Two high-ranking officials of the Khmer Rouge, the brutal movement responsible for more than a million deaths in Cambodia, surfaced recently in Phnom Penh, the nation's capital.

Prime Minister Hun Sen, who had negotiated the surrender of Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, executed a neat two-step, appearing at first to oppose putting the two defectors on trial and then angrily denying that he was soft on Khmer Rouge crime.

The United States is trying to organize an international tribunal under the auspices of the United Nations that could oversee charges that the two officials committed crimes against humanity. In order to win the support of both Hun Sen and the Chinese, the United States has proposed limiting any charges to crimes committed etween 1975 and 1979.

To anyone familiar with US involvement in Cambodia, that proposal is a disquieting one. More important, it reflects a pattern of behavior in which the United States confronts the demons of others but not its own.

The Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975 after the CIA helped topple the Cambodian government and President Nixon secretly bombed the country. During the four years of Khmer Rouge rule, the United States claimed ignorance when it came to Khmer ouge atrocities.

When Vietnam successfully invaded Cambodia and established a puppet government in 1979, American officials helped forge a coalition among the Khmer People's National Liberation Front, the pro-Sihanouk faction, and the Khmer Rouge.

Though technically the United States supplied arms and financial assistance only to the first two members of the tripartite coalition, the Khmer Rouge were the dominant force and after 1979 continued to commit serious crimes, only now with US collaboration. That collaboration included the United States leading the fight to have representatives of the coalition take Cambodia's seat at the United Nations.

If there was any doubt of the Khmer Rouge's preeminent place in the US-backed coalition, it was dispelled when Cambodia's UN delegation chose the Khmer Rouge flag as its standard. US involvement in Cambodia, from the secret bombings to the 1991 peace agreement to which the Khmer Rouge, at the behest of the United States, was a party, constitutes one of the sorriest chapters of the Cold War.

Over the past 10 years, more and more governments have been coming to grips with their pasts. Sometimes the efforts have been clumsy ones, as in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. In other cases - Chile and South Africa are examples - the processes have been incomplete. But coupled with the establishment of the war-crime tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the enthusiastic support most nations have lent the establishment of an International Criminal Court, sentiment is running strongly against impunity.

The United States has often voiced its support for holding to account those responsible for human-rights crimes. But repeatedly over the past few months the Clinton administration has demonstrated that its commitment to the principle ends at our own door.

Guatemala and Honduras have been seeking US intelligence documents with which they might bring closure to their official investigations of human-rights crimes in those countries, but the United States has resisted supplying them.

Fear of what a trial in Spain of General Augusto Pinochet might reveal about US collaboration with his Chilean dictatorship has contributed to anxiety in the State Department about Pinochet's possible extradition, prompting Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to declare that the general's fate was for Chileans to resolve.

And US opposition to the International Criminal Court has turned largely on the spurious fear that American soldiers might be falsely accused of war crimes, despite innumerable safeguards against such a travesty.

Now the United States proposes to limit prosecution of Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea to those periods in which the US had no influence. But if we fail to confront our own role in facilitating, if not nurturing, Khmer Rouge misdeeds, we not only establish a double standard with respect to the rest of the world when it comes to exorcising the ghosts of human rights crimes past, we also lose the opportunity to insure that US foreign policy will avoid similar pitfalls in the future.

The United States should push for an international tribunal on Cambodia unencumbered by artificial restraints. The truth may be embarrassing to us in this case and others, but embarrassment is a small price to pay to heal wounds and sow justice.

William F. Schulz is executive director of Amnesty International USA.

Chester G. Atkins is a former US representative from Massachusetts.

This story ran on page A15 of the Boston Globe on 01/12/99.

© Copyright 1999, Globe Newspaper Company.