A new international body should be set up to monitor historic black sites to avoid theme parks along the lines of Disneyland being set up, the African Diaspora Heritage Trail Conference heard yesterday.

Anthropologist Dr. Jay Haviser said there was a danger that a "Slaveryland" could be established full of bogus and sensationalist information about slavery unless there is proper control.

And he said that unless local communities have a strong input into these heritage attractions set up for tourism, they will be exploited by unscrupulous multi-nationals and businessmen for profit.

"With long traditions of economic marginality for Africans in the Diaspora, having now created the current prodigy of consequences in history, a conceptual 'Slaveryland' is rapidly becoming promoted as part of tourism norms and seen as a viable basis for economic exploitation," he told the conference at the Fairmont Southampton Princess.

"Heritage is seen as just another profit-making product, like sun and sand. Therefore customs, traditions, rituals and festivals can be changed, minimising their importance, or transformed to suit the expectations of foreigners, thus diminishing the true nature of the actual heritage, in what has been called 'reconstructed ethnicity'.

"How far can a host society let its values go before it crosses the line between educational-entertaining presentations of the African Diaspora to become a regression into the degrading exploitation of African enslavement for profit?

"How far will we let control over cultural value expressions relating to these very sensitive issues of African Diaspora heritage pass from the hands and minds of local populations to be manipulated by multinational and individual developers for private profit?

"I believe that to develop long-term tourism industry partnerships, we must either create a new, or incorporate into a larger institution, an international commission for the formation of standards relating to the ethics and values surrounding the use of African Diaspora heritage for cultural reasons."

Dr. Haviser, of the Ministry of Education and Culture in the Dutch Antilles, said the new commission should be affiliated to the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the World Tourism Organisation, AFRICOM and the International Council of Museums.

He warned that cultural tourism will die if the product is not genuine and accurate. Using replica artefacts was fine, but if the public was not told they were copies it would be a "fraud".

Cultural tourism does not work unless there is real input from local people and the exhibits are firmly rooted in reality.

Dr. Haviser said in "Slaveryland" centres, there would be an emphasis on the brutality of slavery and on instruments of torture rather than a more accurate depiction of the nobility of slaves and some of their everyday achievements in overcoming their persecution.

"Some museums and educational programmes for African Diaspora heritage have become primarily memorials to victims, with shackles, cages and objects of abuse as the primary display focus," he continued.

"The accurate broad perspective of events and daily life-ways in the Diaspora are being superseded by sensationalism, personal agendas and a thirst for the horrors of the past.

"Factual accuracy can never be sacrificed to personal opinion or political correctness. Recognising that, often the overcompensation of the descendants of the enslavers is as much a threat to accuracy as under-representation of the descendants of the enslaved.

"Indeed, the legacy of extreme liberalism, reinforcing a narrow view of Africans only as beaten and abused victims, is a serious problem for the objective representation of Africans within the Diaspora and thus also a problem for potential tourism images."

Dr. Haviser was challenged by Kobi Little of the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail in Alabama, who said these brutal images had to be there to remind people of the abuse, and that people of African descent must determine what standard is set.

"This whole thing is political and it should be political. The African Diaspora is about establishing and preserving the African identity and the erasure of the African identity has been political from the Europeans ," he said.

"We don't want to fall victim to emotionalism and sensationalism, but we have to be clear that this is a political process and movement and should be linked to the politics that we believe in.

"We don't want to reduce the African experience to slavery because it is richer than that, but we must never forget that these chains are important and call to our consciousness those things that European people don't want us to remember."