The torch has toured countries that have suffered genocide and has so far been lit at the Darfur-Chad border, Rwanda, Armenia, Germany and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Cambodia was to be the last stop before it heads to China.
Cambodia bars Mia Farrow from holding ceremony
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) - January 16, 2008 The 62-year-old actress, working with the U.S.-based Dream for
Darfur advocacy group, had planned to light an Olympic-style torch
Sunday at the Khmer Rouge's infamous Tuol Sleng torture house to
urge China to press Sudan to end abuses in Darfur.
The group claims China, host of the 2008 Olympics, has protected
Khartoum at the U.N. Security Council and sold weapons to the
Sudanese government, while making Sudanese oil purchases that have
helped fund genocide there.
"We will not allow them to hold the ceremony because they are
not doing this for humanitarian reasons but because they have a
political agenda against China," government spokesman Khieu
Kanharith said.
China is one of Cambodia's major trading partners and was also
the biggest backer of the Khmer Rouge's communist regime in the
1970s, which led to the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million
Cambodians.
Thousands of Khmer Rouge prisoners were tortured at the Tuol
Sleng prison in Phnom Penh before being executed outside the
capital at the site known as "the killing fields."
Theary Seng, head of the Cambodian Center for Social
Development, which was to host the event, said the group was trying
to negotiate with the government in hopes the ceremony could still
take place.
The event was intended to "commemorate past victims of genocide
and to remind us what happens when the world looks away, as is
happening in Darfur currently," Dream for Darfur said in a
statement.
