That's what Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, whose troops had been hunting for the guerrilla leaders, charged this week. ``Our neighbour often denied they existed on their soil, but said they would hand them over to us if we would accept them to rejoin society,'' Hun Sen said. The allegation was part of a broadside fired by the PM at an array of foreign nations, organisations and domestic political opponents who have accused him of trampling on justice.

Stung, Hun Sen reversed himself on Friday and said a trial should proceed. He also took pains to point out that in the past, while others, including the UN, were pushing him to enter into a compromise settlement with the Khmer during the early 1990s, he had insisted its leaders be tried. The Khmer Rougecrimes rival those of any this century. During their 1975-79 rule they emptied the cities and forced the population into agrarian slave labour camps where many were worked or starved to death. Tens of thousands of others were tortured and executed because they were believed to be opponents of the regime. In all, as many as two million died before the Khmer Rouge, who had been raiding Vietnamese villages and slaughtering their inhabitants, were chased to the Thai border by a retaliatory Vietnamese invasion.

There, they might have withered had it not been for cold war politics and regional animosities. On the ground, the Khmer Rouge formed an unlikely alliance with royalist and other non-communist Cambodian groups to oppose the Vietnamese occupation. They were supported by China, their chief international patron, and the US, who ostensibly supported only the non-communist branches, but whose weapons found their way into Khmer Rouge hands.

The reason for the superpower support was that Vietnam was a clientstate of the former Soviet Union. The corridor through which this lifeblood of money, food and weapons flowed to the Khmer Rouge was Thailand. Vietnam and Thailand have long vied for dominance over Cambodia and Laos, and the Thais were exceedingly uncomfortable having a Vietnamese army on their eastern border.

ASSOCIATED PRESS