Cambodian survivors scarred by ‘killing fields’ under Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge

Black-clad Khmer Rouge soldiers charged into Phnom Penh and were welcomed with cheers, remembers Chhung Kong, a teacher in the Cambodian capital during the 1970s.

Few foresaw the horrors that lay ahead as Pol Pot's communist army, victorious over the US-backed republican army of Lon Nol, seized control early on April 17, 1975.

Four years later Chhung had lost 16 of his relatives to the regime, Phnom Penh was deserted and his school transformed into the Tuol Sleng, or S21, torture chamber - one of the most grotesque emblems of a paranoid rule that wiped out a quarter of Cambodia's population.

Tearful survivors yesterday marked 40 years to the day since the Khmer Rouge entered the city.

A few hundred people, including monks and elderly regime survivors, gathered early yesterday at Choeung Ek - the most notorious of the regime's "killing fields" - on the capital's outskirts, burning incense and saying Buddhist prayers at a memorial stupa housing the skulls and bones of victims.

Memories of the bloody agrarian revolution, which left up to two million dead from starvation, overwork or execution, remain seared in the mind of Chhung, now 71.