The New York Times OP-ED

Monday, June 23, 1997

Abroad at Home

By ANTHONY LEWIS

It Tolls For Thee

The reported capture of Pol Pot in the Cambodian jungle is a dramatic reminder of how little the world has done to prevent political mass murder or punish its perpetrators. But it also points to something else. Notwithstanding that failure of leadership, the ideal of human rights and a regime of law has a deeper hold on the human imagination today, everywhere, than it has ever had.

After World War II it seemed inconceivable that the world would allow anything remotely like the Holocaust to happen again. The Nuremberg trials establish that genocide and crimes against humanity violated international law.

But the postwar hopes went unrealized. The United Nations could not agree on setting up an international criminal court to enforce the law. National leaders were unwilling or unable to act when mass murder recurred.

Cambodia was the worst horror. When the Khmer Rouge took over in 1975, many who had opposed the Vietnam War, I among them, thought anything would be better than the bombing inflicted on that peasant society by President Nixon and Henry Kissinger. We were wrong.

After months of silence we began hearing reports of what Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime was doing: killing every educated Cambodian, destroying the works of civilization, forcing people to live a nightmare life of collective toil. In the end more than one million Cambodians lost their lives.

Too little has been

done to prevent

mass murder

A few Western intellectuals, notably Prof. Noam Chomsky, refused to believe what was going on in Cambodia. At first, at least, they put the reports of killing down to a conspiratorial effort by American politicians and press to destroy the Cambodian revolution.

That phenomenon or something like it - explaining away reports of human rights violations as a Western way of interfering in other societies has recurred. When Idi Amin seized power in Uganda and began his massacres, I heard an American specialist on Africa dismiss the accounts.

in fact the West has been slow too slow - to intervene against ghastly human rights violations. The two most recent examples of genocidal murder, the Serbian campaign of "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia and the Hutu slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda, could both have been pre, vented by Western, especially American, leadership. But weak Presidents, George Bush and Bill Clinton, looked the other way.

Overhanging the whole subject of international human rights is the manipulative theory that different nations and cultures view human rights differently. The leading articulator of that notion is Lee Kuati Yew of Singapore, who uses it to justify his lawless treatment of anyone who gets in the way of his power. Mr. Lee likes to talk of distinct "Asian values," as if Asians preferred tyranny.

Kofi Annan, the new Secretary General of the United Nations, made a significant statement on the issue early this month. At a summit meeting of the Organization for African Unity he talked with a directness quite extraordinary for a U.N. leader.

Africa's success, he said, depends on respect for democracy and "for fundamental human rights. The conflicts which have disfigured our continent have, all too often, been accompanied by massive human rights violations

"Some view this concern as a luxury of the rich countries for which Africa is not ready. I know that others. treat it as an imposition, if not a plot, by the industrialized West. I find these thoughts truly demeaning, demeaning of the yearning for human dignity that resides in every African heart."

The yearning for human rights is universal. And the fact that the Secretary General made the point symbolized the power of that truth. His appointment of the President of Ireland, Mary Robinson, as U.N. Human Rights Commissioner also shows how seriously Mr. Annan takes the issue.

When the co-Prime Ministers of Cambodia announced the capture of Pol Pot, they said they would seek to have him tried before an international criminal tribunal. That is the next task for the U.N. and its members: to create such a tribunal, preferably not for Cambodia alone but a permanent court to deal with crimes against humanity.

But the fight against mass murder for reasons of race or religion or politics has to be made case by case. That is why it is 'so important to bring the accused war criminals in the former Yugoslavia to book. Every case is a test of civilization.

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