12 December 2015. Tuol Sleng (S21) Museum

I woke a bit late and by the time I'd got going it was not the best idea to go the the Royal Palace which shuts between 11.00 and 14.00.

So I decided to go to the Genocide Museum that is quite close to the hotel and stays open all day.

On my way, I passed a few street scenes that I thought worthy of a photo.

Tuol Sleng is an extraordinary place. The Pol Pot regime decided that education was a bad thing and closed the schools and used this one as an interrogation centre - particularly for intellectuals. Everything is preserved with the razor wire along the boundaries and the rooms for single and mass occupancy - many of the former each still containing its bed.

Without going into every detail, it is a sobering place and just staggering to think these atrocities were happening between 1975 and 1979 when I was working as a lecturer at the start of my career. Everyone going around seemed to be reduced to silence.

In all I spent about five hours there. Virtually every prisoner (bar perhaps 12 or maybe a few more - there seems to be a debate) were tortured to give a confession and then taken off and killed at the 'killing field'. For S21, the place of death was Choeung Ek, so that is 16,000 from this one centre. But there were centres all over the country and 19471 mass burial pits in 348 separate clusters have been identified. So the number killed goes up to the million mark.Whole families including toddlers were killed on the basis that you have to get rid of grass by the roots.

It is extraordinary that the regime seemed determined to extract confessions - I suppose to justify to themselves the subsequent killings. It seems an absolute psychological phenomenon of dissonance reduction. It is also horrifying that they used the naivety of children to act as the main operatives in the prisons.

It was also striking how meticulous the regime was in documenting its deeds and then attempting to destroy the evidence. All new prisoners were measured and photographed.

It is also incredible that the world refused for years after to acknowledge the veracity of this genocide and The Khmer Rouge were still the representatives of Cambodia at the UN until 1989. Furthermore, the trials of the ringleaders only got going in 2003 and is ongoing.