Lesson from the hostage drama

Lesson from the hostage drama

Tourism, like all booming pastimes, is seeing a growing number of accidents. The hostages kidnapped from a Malaysian island by a group of Philippine Muslim rebels are already a part of that number.

Skilled at underwater diving and hunting, the tourists had a difficult time imagining that they would be transformed from one day to the next into bargaining money in a conflict they probably didn't know about.

One can only hope, of course, that they will be freed quickly. But one also hopes that their misfortune makes carefree people who are just as avid fans of exoticism think about risks they might run.

And we should remind the other kind of tourists -- those who travel regularly in groups to impoverished countries to live the good life in special resorts just for them -- that there is something in fact obscene about imposing themselves in other people's countries without even taking the trouble to know who they are, by profoundly ignoring them or by confusing them with the decor.

-- Liberation, Paris