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p I was aware of the terrible terror that reigned in Kampuchea. Those who managed to escape to Vietnam (and there were over 200 thousand of them!) told me about the brutality of the ruling regime and, most terrible of all, they said that literally several million people had been killed. Evidently Pol Pot’s repeated statement that “We only need a million of Kampuchea’s eight million people" was being implemented to the letter.

p At 7.30 am on April 17, 1975, the unconditional surrender of the government and the end of the civil war were announced, and only a day later, two million people were already on the road. Where were they going? To the countryside, the mountains, the forests. To where, according to the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary clique, “the Kampuchean people were to be reborn, cleansed of foreign filth and become even stronger than the ancient builders of the Angkor-Wat temple".

p Although they made all Khmers work with hoes and “abolished” the towns, the grain harvest dropped to almost a half in less than four years.

p What about Pnom Penh? People on the spot said that virtually no one lived there any more, only about 20 thousand civil servants, technical experts, and, of course, the military. Swallows nested in the empty halls of the Central Post Office, while the National Bank lay in ruins. The windows and doors of the huge Hotel Monorom were boarded up. The Olympic stadium, once the pride of the country (built specially for the Asian Games in 1966, when Khmer sportsmen won 13 gold, 35 silver and 57 bronze medals), had been turned into a banana and manioc plantation. The central market was empty and the shops closed. Diplomats had very limited freedom of movement, and foreign embassies had no telephone connections either with one another or with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

p Here is what Ma Xi, a Pnom Penh student, told me on the Kampuchean border.

p “When the government changed, our university was shut down straight away. My lecturers and friends began, one by one, to disappear. It became clear that the idea was to get 51 rid of everyone ’infected’ by culture. I went into the countryside and pretended to be an illiterate peasant, and that is how I managed to stay alive.”

p It was absolutely essential for the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary regime to annihilate everyone with even a smattering of an education, destroy architectural monuments, pagodas and statues, to turn libraries and museums into warehouses, and keep the people at the zero cultural level in general. Otherwise how could they have implemented their anti-scientific concepts, using barbaric mediaeval methods in an attempt to turn the country back to virtually a primitive-communal system.

p With absolute terror and dictatorship the Kampuchean leaders were, as the American journal National Review remarked, trying to erase and destroy the old social structure of the country, its economy, culture, and customs, and to uproot any intimation of free thought.

p One of the few foreign journalists allowed to visit Kampuchea, a correspondent from the Japanese telegraph agency, rightly asked where else in the world there was a state without towns, without money, without private property and where ] 2 to 13-year olds were forced to work.

Other journalists put the question in a more stinging and open form: Where else was there such a cruel and merciless annihilation of an entire nation?