It is 9am, and outside the Hun Sen primary school in Anlong Veng children are gathering in the searing heat for the first day of the new academic year. Many have walked for miles across the rice fields to get here and their white and blue uniforms are stained red with dust. Nearby, water buffalo carrying produce to the local market trudge down the pot-holed road that provides the only link between this remote community and the rest of Cambodia.

At the sound of a whistle, the school’s headteacher, Som Noeurm, introduces himself to his new literacy class. The concrete walls are bare but for two sun-bleached Aids awareness posters, and mosquitoes buzz through open windows. There are no fans in the classroom or electricity for overhead lighting.

Som starts by warning the children, who sit on plain wooden benches, about the danger of landmines. Both the teacher and his pupils have first-hand experience of Cambodia’s deadliest legacy. In 1983, Som lost his leg in an explosion and, until three years ago, the children who now fill his class were being taught how to lay mines in the nearby rice fields. Only last year, four anti-personnel mines were removed from the school’s dusty playground.

For nearly three decades this seemingly peaceful farming community was at war. As the last stronghold of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, until a fragile peace was brokered in 1998, Anlong Veng was destroyed by conflict. Only now are its schools being rebuilt.

Som, 52, a Khmer Rouge member from 1970 until the 1998 ceasefire, believes education must be a priority for the newly reunified country. Five years ago, he was working at the same school, built in 1991 by the Khmer Rouge. But the lessons were very different then. Officially employed as a literacy teacher, Som was forced to spend the majority of school hours teaching children as young as nine how to lay booby traps, make explosives from fertiliser and transport weapons to the guerrilla fighters at the front line.

After years of indoctrination and conflict, Som maintains that only education can now offer the local children a chance of building a more peaceful society. “In the days of the Khmer Rouge, the children were made to feel like dust,” he says. “They were worthless, without a future and with only the war to think about.”

Cambodia’s children are the silent casualties of the decades of fighting. When the Khmer Rouge swept into the capital Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, the curtain came down on the country’s fledgling education system. Forcibly evacuating Cambodia’s urban centres, the new rulers led the population to rural labour camps where they were put to work building Pol Pot’s vision of a rural, communist utopia. The Khmer Rouge banned televisions, radios and newspapers. Music and singing were strictly controlled and, although Pol Pot himself was a former teacher, education - seen by the party as a breeding ground for counter-revolutionary ideas - all but ceased. Schools - most notably Phnom Penh’s Tuol Sleng high school, where more than 17,000 Cambodians were interrogated before being executed in the nearby Choeung Ek killing fields - became prisons or army barracks. Over the next four years, 1.7 million Cambodians were murdered or starved to death before being buried in fields where their bones still stain the red earth white.

The Vietnamese invasion of 1979 destroyed Pol Pot’s government, but the Khmer Rouge maintained strongholds in areas such as Anlong Veng and Pailin, where the children were largely denied education and were instead co-opted into the war effort. Only since the death of Pol Pot in 1997 and the final laying down of arms in 1998 have government and aid agency officials been able to enter these areas and set about rebuilding the infrastructure.

But there are severe difficulties. With the adult population devastated by war, 50 per cent of the population are under 18; 10,000 Cambodian children have been orphaned by Aids and twice that number are exploited by the sex industry. Som, the Cambodian government and Save the Children Norway, who are at the forefront of providing primary education for Anlong Veng’s children, face a formidable task. The government’s education budget for the region is negligible, and while teachers can expect a salary of only pound;17 a month, few are paid.

Som now shares his simple, wooden home with 10 government soldiers, sent to the region to maintain peace. He works six days a week in a hot, dark classroom with few of the teaching aids and textbooks common in the West, before returning home to tend the rice fields that feed his family. He has not been paid in six months. He graciously suggests that his unseen pay cheques are being spent on relieving the floods that, in late 2000, affected three million Cambodians.

But with five illiterate children of his own, he is committed to making a difference. Som’s young grandchildren are now growing up in the shadow of the soldiers they share their home with and, as we speak, he sits with an AK-47 nearby. But he is determined that they will never hear the guns fired in anger.

Working with Keo Sarath, Save the Children Norway’s programme manager for basic education, who lost more than 50 family members to the killing fields, and Heme Khem, the local government’s district education director, Som is trying to build and staff basic schools, and is already seeing results beyond his wildest dreams. On his first day as a headteacher in 1998, only a few hundred children were being educated in the whole of Anlong Veng district; within a month, there were 1,000. Today, 4,117 children are being taught by 68 staff in the 11 schools built by foreign aid agencies in the past three years.

