Bangkok--12 Sep--eTurbonews
Cambodia's Khmer Rouge sites (also known as killing fields), which left behind memories of a genocide that killed as many as 2 million people, is expected to attract 1.6 million visitors this year.
Today dubbed as Cambodia's Khmer Rouge theme park, it is on almost every tour company's itineraries, reaping valuable tourist dollars for an impoverished country.
The 'genocide trail' covers Tuoi Sieng, Choeing Ek and the latest addition, Anlong Veng, Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot's last stronghold.
Pol Pot's shabby grave and a towering stack of his victims' skulls are drawing a growing number of tourists, curious to see for themselves evidence of Cambodia's macabre regime.
Said Roberto Rossano, a tourist from the UK after visiting Choeung Ek, "The sight of these skulls absolutely shocks you, and it is just a fraction of what they did."
"Cambodia is known to the world for two things - Angkor Wat and the killing fields," said Youk Chhang, from the US-funded research center, The Documentation Center of Cambodia on Khmer Rouge atrocities.
Chhang plans to turn his center into a museum, along the lines of Berlin's Jewish museum, which displays Nazi concentration camps and Holocaust sites.
Cambodia's Ministry of Tourism has given its official approval to the project by putting up signs on the site where Pol Pot was cremated, which reads, "Please help to preserve this historical site."
Pol Pot is known to the world for turning the south Asian country into a vast slave labor camp. Anlong Veng, in northwest Cambodia, was Pol Pot's last stronghold until his death in 1998.
Following the Cambodian government's decision to preserve Khmer Rouge sites, there are now plans to restore nearly 40 houses occupied by former Khmer Rouge leaders and to build a museum, using ex-soldiers of the ultra-communist Khmer Rouge government acting as tour guides.
To attract tourists from neighboring Thaiand, a South Korean-built resort complete with swimming pool, a casino and market ground are being built thirty yards away from the site of his cremation.
Choeung Ek, 10 miles to the south of Phnom Penh and emembered as a vast killing ground, is being developed into a tourist attraction by a Japanese company, while a World Bank funded paved road to the site is being completed.
Anlong Veng, the brutal military commander of the Khmer Rouge known as the butcher, is being touted as a 'living museum' of the Khmer Rouge regime. His ashes, in a temple tomb, is the newest addition to Cambodia's genocide trail.
Seen as a hero to his 26,000 followers at the village, they point to the schools, clinics, a dam and a sawmill he provided at the village. After Vietnamese troops captured Phnom Pehn in 1979, Ta Mok led his followers into the jungle and set up Anlong Veng.
He died before he was tried for the atrocities he committed during the Khmer Rouge regime, but claims his nephew, "the people all love Ta Mok."
Referring to his country's World Heritage Angkor Wat temples and Khmer Rouge past, Chhang said, "One came from God, and the other from hell."