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They say that rules are made to be broken - not so at S21 where the repercussion of disobedience was electric shocks, fingernail removal or summary execution.

These terrors also befell those who did obey their teenage guards and torturers.

In order to root out would be opponents, the Khmer Rouge killed all senior members of the royalist military, intellectuals and executives of businesses within the cities. Hundreds of thousands of suspects were rounded up and forced to write their life stories within the walls of S21. They were forced to confess to being intellectuals and to name others whom the Khmer Rouge could pry on.

Mass killings were common. To save bullets, the guards would round up their victims, take them to the 'Killing Fields' of and bludgeon them to death with the butts of their guns, bamboo sticks or garden hoes.

The Khmer Rouge took pictures of their victims before and after death - these are on display at S21 and too graphic to publish here.

Over 8000 bodies were dug up after the war in a two acre area known as Tuol Sleng. A monument with the skulls of the victims now stands in the centre of the fields. Its difficult to comprehend the violence which took place here.

Killing fields are scattered all around the country. We visited several others including the Killing Caves near Battambang - here victims were tossed down a hole in the mountain into a pit 30m deep with viciously sharp rocks. Again, the remains of hundreds of victims were found here, including the bones of babies and children - it is suspected that if the children could not work (due to illness or disability), they were simply disposed of.

The scars of this time remain. We heard numerous stories from guides who described how they were forced to work in the fields, or hid from the Khmer Rouge in the jungle - surviving on insects and roots for months.

Another legacy is the thousands of crippled victims - some blind, some with severed limbs. Indeed, even now the landmines laid in the late '70s continue to claim new victims almost daily.

Yet you rarely see a Cambodian who is not smiling.

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