“Now the children arrive at the new schools as soon as they are built,” says Som. “There is no need to advertise them. There is so much enthusiasm that we cannot keep up. We have to stop children at the door.”

On the steps of the school, where a tattered Cambodian flag flutters in the late afternoon breeze, seven-year-old Reack is playing with a 13-year-old friend. Despite their age difference, the two boys are in the same class. This is typical of Anlong Veng. With all children long denied even the most basic education, girls and boys of all ages are now determined to take advantage of the new opportunities.

In the neighbouring, even more remote, district of Trapang Prasat, Save the Children Norway and teachers like Som are making similar advances. Close to the border with Thailand, the cluster of huts that since 1998 has become a district capital has no access to electricity or sanitation and many of the surrounding, fertile fields are peppered with mines. As we pass through the village on motorbikes, small crowds gather at the roadside and stare in disbelief. But 54-year-old district governor Chum Cheat has ambitious plans.

During the Pol Pot regime, Chum was a senior cadre, overseeing nearby Preah Vihear province. Today, he receives less than pound;14 and a few kilograms of rice in salary per month after turning down the government’s offer of a promotion to general in Cambodia’s official army. Only recently he discovered that both his brother and sister were killed by the Khmer Rouge despite his allegiance to the same organisation. Chum is now committed to peace, rebuilding his district’s shattered education system in the hope that his community will never be revisited by its turbulent past.

“Few of those in the Khmer Rouge in these parts knew about the terrible things that were going on further south,” he explains. “We simply wanted to bring the poorer people of Cambodia a fairer society, and once the fighting had started there was little we could do but battle on. Children faced terrible things during the fighting, but war is a terrible thing. Now we have to work to restore peace and rebuild.”

So far, the results have been impressive. In a district where more than 70 per cent of the population are illiterate and the first school was only built in 1999, this academic year will see 90 per cent of Trapang Prasat’s children enrolled in the education system.

Teachers have this year volunteered to work double shifts, and 76 volunteer literacy teachers and care-givers have been given bicycles so they can travel along muddy, jungle paths to take basic education to the most distant homes.

Though both Som and Chum have laid down their arms, casting off their ties with the Khmer Rouge to build a new, integrated and educated Cambodia, the problems they face are enormous. With 20 per cent of families in both districts headed by a war widow and most relying on rice farming for survival, many older children are needed at home to help with the harvest. Similarly, though there are plenty of willing teachers in the community, few have had any formal training and, with salaries currently set below subsistence level, few qualified tutors will leave the big cities to make up the shortfall. Primary education may now be available for most, but secondary schools remain the preserve of the few.

The communities controlled by the Khmer Rouge were not alone in their suffering. In Angkor Chum district many of the local people supported the government during the years of civil war. But as the frontline moved across the country with the army’s annual seasonal advances, the villages in this region were often caught in the crossfire.

Bou, 42, was a member of the local government militia until 1998. He speaks to me beside the wooden hut which he shares with his wife and six children. The road to the nearby village was washed away in the recent monsoon rains and it is now an hour’s walk through rice fields to the pump that provides him with fresh water. “Here, there were government schools, but things were rarely stable enough for children to get to them,” he explains. “It was a terrible life. One day we might have been attacked three or more times by the Khmer Rouge and the next the village would be rocked by a government artillery bombardment. As many as 50 per cent of the people living in the surrounding villages were killed and 20 children were killed in 1992 alone.”

Today, his three youngest children go to the simple, concrete school built by Save the Children Norway across the paddy fields. The two basic rooms are dark and lizards skit across the bare walls. Few children can afford school books and they instead write their alphabets in chalk on small, hand-held blackboards. But Bou tells me that his 14-year-old son has found fresh confidence since starting school last year, and he can tell me that Tony Blair is the prime minister of Britain. And yet this is a remote district, cut off from television and the media, where few villagers have travelled more than 20 miles from their birthplace. Like Som and Chum, Bou is hopeful about the future.

And with pound;1 million pledged to the Save the Children Norway programme by the Japanese Social Development Fund this year alone, they have reason to be. “For many Cambodians, it is like waking up on New Year’s Day, looking out of your window and seeing that the nightmare has ended,” says Som. “For years the children have been victims of this country’s wars. Now we have discovered that we are all just Khmer, they can finally stop looking back and start looking forward.”

Save the Children Norway can be contacted at rb.cambodia@bigpond.com.khFor more information on Cambodia’s rural schools building programme go to www.cambodiaschools.com