“You look like Britney Spears!” gushes the young man at the front desk of the Hotel Cara in Phnom Penh.
“It’s the hat, isn’t it?” I say hopefully. He nods. He’s lovely. All the staff here are. The hotel is excellent — small, comfortable, stylish, spotless, and inexpensive. Perfect pillows, too. It was recommended to me by Ross, an American businessman who I met in Bangkok. He works in Cambodia and lives in the hotel. Middle-aged, energetic, dressed in shorts and a black t-shirt, his eyes are fish-tank green, horizontal, and full of passion when he talks about Cambodia. With him is Pat, an Australian lady aged 84, who also resides in the hotel. Pat is what I would call old school — rather aristocratic, tough, adventurous, and razor sharp. If I want to be like her when I’m older I’ll have to shape up mentally, not just hang on to what I’ve got. Pat and Ross have decided that I must go and see Tuol Sleng prison, now a museum, and the mass graves of the killing field outside the city in order to appreciate the modern history of Cambodia.

I admit that I don’t know much about the war. Over lunch in a terrific restaurant, Ross gives me a precis. The first point that sticks in my mind is that the war in Cambodia was essentially a proxy war between Russia, backing Vietnam, and China, backing the Khmer Rouge. The second point is that most of the leaders of the Khmer Rouge were educated people, intellectuals from landowner or civil servant backgrounds who picked up communist ideas at university in France, and then — this is the part that seems to make no sense — turned into mass murderers, descending particularly on members of their own class in a bid to turn Cambodia into a Maoist agrarian peasant state in the name of self-sufficiency.

I go with Pat and her driver, Parak, in Parak’s 4WD, to Tuol Sleng, a former high school turned into a prison camp operated by Khan Khek Iew, where 17,000 people were imprisoned and tortured before they were taken to the killing fields and executed. There were only ten known survivors. Groups the Khmer Rouge arrested and brought to places like Tuol Sleng included people with connections to the former government, the educated, Buddhist monks, homosexuals, Christians, Muslims, ethnic Vietnamese and Chinese, and former urban dwellers. Urban populations were rounded up and taken to labor camps in the country. Parak, who lost his whole family, explains that these people were continually split up and moved from camp to camp to prevent them organising.

The rules at Tuol Sleng:

Inmates were chained to these beds. The metal box is a toilet.

Body of a prisoner:

Waterboarding table:

Inside the prison are boards covered with photographs of inmates. Some are shown before and after torture. Many are former Khmer Rouge members suspected of betraying the party. Some of these are very young. The Khmer Rouge used child soldiers. Pat tells me that children recruited into the army were required to kill their own families. I ask Pat what methods were used to recruit them. She seems irritated by the question, as if the answer were obvious. “When you’re poor and hungry, I don’t think it’s hard to understand,” she says. “Particularly if a man with a gun is telling you what to do.” It might be that simple.

Tuol Sleng certainly gave me pause for thought, but I couldn’t say I was horrified. We’ve all grown up on a daily news diet of human enormities, and this was just more of the same, including a room with glass cabinets full of skulls and paintings of torture by one of the surviving inmates. What I did find affecting were the photographs by prison photographer Nhem En. They are compelling pictures of individuals. Looking from one board to the next, you’re literally faced with the fact that every murder, every act of torture, rape and humiliation, is committed by one individual against another. Every one of Stalin’s famous statistics has a personal history, and so does every human being who strays off the path of humanity.

After Tuol Sleng, Parak drove us to the old Chinese cemetery that became the “Killing field” where prisoners were executed, often with a bludgeon or by having their throats cut with a palm branch to save bullets. The mass graves are depressions in the ground, filled with long grass and purple flowers. A few grave stones from the original cemetery can still be seen. Curiously, I find it has the usual peace of a graveyard. I don’t feel anything here, despite the prisoners’ clothing still lying visibly in the ground:

There is a glass pagoda full of skulls. Parak won’t go there. I go and have a look, but I still feel unaffected, perhaps because the skulls are the opposite of individual. The question “Why” hangs in the sunny midday air. Parak says he has asked many people the same question, and nobody can give him an adequate answer. He thinks the former king and president Norodom Sihanouk could tell him. Ross and Pat think that evil is not far from the surface in human nature, and it is hard to argue with that, or with the contention that power fed to a human being is like raw bloody meat fed to a dog; that man is the top predator on earth and, if he unlocks his own cage, sets himself free from self-imposed taming and removes himself from the reach of law and censure, he will more often than not turn into something which, if it had four legs, would need shooting dead.

There’s also the matter of grudges and revenge. The communists were suppressed by the government in the early 1960s. Prior to the Khmer Rouge gaining power, Khar Khek Iew was tortured in prison by Norodom Sihanouk’s police for engaging in communist activities. Another key figure, Khieu Samphan, was publicly beaten, stripped and photographed. When looking for reasons — not excuses, just causes — I don’t think the virulent power of the desire to get one’s own back and avenge humiliations can be underestimated. Chain it to the mob mentality that arises in situations of political and economic conflict and you might have at least part of the recipe for mass violence.

“Communism doesn’t work because it has to be enforced by totalitarian means, and totalitarianism doesn’t go away,” says Ross when we meet up again in the afternoon. Most mature societies, he says, are looking for an optimum balance between socialism and capitalism. Gung-ho capitalists who would strip away all social services risk creating an angry underclass with nothing to lose. Those unable to see the moral necessity of social welfare should still be able to see its practical necessity.

I finish my trip to Phnom Penh with a quick look around the National Museum, an attractive building housing mainly statuary removed, for its own safety, from temples at Angkor and elsewhere. Unfortunately photography is not allowed. There’s something Egyptian about the streamlined, solid elegance of many of the figures and their full-lipped, serene faces. There is an astonishingly beautiful Lokeshvara, a form of the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara. I can’t help thinking that if there really was a deity of compassion it would look just like this. (And there is a charming one with a horse’s head, who reminds me of Forage. It turns out he is the prophesied 10th avatar of Vishnu.)

Leaving the airport I buy a block of Dagobah lavender and blueberry dark chocolate. It’s delicious. I eat some of it for dinner on the plane. My taxi driver in Bangkok is twitching, making funny noises, talking to himself and applying the brake with alarming jerks. I suspect yaba has something to do with it. Stuck in the usual traffic jam where the tollway reaches Sukhumvit he stretches and yawns mightily. “Tired?” I ask. He says he needs chocolate. I wonder if he will like lavender chocolate, but I needn’t worry, he does. It really is very good.