AFP
Cambodian and Japanese officials yesterday signed a deal to preserve a notorious Khmer Rouge prison where thousands of people were held before being executed in the late 1970s, officials said.
The three-year Cambodia-Okinawa “Peace Museum” Cooperation Project, will begin working this month to preserve the remaining remnants of S-21 prison, later turned into the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh.
“This is very useful because Tuol Sleng has key documents (from the Khmer Rouge), but we do not have tools to preserve them,” Cambodia’s deputy minister of culture, Chuch Phoeurn, told AFP.
The museum served as a prison during the regime’s 1975-1979 rule and was run by Duch, who is on trial at the country’s UN-backed Khmer Rouge court for overseeing the torture and extermination of some 15,000 people.
The high school-turned-torture centre is still littered with reminders of its brutal past, such as shackles and bare metal bed frames on which the corpses of inmates were found by invading Vietnamese soldiers in 1979.
Representatives from the Japan International Cooperation Agency, Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum, Cambodia’s ministry of culture, and Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum signed the preservation agreement in Phnom Penh.
Chuch Phoeurn said under the deal three staff members from Tuol Sleng would go to study in Japan every year to learn methods for preserving objects at the former Khmer Rouge prison.
The Cambodian government last year asked the UN’s cultural agency to register the notorious Khmer Rouge prison and its archives. The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum Archive was also registered by UNESCO’s Memory of the World for Asia and the Pacific region in February last year.
The three-year Cambodia-Okinawa “Peace Museum” Cooperation Project, will begin working this month to preserve the remaining remnants of S-21 prison, later turned into the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh.
“This is very useful because Tuol Sleng has key documents (from the Khmer Rouge), but we do not have tools to preserve them,” Cambodia’s deputy minister of culture, Chuch Phoeurn, told AFP.
The museum served as a prison during the regime’s 1975-1979 rule and was run by Duch, who is on trial at the country’s UN-backed Khmer Rouge court for overseeing the torture and extermination of some 15,000 people.
The high school-turned-torture centre is still littered with reminders of its brutal past, such as shackles and bare metal bed frames on which the corpses of inmates were found by invading Vietnamese soldiers in 1979.
Representatives from the Japan International Cooperation Agency, Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum, Cambodia’s ministry of culture, and Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum signed the preservation agreement in Phnom Penh.
Chuch Phoeurn said under the deal three staff members from Tuol Sleng would go to study in Japan every year to learn methods for preserving objects at the former Khmer Rouge prison.
The Cambodian government last year asked the UN’s cultural agency to register the notorious Khmer Rouge prison and its archives. The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum Archive was also registered by UNESCO’s Memory of the World for Asia and the Pacific region in February last year.
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