Ministry asks Unesco to speed up registration work

23 Apr 2019  2055 | Business & Trade Fairs

The Ministry of Tourism on Thursday asked Unesco to accelerate the process of listing Battambang, Kratie, and Kampot as heritage cities.

During a meeting last week with Sardar Umar Alam, Unesco’s new representative to Cambodia, Minister of Tourism Thong Khon asked that work to list the three Cambodian cities as heritage sites is hasten, according to Chuk Chumno, director of the tourism products department.

The Unesco representative pledged to speed up the registration.

Before the Cambodian cities can be listed with Unesco, however, Cambodia needs to list them as national heritage cities, Mr Chumno said.

“We have worked with the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts to study the possibility of registering these three cities.

“Our cities boast many French colonial buildings and we believe they are good candidates to join the Unesco list.

“We cannot tell you precisely when the cities will be registered with Unesco. It is a long process with many complexities. First, they need to be registered as national heritage sites in Cambodia,” he said.

“A Unesco working group will visit the cities eventually to evaluate them and decide if they deserve to be on the list. This, however, can take a long time.”

Soy Sinol, director of Kampot’s tourism department, said they are already preparing for the listing.

“We have a group of experts maintaining the historic city centre and the ministries of Tourism and Culture have arranged a workshop to collect more input and data that will be used for the application.

“Being a part of the list of world’s heritage sites will help promote our cities to tourists around the world and will boost the number of visitors,” Mr Sinol said.

Last year, Unesco added Cambodia’s Lkhon Khol to its list of “intangible cultural heritage in need of urgent safeguarding”.

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