Ten minutes’ bumpy drive from the border with Thailand, past a strip of gaudy casinos and brothels in a landscape of denuded hillsides, is a place where travellers fear to stop.

Throughout Cambodia the border town of Pailin is known — apart from its gemstones — as the last bastion of the Khmer Rouge, from where its remnants fought the Government until 1998.

The reputation is enough to send most travellers rushing through to the capital, Phnom Penh, eight hours drive away. Locals say that about 70 per cent of the area’s older men were fighters and that nearly all families have links to the regime blamed for the deaths of 1.7 million of their compatriots between 1975 and 1979.

Among them are men guilty of the worst crimes of the 20th century. Yet in the past four years many who are now law-abiding farmers and traders have renounced their former leader Pol Pot as a servant of Satan; travellers today are likely to suffer nothing worse than a fervent attempt to bring them to the Lord.

Phannith Roth, a missionary who grew up half-starved in a labour camp, admitted that he was terrified when his congregation in the town of Siha-noukville begged him to go to Pailin to spread the Word.

“I was scared because there are landmines everywhere, malaria is rife and because of the Khmer Rouge, who everyone knows are cruel,” he said.

“But it was the Lord’s will.” Now his Pailin Bible Presbytery Church has about 40 former Khmer Rouge worshippers. “One was a hopeless drunk who told me he would have committed suicide if he had the courage,” Pastor Phannith said. “He had been forced to machinegun 100 villagers to death and had recognised his own sister among them. After that he couldn’t face his family.

“But now he has found Jesus. He has something to live for; he has stopped drinking.”

Pastor Phannith said that many chose Christianity because they did not find forgiveness in Buddhism, which teaches that a soul must pay for its sins during lives to come.

Other churches have sprung up in the past four years, many with the help of missionary groups in America and South Korea. First to be established was The Good Samaritan Church, which has five ex-Khmer Rouge converts. The Four Gospels has about 30 and only the Seventh-Day Adventists admit to having none, although when they tried to take the gospel to Khieu Samphan, the former Khmer Rouge head of state, he cheerily wished them well.

Nuon Chea, the deputy to Pol Pot, who is regarded as the most evil surviving leader of the regime, also lives in the town in a spacious wooden home, overlooked by a half-built hotel for the growing influx of Thai gamblers.

Some former Khmer Rouge figures have embraced capitalism instead of Christianity. District officials are said to be among those who have invested in the tacky Pailin Flamingo and Diamond Crown casinos, which are important employers now that a mining boom has ground to a halt after the gemstones became exhausted. Later this year two former regime leaders are expected to appear before a tribunal charged with crimes against humanity. The tribunal has been delayed by months of bickering, but its rules have finally been agreed.

Pastor Phannith has advised his congregants to cooperate with the tribunal, as he says they should be thinking about justice on earth as well as judgment in heaven. Mean Leap, an ex-Khmer Rouge soldier with a ferocious stare, who is now pastor of the Four Gospels Church, says he and his congregants plan to ignore the tribunal. “Only Christ will save us,” he said. “Although I don’t know whether we will go to Heaven or Hell.” He says he was a teenage bodyguard for a commander, then fought from Pailin until 1998 against occupying Vietnamese troops. Like most Khmer Rouge veterans in the town, he denies taking part in executions.

Pailin’s hilltop Buddhist temple competes with the churches for souls, with many ex-cadres donating food and cash for the monks. They have much to atone for. Between 1975 and 1979 pagodas were turned into torture chambers because their thick walls muffled screams and monks were singled out for the killing fields.

Abbott Rattanak Mony Chan Kong said: “I don’t care what the Christian churches do but some ex-Khmer Rouge have become monks here. Even if they have killed people in the past they can come here now. We welcome them.”

Thon Thea, a former Khmer Rouge soldier, said: “I had to fight and saw people killed and I feel guilty. But I know that God will forgive me.”

Victims of the killing fields

—An estimated 1.7 million people lost their lives under the brutal ultra-Maoist regime of 1975-79

—The educated — monks, French-speakers and people with glasses — were among those rounded up and tortured in special centres

—Out of the 16,000 political prisoners who entered the most notorious of these — S-21 — only six are thought to have come out alive

—Money became worthless and private property, education and religion were all abolished, as Cambodia’s urban dwellers were forced on to agricultural collectives

—Many victims of Pol Pot's regime were taken into “killing fields” to be executed, having been tortured with searing-hot metal prods or on electrified metal beds

Sources: News agencies; Yale University

Explore Asia News

• China News

Times Recommends

• Putin set to bait US with nuclear aid for Tehran
• North Korea ‘uses doubles to hide death of Kim’
• Academics label Charlie Wilson too 'gung-ho'