Cambodian diary a rare glimpse of life under the Khmer Rouge

It was an extraordinary act of defiance, and it was extraordinarily risky. But all Poch Younly did was set pen to paper.

Nearly 40 years ago, hunched on the floor of the wood-and-leaf hut he was forced to live in away from his children, the Cambodian school inspector kept a secret diary vividly recounting the horrors of life under the Khmer Rouge.

The radical communist regime, an extreme experiment in social engineering, took the lives of 1.7 million Cambodians through overwork, medical neglect, starvation and execution.

Poch Younly was acutely aware that he could be killed if discovered. He hid the diary inside a clay vase. In those dark days, when religion and schools were banned and anyone deemed educated could be killed, he had no right to own so much as a pen and paper.

"Why is it that I have to die here like a cat or a dog ... without any reason, without any meaning?" he wrote in the spiral-bound notebook's last pages.

Four decades later, that question still haunts Cambodia.