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Cambodia to open US-funded Khmer Rouge genocide museum
21.04.2008
PHNOM PENH, April 21, 2008 (AFP) - The United States is giving Cambodia two million dollars towards a new genocide museum in Phnom Penh that will chronicle the crimes of the Khmer Rouge regime, a researcher said Monday.
Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Centre of Cambodia which collects evidence of Khmer Rouge atrocities, told AFP that the museum, library and research centre should open in 2010.
"We want to help prevent genocide from happening. Genocide is happening all over the world in this new century," Youk Chhang said.
"By building this museum, we focus on showing genocide in Cambodia ... (but) what we are doing is not only for Cambodia, but also for humanity."
Plans for the museum include a permanent exhibit chronicling events during the 1975-1979 rule of the ultra-Maoist Khmer Rouge regime, under which up to two million people died of overwork and starvation or were executed.
Youk Chhang, who would be the new museum's curator, said the government donated some land to house the museum.
The first construction phase would use the two million dollars from the US government, but fund-raising was still ongoing, he added.
Tuol Sleng, the Khmer Rouge's notorious Phnom Penh torture centre, has already been turned into a museum.
The so-called killing fields outside the capital, where thousands of people were bludgeoned to death, also acts as a sombre attraction for tourists and a memorial site for Cambodians who lost family members.
The Khmer Rouge abolished religion, property rights, currency and schools, and forced millions of people from the cities and onto vast collective farms as Pol Pot's ultra-Maoist regime sought to create an agrarian utopia.
A joint Cambodia-UN tribunal to try surviving top leaders of the regime convened in 2006 after nearly a decade of haggling, but has faced delays and a funding crisis.
Some fear that the elderly defendants could die before standing trial for their alleged role in one of the 20th century's worst atrocities.
World News (EAA) - AFP
Facts
- August 6, 1940 - Estonia became a part of Soviet Union
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