Twenty-three years after the Khmer Rouge came to power, thousands of skulls bear stark witness here to the horror of Cambodia's killing fields which now lie quiet. Surrounded by dry and burnt rice paddies, this pitted patch of dusty ground nine miles from Phnom Penh is where thousands were put to death under the brutal regime of Pol Pot.
Stacks of skulls and chipped bone fragments, bleached white in the Cambodian sun, testify to the country's bloody past, when some two million people were worked to death, or killed and dumped in shallow graves.
"When I came here in the early 1980s this place still had a very bad smell," said a 40-year-old taxi-driver who still remembers the day the Khmer Rouge arrived in Phnom Penh.
"I remember it was during a happy New Year celebration like this, in April, when Pol Pot and his men came. The people stopped smiling and all they did was work," he said.
"Everyone had to leave the city, and those that did not leave were taken here to be killed. You can see the bones and parts of their clothing," he said pointing to the rows of open pits.
Now, with the Khmer Rouge rebels almost routed by the Cambodian government, and Pol Pot reportedly dead, these 129 mass graves, containing the bones of some 8,985 Cambodians and a handful of foreigners, bear witness to what has been.
The Khmer Rouge took over the capital Phnom Penh on April 17th, 1975, and immediately forced the city's entire population into the countryside as part of its radical agrarian social programme.
Over the next four years thousands of the city's former residents were killed and buried at Cheung Ek.
A sign nearby bears old, grainy black-and-white photos of the graves and partly decomposed corpses still bound, gagged and blindfolded.
"The people of Kampuchea always inscribe themselves with this suffering and wrath against the genocidal and criminal clique of Pol Pot and Ieng Sary we cannot forget it," a sign next to the photos reads in broken English.
The sign tells more than might be imagined at first glance. Many senior posts in the Phnom Penh government are now occupied by former Khmer Rouge cadres who have emerged from the jungles to join the government.
Former Khmer Rouge foreign minister Ieng Sary, who split from the hardline rebel leadership two years ago, is the most prominent of this group, which human rights workers say includes many others.
"People are still angry when they think about Pol Pot," the taxi-driver explained, navigating the pot-holed road back to town, sounding his horn to scatter crowds of smiling children, celebrating the new year by spraying each other with water and smearing white paste on passing cars.
"Perhaps it is not so good that Pol Pot is dead, because those that are left will be able to blame him only. Then they will never have to admit their guilt, their responsibility," he said.