p The inhabitants of Preyveng returning from the eastern provinces are temporarily being sent to surrounding village communities where there are many empty houses. The authorities have not yet managed to open the schools. There are not enough teaching materials, as they were systematically burned by the old regime. “We are looking for teachers,” the chairman related. “We have been able to find some, but the majority were killed.”

p In the centre of town we were brought to an enterprise that had been one of the most important in the country’s weak industry, Preyveng’s clothing factory. The more than 300 women who worked in the factory were kept like prisoners in a concentration camp. The minutest infraction of the inhuman work regime was punished by torture and death. Women were forced to work for the Pol Pot troops. Balls of yarn still lie strewn about in the yard. The last workers, about a hundred of them, were killed shortly before liberation. Perhaps the cutthroats wanted to get rid of any witnesses, as the SS did towards the end of World War II. The corpses of the women were flushed into the factory’s sewage system. I saw the remains, and it was a sight that will haunt me for the rest of my life ....

p The clothing factory in Preyveng is not the only example of the premeditated murder of workers whom Pol Pot evidently saw as a threat to his regime.

However hard this was for everyone we talked to in Preyveng, this horrible and so recent past, life is beginning anew in the neighbouring communities. The figures testify to this most of all.