Past in closet

US secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s visit to the Tuol Sleng prison in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, on Monday threw up an image of the estimated 17,000 people who were tortured and killed there between 1975 and 1979 under the Khmer Rouge regime. Yet the memory of that horrific past continues to be belied: Cambodia’s prime minister, many of whose close associates had ties with the Khmer Rouge, recently asked the United Nations not to expand the scope of the tribunal looking into the regime’s crimes. In Cambodia, some skeletons are yet to tumble out.