Paul Shannon is a staff member of the Peace and Economic Security Program of the AFSC in New England.

December and January saw a spate of news stories condemning the Hun Sen government in Cambodia for promising amnesty to two infamous Khmer Rouge leaders, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan. The Boston Globe blasted Hun Sen, insisting that the Khmer Rouge leaders be tried before an international tribunal . The Clinton Administration put these two mass murderers on its "Wanted List" and committed itself to working with other countries to grab them. The Globe explains that Hun Sen's offer of reconciliation with the Khmer Rouge leaders stems from the fact that Hun Sen himself was once an ally of the Khmer Rouge who today uses repression to stay in power and control his "democratic opponents.". (Note: Under international pressure Hun Sen may have decided against amnesty.)

Given the thoroughly documented 1975-1979 genocide committed by the Khmer Rouge, all of this talk seems to make sense-except to anyone who remembers recent Cambodian history.

There have already been genocide trials for Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea as well as all the other Khmer Rouge leaders. They were tried in absencia and found guilty of genocide by a tribunal organized in the early 1980s by the very same Cambodian government that the US and its media screams at today. And what was the US' reaction to those convictions? Remarkably, the US decided to come to the aid of Pol Pot and his right hand men, Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea.

Herein lies one of the most important stories of the 1980s-namely that the least known international crime of the decade was committed in Cambodia by the United States itself. Who would believe that after the Khmer Rouge genocide of 1975-1979 was ended, the US itself would allow the Pol Pot regime to terrorize its victims for ten more years! And yet extensive reports by western journalists and relief workers-and the words of US officials themselves-make this awful truth absolutely clear:

• At the end of 1978 Vietnam responded to Khmer Rouge massacres of villagers in western Vietnam by invading Cambodia and ending Pol Pot's genocide. The Vietnamese installed a government headed by past members of the Khmer Rouge who had fled to Vietnam after their insurrection against the Khmer Rouge leadership in 1977-78 had been crushed. It is dishonest of the Globe today to compare these Khmer Rouge members who rose up against Pol Pot in an attempt to stop the genocide with Khmer Rouge leaders who ordered the genocide.
• To overthrow Cambodia's new Vietnamese-installed government, the US organized an economic embargo and forced the massive UN relief effort on the Thai border to save the remnants of the Khmer Rouge army-all in direct violation of the desires of the traumatized Cambodian population.
• The Khmer Rouge army, with the backing of the US and China, was used to hammer Cambodia's new government into submission. UN-supplied Khmer Rouge camps were set up along the Thai border and thousands of Cambodians who had fled to Thailand were forced once again to live under their tormentors.
• US leaders encouraged China to send weapons through Thailand to the resurrected Khmer Rouge army and welcomed collaboration between the Thai military and Pol Pot, Khieu Samphan, and Nuon Chea.
• The US made sure that the Khmer Rouge held Cambodia's seat at the UN and pressured Prince Sihanouk to head a Khmer Rouge-led coalition.
• After 10 years of embargo and war, the success that Cambodia's government had in rebuilding the country was destroyed, the UN took over, bizarre elections were held, and the country was reduced to the political and social basket case that it is to this day.

Cambodia. We should tremble when we hear the word after the nightmare we have wrought there. But most of us don't even know about it. Can you imagine the hue and cry if another country announced it would hunt down US leaders responsible for crimes against Cambodia and bring them before an international tribunal? Instead we have the audacity to get indignant about the Khmer Rouge refusing to face the fact that for ten long years they were our Cambodian "contras."