Washington  - Sixteen years in the making, a new online museum about communism was launched Tuesday in Washington to offer enough material - testimony from victims in their native languages, chilling portraits of the worst rogues - to make sure no one forgets the evils of communism.

Even if 20 years have passed since the Berlin Wall came down, the organizers believe the museum is still relevant in the age of al- Qaeda because millions of people still live under communist systems in places like North Korea, Cuba and Chinal.

"It ... hasn't really gone away ... the US is intimately connected with China, Cuba and North Korea, and you must understand who you are dealing with," Lee Edwards, chairman of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, told the German Press Agency dpa.

The Global Museum on Communism was chartered by the US Congress in 1993, and aims to eventually build a bricks and mortar version.

But the virtual version at http://www.globalmuseumoncommunism.org/ offers plenty of material to preserve the current and past history. More to the point, the website offers the sort of high tech attractions aimed at drawing in young people from all over the world.

There's a quiz to test knowledge of the facts. Who, for example, wrote the Communist Manifesto? (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.)

Video testimony at the online museum shows a young woman, Kim Eun Jin, speaking in Korean about defecting from North Korea, and Dr Nguyen Ngoc Guy speaking in French about his sufferings under Vietnamese communism.

A text tells how Eduard Kolga of Estonia - the subject of a documentary film Gulag 113 - and 30,000 other Estonian men were "mobilized" in 1941 under the guise of fighting against the Nazi threat. Instead, they were sent to a distant labour camp, where one- third of them died. He survived and emigrated to Canada.

The museum, funded through donations from Eastern European governments, private foundations and nearly 1,000 individuals, also offers a rogue's gallery of communism, including Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, and Pol Pot.

Collectively, the numbers are astounding. The historians and survivors who organized the museum attribute at least 100 million civilian fatalities to communist rule worldwide. In the Soviet Union alone, the toll from 1917 to its fall in 1991 was 20 to 30 million deaths.

Romania, whose embassy in Washington hosted the launch, has a tally of 437,000, from 1947 to 1989; China, 65 million; Vietnam, 1 million.

The non-profit foundation will work to educate "this generation and future generations about the history, philosophy and legacy of communism," it said on its website.

Edwards said the site is using new technology that will allow streaming past firewalls into China, Vietnam and Cuba.

"We're determined to educate young people about communism, and to do that you need to go online," Edwards said.

Organizers are hoping viewers will find inspiration in the "Gallery of Heroes" that includes US presidents Ronald Reagan ("Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!") and Harry S Truman, Nobel Peace Prize-winner and former president of Poland Lech Walesa and author and former Czech president Vaclav Havel. (dpa)