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| Sunday, 19 December 2004 |
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Christ's birthplace seeks end to tourist glut for Christmas BETHLEHEM, West Bank, Saturday (AFP) It was built to house dozens of buses, but Bethlehem's now entirely empty coach station bears painful testimony to the collapse of a once-booming tourist industry after four years of Palestinian-Israeli violence. Olive wood carvings of Jesus and the wise men gaze out from deserted shops winding up the hill to the Church of the Nativity, where Christian tradition says the Virgin Mary gave birth to the son of God over 2000 years ago. Nidal, a 35-year-old Palestinian guide, emerged with a handful of tourists from the fourth-century shrine, soon to be crammed with thousands of local Christians and visiting pilgrims attending the annual Christmas mass. Bullet-holes are still visible on the high walls surrounding the basilica, where in April 2002 over 200 Palestinians, including gunmen, civilians and clerics, were besieged for over five weeks by Israeli troops. Apart from a few days over Christmas and New Year, Bethlehem is a ghost town, Nidal said, adding that things were very different before the start of the Palestinian uprising in September 2000. "We used to have more than 100 buses arriving every day, now we have five on a good day," he told AFP. "Everybody used to make a living." Foodstalls behind him are bereft of custom and closed shutters hide formerly thriving coffee shops, testament to the tourist drought which has left an estimated 60 percent of Bethlehem's 40,000-strong population unemployed. |
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