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