Children's excercise equipment and whips made of electrical wire

are but two of the implements of torture on display at Tuol Sleng, a former high school in Phnom Penh, Cambodia converted by the Khmer Rouge into their chief centre of torture. Known widely as S-21 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuol_Sleng_Genocide_Museum, a visit is a full frontal visceral assault. A guantlet of burned and disfigured men, many with missing limbs, begging for US dollars flank the entrance. Inside agitated vistors with tight faces and crossed arms shuffle from one classroom to the next reeling in the full horror of the Khmer Rouge killing machine that cut down a quarter the Cambodia's population in just over three years. Rounding out an afternoon of misery is a trip to Choeung Ek http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choeung_Ek, the closest 'Killing Field' to the capital of some 200 execution sites established by the Khmer Rouge and where some 8,895 S21 and other prisoners met their end. It's an awful, chilling place with the skulls of the murdered housed in a glass fronted Buddhist stupa. Walking the paths amongst the excavated pits, fragments of bone and clothing still poking out of the earth near the 'killing tree' against which babies were beaten to death, is a putrid tonic for idealists of all political stripes.

As I write this the trial of 'Duch' who ran S21 is coming to a close.