Atrocity or theme park?

Youk Chhang's U.S.-funded center, which is delivering boxes of documents on Khmer Rouge atrocities to the tribunal, plans a museum. One of its staffers, Sayana Ser, has toured Nazi concentration camps, other Holocaust sites and Berlin's Jewish Museum while attending a graduate program at Wageningen University in The Netherlands.

Roberto Rossano, a 22-year-old Londoner, said he knew little about the Khmer Rouge nightmare until he visited Choeung Ek.

"When somebody tells you one or two million were killed it's just a number, but when I came and saw just a fraction of what they did - these skulls - it absolutely shocks you," he said.

He and a friend had just seen the soaring stupa, or Buddhist reliquary, crammed with 8,985 skulls, some bearing clear evidence of death by hammers, hoes, bamboo sticks and bullets. Skeletal remains and ragged clothes lay in surrounding shallow graves. A sign next to a tree explained how executioners bashed the heads of children against its trunk.

The victims were bused in from Tuol Sleng, a former high school where up to 16,000 suffered torture and abysmal living conditions before being "smashed." Also on display are instruments of torture and scores of haunting photographs of those about to die, taken by their captors.

In the bougainvillea-shaded courtyard are tombs of 14 prisoners killed just before Vietnamese troops captured Phnom Penh in 1979, driving the Khmer Rouge into the jungles to fight as guerrillas and eventually to be squeezed into enclaves like Anlong Veng.

Anlong Veng, only recently cleared of mines, is perhaps the only "living museum" of the horror. Many of its 26,000 inhabitants are Pol Pot's former fighters and officials, some of them missing limbs.

Ta Mok, a brutal military commander, lived here until his death last month. Although he was to have stood trial for atrocities, he was a hero in Anlong Veng, and people eagerly point out his humanitarian legacy - schools, clinics, a dam, a sawmill that provided free wood to the poor.

"The people all love Ta Mok," says his nephew, Cheam Ponlok.

The commander whom the Western media dubbed "the Butcher" was seen off by hundreds of mourners and chanting Buddhist monks, and his ashes placed in a tomb in a temple - the newest addition to Cambodia's genocide trail.

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