The Khmer Rouge are everywhere - again, still. Twenty-five years after the invading Vietnamese army drove Pol Pot out of Phnom Penh, the murderous regime's name still echoes through the city, as a curse, as a fact of life.
"[The Khmer Rouge] are around, we talk to them every day," said Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Centre of Cambodia, who says the group's name is a symbol of evil in his country, central to a survivor culture in which everything can be defined by the group and blamed on it.
This week, the Cambodian Government moved a step closer to facing those demons when the National Assembly approved a Khmer Rouge war crimes tribunal agreement with the United Nations to try "senior leaders and those most responsible".
The agreement has been approved by the Senate, but is yet to be signed by the head of state. The current confusion over King Norodom Sihanouk's retirement/abdication and his claim that he will no longer sign documents of state does raise a potential sticking point.
After so many years and so many false starts, some are asking what the point is. The chief perpetrator, Pol Pot, has been dead six years. Close to half of the 11 million population is under the age of 15, born almost a generation after the event.
The point, said Ysa Osman, who has researched the regime's targeting of Muslims, is that leaders must know they will be held accountable, however long it takes.
"In the future, 100, 200 years from now, leaders of government will consider [the tribunal] and not commit such crimes."
Mr Osman, 33, was four years old when he was sent to a children's camp. "My memories are of very little food, they forced me to work in the fields, dig a dam. I was too young."
He lost two grandparents, two brothers and a sister. He estimated 400,000 to 500,000 Muslims died. Estimates for the total number killed range from 1.5 million to 3 million.
" The tribunal will set us free," Mr Chhang said. "It is one of the most important processes for reconciliation, to end the survivor mentality, to stop blaming everything on the Khmer Rouge."
Helen Jarvis, an adviser to Sok An, the Deputy Prime Minister who heads the tribunal taskforce, said the survivor mentality is "very pervasive".
"And to a great extent it is true. There is a terrible dearth of skills, experience and confidence ... There is no continuity," Dr Jarvis, who formerly worked as an Australian academic, said.
Even the Khmer Rouge rank and file regard themselves as victims of the revolution, Mr Chhang said. Many joined when the country was at war, and did not sign up for genocide.
"They are us, we are them. They are glad ... to be released from their pain, it is important to hear the story from both sides."
The documentation centre has conducted 20,000 interviews, preserved 7,000 documents, 20,000 photos and 300 documentary films, and identified 19,541 mass graves, 941 prisons and 88 genocide sites. It does not analyse the material: the collected resources will be made available to both prosecution and defence in the coming trials.
The new agreement calls for the prosecution of senior leaders and those most responsible for the genocide.
"I don't think either side is interested in combing through Cambodian society to find everyone who committed a crime," Dr Jarvis said. "The recognition that the crimes took place is more important than looking for the individuals."
The Cambodian Government wants the tribunals to start in 2005, but funding must be raised first. The United nations Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, has said he wants the money for one year's funding in hand and pledges on the table for the following two years before the process begins.
The three-year budget is estimated at US$57 million. So far, no one has made a pledge.
"When the three years of trials are over, it is a process of recognition," Dr Jarvis said.
"People will feel they have done something for the memory of the victims."