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'I was a foreign journalist in Phnom Penh when the Khmer Rouge marched in victorious in April 17 1975, their faces cold, a deadness in their eyes. They ordered the city evacuated. Everyone was to head for the countryside to join the revolution. They killed those who argued against leaving. Two million frightened people started walking out of the capital. The guerrilla soldiers even ordered the wounded - between five and ten thousand of them - out of overflowing hospitals where the casualties had been so heavy in the last days of the war that the floors were slick with blood. Most couldn't walk, so their relatives wheeled them out on their beds, with plasma and serum bags attached, and began rushing them along the streets. I watched many Cambodian friends being herded out of Phnom Penh. Most of them I never saw again. All of us felt like betrayers, like people who were protected and didn't do enough to save our friends. We felt shame. We still do.'
'Cambodian warriors have a battlefield custom, going back centuries, of cutting the livers from the bodies of their foes, then cooking and eating them. The belief is that this imparts strength and also provides a talisman of protection against being killed. Among pictures from Cambodia rejected by Associated Press were one of a smiling soldier eating the liver of a Khmer Rouge fighter he had killed, one of decapitated corpses being dragged along, and one of a human head being lowered by the hair into boiling water. Many of us are relieved to be protected from such images, but when we support a war we lack a full grasp of what we agree to.'
'The refugees I met at a UN camp on the Thai border in 1975 all had horrible tales to tell. They spoke of Khmer Rouge cadres beating babies to death against trees, of any adult suspected of ties to the old regime beings clubbed to death or shot, of starvation and total lack of medical care, of men with glasses being killed because they were "intellectuals". It was absolutely clear to me that these refugees were telling the truth. History shows that refugees usually do.'
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