The latest eruption of this high moral tone has been the call for the trial, by an international jury, of Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, two high-ranking henchmen of the notorious Pol Pot. These men have surrendered to the Cambodian government, and the bargain with prime minister Hun Sen is apparently their freedom from indictment under any war crimes tribunal.

Since the crimes of the Khmer Rouge were brought home dramatically to an international audience by the movie The Killing Fields, even people unconnected with politics know the extent of the genocide practiced by Pol Pot's army on their own people. It is no surprise that the Cambodian government's amnesty proposal hasevoked strong reactions.

The trouble, however, is that the "murder of a gentle land" story is only half-true. There is no doubt that Pol Pot was guilty of gruesome crimes. Unfortunately, several of those responsible belonged not only to the Khmer Rouge, but to countries all over the world.

The first question is which international body is competent to carry out the trial. Will it be the world court at the Hague? But that court is a United Nations body, and the UN's record in its dealings with the Pol Pot regime is none too clean. The Pol Pot government was driven from Phnom Penh as early as January 1979, but its representative continued to occupy a seat at the United Nations and claimed to speak on behalf of Cambodia for a full decade.

The United States and China were the authors of this UN policy. All international aid to Cambodia was cut off. None of the international financial bodies lent a helping hand to that beleaguered country. Even the World Health Organisation refused aid to Cambodia. In 1991,the UN Human Rights Sub-commission dropped from its agenda references to the genocide in Cambodia.

To avoid offending the Chinese, a UN peace plan dropped all mention of genocide from its draft. The UN can hardly be the organisation to cast the first stone at the Khmer Rouge.

What about that beacon of freedom and transparency, the United States, which has been very vocal in calling for a trial of the Khmer Rouge insurgents? It can, in fact, be argued that it was the US which was the catalyst for the whole genocide.

A Finnish government study, cited by Edward Herman, professor emeritus of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, points out that the bombing of Cambodia by US forces since 1969 and the coup against Sihanouk carried out by a US-supported clique of generals created conditions which paved the way for the brutalisation of Cambodian society.

The Finnish study estimated deaths through the US bombings at 6,00,000, with another two million people made refugees. At the time when theKhmer Rouge took over Phnom Penh, the country was in shambles, and famine loomed large on the horizon.

That is not all. Even after the Khmer Rouge lost power, the United States consistently supported it, trying to ensure that it formed part of any future Cambodian government. In 1982, the US and China helped form the Coalition of Democratic Government of Kampuchea, which in the memorable words of American columnist Ben Kiernan was neither a coalition, nor democratic, nor a government and not in Kampuchea.

This organisation provided a convenient fig leaf for the Americans to route supplies and equipment to the so-called non-communist resistance, which existed only in the imaginations of the American right. This non-communist opposition was a non-entity without the support of Pol Pot's well-trained forces, and Sihanouk's commander-in-chief, Price Ranariddh, readily accepted the Khmer Rouge as the main attacking force, pointing out that they celebrated Khmer Rouge victories as their own.

Ironically, it isSihanouk who is now calling for the trial of Khieu Samphan. Add to that indirect support by the US for the Chinese backing of Pol Pot. In 1981, Carter's national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, revealed that he encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. Later, when public opinion in the US became too hot to handle, the training of the "Cambodian opposition" was taken over by the British. All this shows that the Pol Pot story is, regardless of what the western media may say, hardly a black and white one, and there are several villains besides the Khmer Rouge.