Testament to the killing fields a grim reminder of man’s inhumanity to man

EVEN if you arrived in Cambodia knowing absolutely nothing of its recent history, it would only take a few hours before you noticed something disturbing.

You see, in Cambodia, a strikingly high proportion of middle-aged people have some kind of disfigurement. War, repression and disease have taken a terrible toll. A leg lost through a landmine, an arm to leprosy, a pair of eyes gouged out by the Khmer Rouge, scarcely anyone over 40 seems to have escaped. By all accounts, however, the worst injuries were inflicted on people’s minds.

Growing up in the late 1970s, Cambodia was for my generation what perhaps Biafra had been for the one before and Dachau had been for the one before that: the epitome of humans suffering at the hands of other humans. Now those who can forget, do so, as Nhim explained to me. Quite unreasonably cheerful, he sits outside a Parisian-style street café every night in Phnom Penh selling string bracelets. These he weaves together in various national colours to supply the burgeoning tourist trade in what the “in” crowd know as simply “PP”.