Belgrade/Zagreb - Now that their countries are making headlines for other events, Serbian and Croatian travel agencies are offering paying customers a chance to see the scars of war or to retrace the footsteps of the most-wanted war criminals. Since 2000, most organized tours in Belgrade take foreign visitors to a downtown army headquarters laid to waste by NATO bombs in 1999, giving the inquisitive a chance to click a covert photo when police are not looking.
The violent past is giving the small, but resilient war-tourism industry new impetus.
In July, the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic was arrested in Belgrade, after spending 13 years on the run from international justice for alleged crimes such as the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslims at Srebrenica.
Speculation that he was hiding in caves and in monasteries proved unfounded and he was instead living as a quirky and bon-vivant healer in Belgrade, secretly writing and publicly releasing books of poetry under his own name.
Just days after his arrest, the Belgrade agency Vekol offered the "Pop-art Radovan" tour (www.vekoltours.com), taking clients along the psychiatrist-turned-warlord route in hiding.
Stops include an eatery where Karadzic alias Dr. Dragan David Dabic ate crepes, his local grocery story, a place where he drank coffee and his favourite restaurant, the Luda Kuca (Crazy House). There he played the traditional Montenegrin single-stringed instrument gusle for guests.
The 35-dollar tour includes a visit to the place on the outskirts of Belgrade where police dragged Karadzic off the public bus no 73. At the end of the tour, each tourist is given a sample copy of the Zdrav Zivot (Healthy Life) magazine to which Dabic contributed.
At long last, Karadzic will stand trial for genocide and crimes against humanity committed by Serb troops in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995finally at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague.
In Sarajevo, regular tourist agencies do not take the curious or the sentimental to famous sightseeing spots or notorious locations, but there are men with a business spirit who will do so for a fee.
One of them, Zijad Jusufovic, plays guide to foreigners, many of them journalists, who want to visit Srebernica or see the 800-metre tunnel linking the besieged Sarajevo Muslims with the outside world through which an estimated 1 million people duck-walked.
Jusufovic and other guides, experienced in spotting a potential client and quickly calculating an upper-end acceptable price, say that apart from Western or Japanese "clients," they sometimes take Serbs to places where their relatives or friends were killed.
Croatia was also in a bloody war, its most prominent symbol being the city of Vukovar on the Danube and bordering Serbia. Besieged by the Yugoslav army, the city was mercilessly shelled for 87 days and ruined completely. It eventually fell in late 1991.
It was also the scene of one of the biggest war atrocities during the Croatian war, namely the execution of 264 Croatian prisoners by Serbian soldiers and reservists at Ovcara, a pig farm near the town.
Still badly scarred and reeling, Vukovar is now a tourist magnet promoted by the Danubiumtours (www.danubiumtours.hr) agency, which offers the "Footsteps of Vukovar defenders" programme.
The six-hour, 12-stop, guided bicycle ride costs 140 kuna (30 dollars) and takes the visitor from downtown Vukovar to the hospital along the so-called "tank road" to a prison camp and Ovcara.
The site of the former hospital, where most of the Ovcara victims were captured by Belgrade's troops, is now strewn with wax figures of wounded and dying Croatian soldiers.
"Everybody does war tourism - Vietnam, Rwanda, Cambodia, Poland... Why not us, why shouldn't we earn?" asks Zrinka Sesto, Danubiumtours director in Vukovar.
An estimated 20,000 visitors come to see the ruined city every year, but, after stopping at the graveyards and war localities, they have a hard time finding an eatery where they can dine in comfort or accommodation.
"Vukovar could become a place where a common tourist can learn a lot, but at the moment it has nothing but the war to offer," Sesto said.
