In 1975, Saloth Sar, better known as Pol Pot,
plunged his country into the most profound hell.
While neighbouring Vietnam was fighting a bloody struggle against the American invader,
Pol Pot founded the clandestine Kampuchea Workers Party,
a movement first planned in the 1950s in the classrooms of the Sorbonne university in Paris,
where Pol Pot had been given a grant to study.
In 1965, on a visit to China at the start of the Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot discovered radical politics.
A peasant revolt marked the beginning of a declaration of armed struggle,
but Pol Pot and his army of Khmers Rouges did not develop their vision of a revolutionary society
until they had succeeded in gaining absolute power.
Events speeded up as the war against the Americans in Vietnam escalated.
The coup d'état by general Lon Nol, and the proclamation of the Khmer Republic unleashed civil war.
Five years later, in April 1975, the Khmers Rouges succeeded in conquering the capital, Phnom Penh.
The population, weary of war, welcomed the victors as heroes bringing peace.
But what they could never have imagined was that that very same day a nightmare had begun,
and would continue for four long years.
The worst was yet to come.
Immediately, massive evacuation from the capital began, and the population was interned in communes,
made to do forced labour.
All basic rights were abolished, and the most absolute reign of terror began.
In a matter of hours, Phnom Penh became a ghost town, and all forms of property were abolished.
The markets, the currency, the media, telephones and the postal service all disappeared.
Pol Pot, Big Brother number one, was finally able to put into practice what he had dreamt of so long;
The intellectuals must learn from the young, illiterate peasants.
Anyone who had received secondary education was condemned to be executed.
Wearing glasses, and not having calluses on your hands made you a candidate for death.
90% of doctors were killed.
Babies were murdered by throwing them against the trees and, using hoes in order to save ammunition,
thousands of Cambodians were wiped out.
The fields of Cambodia were soon strewn with dead bodies in a holocaust comparable to that of Hitler or Stalin,
and which cost the lives of two million people
that is, a third of the population.
Toul Kork, a suburb of Phnom Penh, was the place chosen to bury over twenty thousand victims.
Today, we can still see the mass graves of the most horrific, blood-curdling place in south east Asia.
In the centre of Toul Kork a monument reminds us just what humans are capable of.
And the most horrifying thing of all is that the assassins were boys and girls of between ten and fifteen years old,
who were turned into killing machines through sessions of political indoctrination.
Jem Phang was one of these young people, recruited from a monastery when just 11 years old.
Pol Pot was not the cause of the genocide, quite the opposite,
he managed to raise the production of rice, and there was food for everyone.
If they had let him govern for longer, this country would have developed.
Those really responsible for the holocaust were the Vietnamese, who hate us.
They infiltrated our organisations, and manipulated the ignorant local leaders, in order to wipe out our culture.
The Democratic Régime of Kampuchea converted the Tuol Svary catholic school
into the main detention and interrogation centre of the political police.
Known as S-21, it remains the greatest symbol of Pol Pot's reign of terror.
Its archives provide chilling, detailed accounts of the prisoners who passed through here.
Interrogations were carried out by young fanatics, eager to prove themselves.
If the victim confessed to some crime, he was sentenced to death,
and if not, the interrogators murdered him anyway, simply with a blow to the head.
In order to stop the torture, prisoners had to declare themselves guilty of one of three basic accusations:
either they were agents of the CIA, the KGB or the Vietnamese secret services.
Daily, they were subjected to such brutal punishment that many of them simply could no longer bear it, and took their own lives,
throwing themselves from the upper floors.
To avoid these suicides, the Khmers Rouges put barbed wire around the walls of the entire building.
When it came to torturing their victims, the executioners made no distinction between a frail old woman,
an innocent girl, or a foreign journalist who had been unable to flee the country in time.
In four years, over 17,000 people were executed in the S-21 concentration camp.
In one of the rooms, we can still see the piles of clothes of those innocent victims, exterminated by their own people.
Only two people managed to escape from this prison alive, thanks to their artistic skills.
The sculptor Im Chann was saved because he had to finish a bust of Pol Pot.
Today is the first time In Chann has returned to the concentration camp he was released from.
Vann Nath, the other survivor, was Pol Pot's official portrait painter,
and he painted the pictures of the atrocities we saw earlier.
These are the testimonies of a past which Vann Nath wanted to immortalise in his paintings,
in the hope that what happened in Cambodia will never be forgotten.
We had to get up at four in the morning and do half an hour of gym with the iron shackles around our ankles.
Though we were half naked, we were searched every morning.
Then, we were forced to remain lying on the ground for the rest of the day.
It was forbidden to sit up, or talk.
Often, they would beat our backs with a bamboo cane, and we only ate once a day, a little rice.
On the fifteenth of April, 1998, Pol Pot died at the age of 70, in a small shack in the jungle of Thailand,
where he had taken refuge along with the last Khmers Rouges.
His death came at a very opportune moment
Bill Clinton had begun legal proceedings to have him captured brought to trial.