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Unsettling as it was to walk the grounds at Choeung-Ek, it was a fascinating time to be there -- since the drama behind the killing fields was still unraveling. In Phnom Penh, Ta Mok (nicknamed the butcher, Pol Pot's No. 2 man during the Khmer Rouge regime) awaited his local trial, while human rights groups called for an international tribunal to determine his guilt. Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen publicly balked at such an idea, claiming that an international tribunal would only be fair if Henry Kissinger was also called to trial for initiating the indiscriminate bombing of the Cambodian frontier in the early 1970s. Meanwhile, in western Cambodia, Khmer Rouge cronies Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea received summons to appear before the military court just a few days before Deuch (Pol Pot's old torture chief at Tuol Sleng prison) suddenly turned up in Battambang and announced that he was a born-again Christian, and "deeply sorry" for ordering the torture and execution of 14,000 people.

To add to this atmosphere, my visit to the killing fields coincided with the height of NATO's air raids on Yugoslavia. Some Cambodians expressed skepticism at NATO's actions ("Kosovo 'Does not compare' to Khmer Rouge Horrors" read one Cambodian Daily headline), but as I walked over the shattered bones at Choeung-Ek, NATO's far-off actions in defense of the Kosavars seemed to imply a kind of hope -- a Year Zero (to use a term coined by Pol Pot) for global morality; a new prototype for international justice: Human Rights 1.0.

Also Visit our Vietnam: 25 Years Later site for more articles like this one.

Could this newly minted solution to human brutality, I wondered at the time, have saved Cambodia from the horrors of the Khmer Rouge?

In retrospect, I know only that such comparisons quickly lead to the tangent-bending brand of rhetorical badminton that has made Noam Chomsky a campus cult figure. To hold Human Rights 1.0 up against the events of the past invites an almost endless slew of reassessments.

After all, one might point out (as Philip Gourevitch did in "We Regret to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families," his book about the 1994 Rwandan massacres) that genocide has historically been a cornerstone in community-building -- that groups of humans have always had the tendency to define themselves by elimination. Few time-honored historical figures would be able to pass the standards of Human Rights 1.0.

Moses, for instance, ordered the ruthless and total slaughter of unarmed women and children at places like Midian and Heshbon and Bashan. Was Moses less human than we are now? Should his memory be stricken from the Judeo-Christian record and re-categorized with the likes of Slobovan Milosevich? Should Genhis Khan's mug be removed from Mongolian currency and his memory pigeonholed with that of Lt. William Calley? Should Angkor Wat and the Great Wall of China be razed as a gesture against slave labor? Should NATO bomb Washington as an ex post facto retaliation for the Trail of Tears?

Eventually, the objective logic of Human Rights 1.0 doesn't seem quite so clear. Why, after all, did we bomb Serbs over Kosovo when we didn't bomb Turks over Kurdistan? Why was South African apartheid the hip human rights cause of the 1980s when Sudanese slavery barely garnered a public mention? Why do we mourn the Cambodia of the 1970s when we can't even find East Timor on a map?

Why do the 504 civilian victims of My Lai so succinctly symbolize the brutality of an attrition war, when the 502 civilian victims of Binh Hoa represent little more than a small-print statistic?

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