The Grim History
“Pol Pot, Boom Boom Boom”, explains the young lad who has insisted on giving me a tour of the beautiful hilltop temples outside Phnom Penh with his friends and their homemade hand-fans. The ruined temple is being reconstructed with a giant Buddha 
statue as the centrepiece.
The journey by Moto with Peter had taken two hours with temperatures in the upper 30s, and he’s fallen asleep in a hammock conveniently provided by a lunch stall. The local kids, as I have come to expect, had lingered around me playing and practising their English. Their local trade is to vigorously wave fans at tourists as they climb the hill to the temple in the heat; a clever ploy indeed for this is very welcome and makes one feel quite important. They are much more relaxed than the city children, and so much more polite than most Western children, and with some coaxing and the help of my phrasebook, I get them to teach me some Khmer.
The kids seem to know all about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge; somehow I’d felt that these young and innocent lads would be spared such horrors. With a people who are mostly so kind and honest, from the polite playful kids to the smiling helpful adults, it is so hard to comprehend what led to the horrors of 30 years ago at places like security prison S-21, a former school, and The Killing Fields, 10 miles from the city.
The following is an excerpt from the English text, exactly as displayed at The Killing Fields:-
“They were trying hard to get rid of Khmer character and transform the soil and water of Kampuchea into a sea of blood and tears which was deprive of cultural infra-structuere, civilisation and national character, became a desert of great destruction that overturned the Kampuchean society and drove it back on the stone age”
