On a riverbank deep in the Cambodian countryside, a former Sydney academic turned genocide investigator is probing a patch of long grass with her bamboo walking stick. Helen Jarvis is looking for more evidence of mass murder: bones or teeth, or scraps of clothing, for instance.
Half a century ago, the Khmer Rouge turned this sun-flayed stretch of sand and scrub into a prison camp and execution ground, which it code-named M-13. “People still find human remains here after all this time,” says Jarvis, a purposeful, plain-spoken 78-year-old.
M-13 is a three-hour drive from Cambodia’s booming capital, Phnom Penh, along roads lined with straggling villages of timber houses on stilts. As big as a football stadium, M-13 is bounded by an oxbow lake and a milky brown river that winds across a patchwork of newly ploughed fields. On the horizon, sapphire-blue mountains shimmer in the haze. It’s mid-year, traditionally the start of the wet season, but the south-west monsoon is yet to deliver regular cooling rain.
