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Cambodia's magnificent Angkor Wat temple was discriminated against
by the Seven Wonders contest voting system, which favoured
countries with more educated and larger populations, a senior
provincial official said Monday.
Chan Sophal, deputy provincial governor of Siem Reap, where the
12th century temple is located, called Angkor Wat being overlooked
as a modern wonder "regretable" but said the voting system had
always made it virtually impossible for a Cambodian monument to
win.
The New Seven Wonders Foundation announced the list of the new
seven wonders in Lisbon last Saturday after around 100 million
votes were registered by internet or telephone. The new list was
chosen from a short list of 21 sites selected from an original list
of 77.
"The competition just wasn't suitable for a country in
Cambodia's situation," Sophal said by telephone. "It is a country
with a very small population, most of whom know nothing about
information technology or computers so they could not vote or
contribute."
Cambodia is recovering from almost three decades of civil war,
including the Khmer Rouge's 1975-79 Democratic Kampuchea regime
which wiped out the country's infrastructure, including schools
and communications and under which most of the educated population
such as teachers and doctors were killed.
Sophal said technology such as telephones, let alone computers
for online voting, were almost non-existent in rural areas. Siem
Reap in the country's north is one of Cambodia's poorest
provinces and the country remains one of the poorest in the
region.
The United Nations Educational, Social and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO) has already blasted the competition as irrelevant. UNESCO
designated Angkor Wat a World Heritage site in 1992.
The New Seven Wonders winners were: the Great Wall of China, the
ruins of Petra in Jordan, Rio de Janeiro's famous statue of
Christ, the Incan ruins of Machu Picchu, the Mayan city of Chichen
Itza in Mexico, Rome's Coliseum and the Taj Mahal.
The current population of Cambodia is estimated at around 14
million people.
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