Campaigners in Bosnia and Herzegovina are urging Google to stop allowing the online promotion of a hotel that served as a concentration camp during the countrys 1990s war, asking the tech giant to intervene against an erasure of history.
Authorities in the primarily ethnic Serb region of Republika Srpska recently added the spa and wellness retreat in the eastern town of Visegrad to a list of resorts that citizens could visit at a discount using a state voucher, in an attempt to boost the coronavirus-hit tourism sector.
The move renewed outrage over Vilina Vlas hotel, which survivors have long said should instead serve as a memorial to victims of atrocities including murder, torture and rape which took place when Bosnian Serb paramilitaries occupied the site.
A petition launched by campaigners asks Google to remove the site as a tourist destination in its search engine and its maps tool.
Sadly, the not-so-distant history of this hotel is trying to be systematically erased in the most inhumane methods possible with backing from the Republika Srpska government trying to promote it as a wellness spa and resort, wrote petition author, Amela Trokic, a guest lecturer at the University of Sarajevo.
Ms Trokic asked whether Google would allow the promotion of Polands Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where German Nazis sent 1.1 million people to their deaths during World War Two, if it was converted into a wellness retreat.
The academic the question was not hypothetical, as Vilina Vlas hotel served as one of the main detention facilities during the Visegrad massacres in the Bosnian War.
Bosniak prisoners were beaten, tortured, and murdered while hundreds of women were raped and sexually assaulted in the very rooms of this horror hotel, she wrote.
Remove this atrocity from your search, remove it from all your maps and help us in our attempt to provide dignity and justice to the women and men whose innocence was stolen.
Original article