Sakha Minister of Entrepreneurship and Tourism Development Yekaterina Kormilitsyna wants to use infamous gulag camps located near the "road of bones" to attract more tourists to her republic. For human rights group Memorial, it would be like turning Nazi concentration camps into resort areas.

Moscow (AsiaNews/Agencies) - Yekaterina Kormilitsyna, Minister of Entrepreneurship and Tourism Development in Russia's Sakha Republic, also known as Yakutia, wants to set up 'tourist camps' on the sites of former gulags in her remote region of eastern Siberia.

She made the proposal at a meeting of regional and local officials during a festival called "travels to the pole of cold" in reference to the village of Oymyakon, generally recognised as the coldest inhabited place on earth.

During the 1940s and 1950s, thousands of political prisoners, dissidents and anti-government activists worked in forced labour camps - the gulag - located in the Tomponsky District, where they built the M56 Kolyma Highway, often called the "road of bones" as many of them died and were buried on site during construction.

"Today the gulag has every chance of attracting tourists," the minister said. "This project will preserve the historical heritage not only of the region, but of the country as a whole."

Officials agreed to co-operate in establishing tourist camps on the site of two labour camps, the M56 construction camp and another where the yellow mineral orpiment, an arsenic sulphide mineral, was mined.

Human rights group Memorial, which works to preserve records of political repression including the gulag labour camp system, was outraged by the tourist camp proposal.

Memorial activist Yan Rachinsky said projects to open up labour camps for commercial, rather than educational, purposes create a "pseudo-historical fiction" and a "false sense of what happened". In his view, "It's the same as a German concentration camp becoming a calling card for Germany."

• russia
• siberia
• gulag
• resort
• tourism