Cambodians were shocked to learn that their government had privatized Cheung Ek, the most notorious of the "killing fields" of the autogenocidal Khmer Rouge.

This NYT piece suggests they shouldn't have been -- that corruption and greed are driving a firesale of Cambodia's public assets.

An excerpt:

There is little to see here but gaping pits in the ground and a glass-fronted tower that holds some of the 8,000 skulls of people who were slaughtered here.

Cambodia leased the Cheung Ek killing field, where 8,000 people were executed, to a Japanese company.

This is the most venerated of the hundreds of killing fields in Cambodia, and over the decades it has become a place to remember the 1.7 million people who died during the brutal rule of the Communist Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979.

So many Cambodians were shocked when the government announced last spring that it had leased the Cheung Ek killing field to a Japanese company to manage for a profit. "It is commercializing the memories," Youk Chhang, director of the leading archive of Khmer Rouge materials, said at the time. "Memories cannot be sold, cannot be contracted."

But the deal should have come as no surprise. The market is hot now for government assets and prime real estate - universities, courts, hospitals, police stations, ministry buildings - which are being sold or bartered as if Cambodia were somehow going out of business.

It is the latest wave in the corruption that, hand in hand with lawlessness and impunity, has thwarted the country's emergence from the destruction of the Khmer Rouge years.

This is a land where just about everything seems to be for sale or lease: forests, fisheries, mining concessions, air routes, ship registrations, toxic dumps, weapons, women, girls, boys, babies. Long before the deal for the killing field, just south of the capital, Phnom Penh, the government gave a well-connected private company the concession to earn millions of dollars managing Cambodia's national symbol, Angkor Wat.

Land values in Phnom Penh are estimated to have tripled in the past five years, and the market is so rabid that small lakes are being filled to create more prime land to sell.