Decolonizing Travel with The Hybrid Tours.

One of the projects we accompany, uplift, and partner with is a very cool social enterprise called the The Hybrid Tours. Co-founded by Hira (from Pakistan) and Sebu (Costa Rica), The Hybrid Tours aims to decolonize the travel and tourism sector, curating immersive experiences led and guided by activists, organizers, artists, and tour guides local to the countries they take you to. Their trips educate tourists on histories, experiences, and perspective that usually don’t show up in the headlines back home. They break down stereotypes and build bridges between their guests and the communities.

This past summer, the Hybrid Tours shared about a deeply meaningful experience it curated with its partners in Bosnia (Udruženje logoraša Mostar) that provided their travelers with a chance to learn directly from the lived experience, reflections, and activism of former Bosnian prisoners of concentration camps.

Following the war that split the former Yugoslavia into six independent countries, the detainees who left these camps had to deal with the psychological trauma of their experience entirely on their own. They had almost no assistance in the communities/cities they lived in. Over the past three decades, a startling 50% of these former detainees have passed away.

Survivors were forced to fight for their own rights and the state didn’t assist them in any way. Due to the complex political situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), the people who committed the atrocities and crimes were protected by Serbia and Croatia, respectively. According to Emir Hajdarovic (President of UIM and a survivor himself) the position of the victims was, and continues to be, decided by the same people who committed the atrocities and war crimes against them…who felt there was no need to integrate survivors back into society.

So, how is the Udruženje logoraša Mostar (Association of Former Prison Camp Inmates in Mostar) working to make a difference? Hajdarovic explained to a recent Hybrid Tour group..

“We are trying to encourage survivors to write books so the atrocities they faced aren’t forgotten. We also encourage them to appear in court, to fight for their rights and to tell the truth about what they experienced. Politicians are not inclined to help survivors because their testimonies are a problem for them. If survivors write these books and appear in courts to show the true picture of what happened in the concentration camps and how many people were detained, it would not be favourable for politics.

5,000 people are still alive but are afraid to come forward. As I mentioned, any assistance from beneficial sources is minor and we need financial funds for our activities, this is why we can’t help survivors financially. However, we provide some psychological assistance to help them cope with everything that they went through.

One thing we are also currently trying to do is to push authorities to adopt a law on all torture in the camps against people of all religions. In BiH, we have 3 different politics at the state level. Three different versions of what happened. In comparison to the Serbs and the Croats, Bosniaks have no rights secured by institutions because the other two are strongly against this. They want to stop Bosniaks from getting any rights. No medical help was even offered to survivors.

In 2017, the ICTY sentenced Bosnian Croat wartime military and political leaders to 111 years in prison for taking part in a joint criminal enterprise aimed at forcibly removing Bosniaks from Herceg-Bosna in an attempt to create a ‘Greater Croatia’. None of the Croatian leaders have accepted the ruling, they need to accept what they did here.”

To learn more about the impact of the Hybrid Tour’s Bosnia trip, upcoming tours to Pakistan, South Korea, and Jordan, or about how taking a trip with the Hybrid Tours becomes deeply impactful to the communities of all those who participate, take a gander through their platform to learn more.