Hello, welcome to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC Will Service with me, Jane

Wilkinson.

I'm going to take you back to 1992 to Cambodia and the first Dhammer Yetra, a 400-kilometer

piecewalk that brought together a country torn apart by years of conflict.

It was one of the most uncompromising and inhumane political experiments of modern times,

killing great swathes of the Cambodian population.

In the part of Western Cambodia that we visited, refugees are still fleeing from violent

clashes that erupt almost every day.

Those news reports from the BBC in Thames TV were looking back at the brutal communist regime

that governed Cambodia in the late 1970s.

No one will ever know how many people have died under the rule of the Khmer Rouge.

The estimates range from 200,000 to more than a million.

Perhaps the man most responsible is the Khmer Rouge leader, Paul Pot.

Well, he and the leadership of the Khmer Rouge, they wanted to create a perfect proletariat

within Cambodia and take it back to what he called the year zero.

That's peace campaigner Jesu Amozepang Suwan, talking about Paul Pot's Marxist rule when

money, private property and religion were banned and millions of people were forced out

of the cities to work on communal farms.

Some people just fled to what became refugee camps in Thailand.

People who couldn't handle the journey because they were ill or elderly or whatever simply

died on the roads and other people with basically no skills for survival in the countryside

perished from disease and the workload.

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