Heide and I visited the S21 camp in Phnom Penh, the former high school, turned torture and “processing” centre used by Pol Pot’s crazed Khmer Rouge extremists. Along with a number of fairly graphic photographs that show the barbarous and extremely brutal, nature of the torture inflicted on the inmates there was a gallery of photos of the faces of the many thousands who passed through the barbed wire encased perimeter.

The faces we saw were: the young and the old, the infirm and the fit, peasants and the elite, the educated and the illiterate, civilian and military, Orientals and Occidentals, Khmer Rouge activists and opponents, clergy and lay people. In short we saw photographs of thousands of people who for whatever reason, real or imagined, were rounded up, tortured mercilessly and ultimately “dispatched”. Almost without exception the faces on these photographs seemed to scream at us that question: “Why?”

The museum isn’t exactly full of artifacts or information, it doesn’t have to be. To rip off the Pope’s review of the Mel Gibson movie “Messiah”: “It is as it was”. And that is powerful enough. A number of the exhibits are shocking, for example a list of 54 people who were, for whatever reason, due to be “smashed” that day. There were paintings by an artist who was one of seven found alive at S21 when it was liberated that depict the heinous nature of the place. There was an hour long video that focused on the human aspect of the atrocious events by chronicling the divergent paths of a husband and wife through the days of the regime until each was murdered. The film was perhaps the most poignant of the displays, at least that is my judgment after looking at the large number of tear stained cheeks and hollow looking faces among the audience, each I am sure asking themselves: “Why?”

After spending time at the museum we, like many thousand before us, both tourist and victim alike, took the 18km drive out to the Killing Fields, or as our Tuk-Tuk driver called them “the fields of the genocide”. It is here the famous display of thousands of human skulls can be viewed as both a reminder and a warning of the horrors that mankind can see fit to impose upon mankind. It is moving and it is appalling. Around the monument that houses the skulls are numerous pits, some exhumed, others untouched, into which the victims were dumped. All around are fragments of clothing and shards of human bone, each a vivid of reminder of the mass murder that took place in these fields only a couple of decades back. So recent in fact that I can remember it and the starvation that gripped this nation when the events were taking place.

It was a moving, emotional day and I think I would have proposed we pop out for a couple of beers even if it hadn’t been the occasion of my 23rd birthday (well if my mum is only 29 I’ve got to be younger than that) but I’m delighted to say I didn’t have to make this proposal as my better half was already one step ahead on that front. We mulled over the distressing sights of the day long into the hot sultry night and even when our minds were lubricated we could still make no sense of that which we had seen.