Cambodia: beyond the Killing Fields

Christopher Hudson had never been to Cambodia when he wrote The Killing Fields, his searing bestselling war story. Almost 30 years later, on his first visit, he discovers a country and a people that are moving on with optimism

BETWEEN sparse clumps of trees, the ground dips in smooth, saucer-shaped hollows. No birds sing. It is bouncy underfoot, as if you are treading on invisible hands pushing upwards towards the surface. In fact, you are walking over the compacted bones of the thousands of corpses buried by the Khmer Rouge revolutionaries between 1975 to 1979, when they had run out of burial sites in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh.

People walk quietly, talking in hushed voices. These are the killing fields at Choeung Ek, 10 miles from the city centre, where “enemies of the state” were brought in lorry loads to be clubbed unconscious and finished off beside an open pit with a spade blow to the back of the neck — bullets being too precious to waste on humans. A paved walk leads to a circular, glass-and-concrete tower, each of its 17 storeys crammed with skulls. So far, 388 extermination camps have been found. Out of a population of seven million, around two million were killed during the four years of the Khmer Rouge’s murderous reign.