KR Survivor Eyes Memorial In US City

CHICAGO, USA  The first US memorial to the victims of Cambodia's killing fields will be a modest enough affair a series of glass columns  engraved with the names of many who perished under the Pol Pot regime.
A place for Cambodians to come for solitude and reflections, the indoor memorial and a heritage museum will be completed in January 2002 in Chicago at the headquarters of the Cambodian Association of Illinois.
But for the association's president, Chenda Taing, it's the fulfillment of an obligation to his countrymen that stretches back a quarter of a century.
When he escaped a Khmer Rouge labor camp in 1976, the old people who helped him during his 15-day odyssey to the Thai border, said," If you survive, don't forget our people. Try to come back and rescue us."
Chenda Taing one of just five survivors out of a group of 300 who made it to Thailand was not able to participate in the over throw of Pol Pot's 1975-1979 reign of terror the Vietnamese invasion took care of that.
But with the creation of this indoor memorial at the center, he feels income way that he has made good on his promise to those people.
"I  never forgot what they told me. "Chenda Taing said, "We're only a small community, but we felt it was important to recognize the dead so many of them died anonymously."
Prime Norodom Sirivudh, supreme privy counselor to King  Norodom Sihanouk, endorsed the project Thursday in Chicago at a reception, saying that  a country that forgets its past cannot  build a future.
Among the more than 1 million people who died during Pol Pot's Maoist regime were two of Taing's brothers: Eam Ny Taing, 45, and Chin Theng Taing,15.
The Cambodian community in the US state of Illinois numbers some 7,000 people, one of the smaller clusters of Cambodian communities in the US after Long Beach in the state of California; Lowell, in the state of Massachusetts; and Seattle and Tacoma in the state of Washington.