in My Lai where survivors take visitors on a tour of a re-creation of burned buildings and dead animals.

I struggled here as well.  In the last two days I have visited two monuments to genocide, both of them very moving in very different ways.  The first, in the city, was an actual place where killings happened.  The had statues set up to memorialize some of those killed and statues set up to depict the treatment of these individuals.  The buildings were riddled with bullet holes and in one spot the floor is said to still have blood stains on it.   The second was a memorial in a village in the countryside. This was one of the most intense places I have ever been.  The photos and stories were graphic and the tours were given by survivors.  The English speaking guide I had lost his father.  There was another guide there who had lost his whole family.  He was interviewed by television journalists right after the event and they played the video.  It's hard to understand how he can work in a place where he watches a video of the biggest trauma in his life over and over again in the hopes of educating others.  My English speaking guide asked me if I wanted to take a picture of this man and I posing next to a picture of this man taken by journalists during that interview.  I expressed concern that I didn't want to do anything disrespectful but he insisted that I do it and that they would ask him to pose with me.  Imagine my surprise when after the guide took a picture with my camera, the man posing with me took out his phone and asked the guide if he could have a picture with me as well because he felt it was so important that Americans came and learned about what happened here.  When the guides found out I was a teacher they gave me a book and some CDs of pictures and images to bring back to my classes.  All in all, it was a pretty intense day.

For those that are interested I am also keeping a journal of my travel and I will post some of that when I return and share where I have been.  In that post I will share a lot more information about what I learned in these places and my reflections on this genocide.