If these were the hopes, then the world in 1999 is nowhere nearer this judicial Elysium than it was ten years ago. In fact, it might be further away.

Ten years ago, with the Berlin Wall crashing and Gorbachev cutting off arms to Iraq and other trouble-makers, the world lurched closer to consensus on issues of aggression and war crimes than it can be said to have attained today. Present Security Council division on Iraq only confirms the point. An international war crimes tribunal, recently the subject of international agreement, means nothing without retrospective powers, effectively sealing its usefulness in any case prior to 1999, assuming it ever gets off the ground. It is certainly unable to deal with three cases now being considered in London, Rome and Phnom Penh.

First, there is Augusto Pinochet, the superannuated Chilean military ruler who has been detained in London by a Spanish extradition request whilst seeking surgery. The charges are murder, crimes against humanity and genocide, approximately the same headings for classic war criminals. The number of deaths in question are some 3,000. A deep and close ally of Chile, Britain may nonetheless end up acceding to the Spanish request.

Then there is Abdullah Ocalan, leader of a Kurdish separatist military organisation, the Kurdish Worker’s Party (PKK). The PKK, it is no secret, is a terrorist organisation which has claimed the lives of perhaps as many as 37,000 people. Ocalan was arrested in Rome where he had been invited to seek sanctuary. Italy has no desire to try him. It will not extradite him to countries willing (Turkey) or able (Germany) to prosecute: Turkey because it has the death penalty on its statutes, thus prohibiting extradition under Italian law; Germany, because it fears a wave of PKK reprisals if it puts Ocalan on trial.

Then there are the cases of Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, both former Khmer Rouge senior commanders. The two emerged in public last December to be treated as honoured guests of Hun Sen’s government. Attracting a howl of protest and calls for their trial, the Cambodian government, caught wrong-footed, undertook to review its options. The killing in Cambodia during the four-years of Khmer Rouge rule in the 1970s claimed some 1.7 million lives. So extreme and comprehensive are the crimes - the destruction of a whole society - that no one any longer has anything good to say about the Khmer Rouge, although many once did. Certainly, political will can enforce a trial which would be bedevilled by none of the legal complications afflicting the cases of Pinochet and Ocalan.

On its face, all is well with the state of international morality. Those charged with serious crimes, of varying political and national stripes, are being called to account. But the truth is less reassuring. Why is Pinochet arrested on a Spanish warrant in London, despite holding a diplomatic passport after constitutional and legal arrangements have been peacefully made in his own land? Conversely, why is Ocalan in effect a criminal in search of an extradition order and court, although he is alleged to have been responsible for killings ten-fold in magnitude of that attributed to Pinochet? Why are Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea left at large, now by the Cambodian government, and previously by the international community which, in underwriting the Cambodian peace plan, left the Khmer Rouge intact in Cambodia’s political arrangements? Why are human rights advocates so au fait on Pinochet but scratch their heads when they hear of Ocalan? Why are Cambodia’s new political arrangements seemingly sacrosanct whereas Chile’s are not? Chile, which Pinochet ruled by military fiat from 1973 to 1989, is a remarkable country. Unusually for its region, it has a tradition of democracy and a corresponding historical unfamiliarity with coups d’etat. Its presidential system, modelled on the United States, was slanted in favour of the executive rather than the legislature, but balanced by an independent judiciary and a unique institution, that of Comptroller-General, in effect, the arbiter of the legality and constitutionality of executive conduct.

The Comptroller-General, once appointed by both president and senate, cannot be removed.

Pinochet is credited with destroying Chilean democracy. The charge is strictly untrue. That was done, in all important respects, by the man he ousted, Salvador Allende, who narrowly won the presidency with 36% of a three way vote and the confirmation of a fair-minded Congress, aware that he had run unsuccessfully on three previous occasions. In winning parliamentary acquiescence, Allende’s committed himself to a Statute of Guarantees of individual liberties, a mere tactical ploy (as he told the French communist writer Regis Debray) which he never intended to honour.

Allende never sought by referendum or parliamentary means to pursue his goals; he knew he lacked support. This did not end the matter; it started it by a process of by-passing parliament and the courts. Unsurprisingly, Allende lost early the support of Congress which otherwise might have been expected to support broad reform on socialist lines.

The only nationalisation that proceeded legally, with due approval of Congress, was that of some large multi-nationals.

Every device was used to subvert the law. Banks were acquired through share-buy-outs; factories requisitioned, farms expropriated, often at gun-point.

Demonstrations were instigated against the courts which, together with the Comptroller-General, declared illegal each successive step taken by Allende.

As Deschamps puts it: ‘no constitution is proof against bad faith’.

The result was galloping inflation (323% by August 1973) a massively devalued currency, the rise of armed militias, often composed of foreign adventurers (more than 13,000) smuggling arms across the Argentine border, supported by Moscow. A mythology has arisen to attribute Allende’s fall to the bad faith of the armed services and various ‘elites’ who supposedly wanted nothing better than to dispose of Allende’s socialism. In fact, the ‘elites’ included the democratically elected Congress, which affirmed 81 to 47 that Allende was acting illegally and called upon the armed forces to ensure his compliance with the Constitution; the 100,000 housewives who demonstrated against the government, and especially striking truck drivers; certainly not the middle-class, whose representation in any case traversed the whole political spectrum.

And although the CIA was determined to rid Chile of Allende, as declassified American documents reveal, it appears to have had no influence upon the timing of the coup.

The decision to take power was made by the recently appointed military commander, Augusto Pinochet, who acted on the unanimous advice of all three military services, the uniformed carabineros and, what is less well known, elements of Allende’s own Socialist Party. This is less surprising than it should be: Allende’s Chile was ebbing away to complete chaos and possibly civil war, with radical insurgents plotting a revolutionary seizure on Independence Day, 15 September. Allende had lost control of his own radicals. Pinochet, in preserving Chile from that nightmare, may be entitled to more thanks than blame.

That leaves the issue of his subsequent conduct. Undoubtedly, many of his 3,000 victims were armed insurgents killed in combat but there is also testimony of murder and torture by Pinochet’s security service, the DINA, and measures extreme enough to have led the US government to suspend military aid in 1976. Pinochet is open to a charge of either ordering or condoning these practices, which he has strenuously denied in the past.

However, this is where justice paradoxically comes into collision with democracy and political reality.

Pinochet was strongly supported as military ruler: a plebiscite, held in 1980, stands to prove it. Equally, he obeyed the will of the people and stood down in 1989 when a second plebiscite indicated a Chilean desire to have done with military rule. If not a liberal state, Pinochet at least bequeathed a secure and prosperous one, having provided prudential government from what appears to have been a disinterested sense of the public good. It is a record that sits uneasily with the crimes of the DINA, but that only underscores the complexity of his case. What seems clear is that DINA officers would need to be investigated in court before we could hope to evaluate Pinochet’s guilt and that is where we run into difficulty for that is precisely what Chile elected not to do when democracy was restored.

It is ironic that Spain, of all countries, the former colonial power in Chile, having voluntarily forgotten the far more comprehensive crimes of the Franco regime, should seek to sit in judgement on Chile’s, in defiance of its own people’s verdict on the matter.

Chileans angrily denounce this as a form of neo-colonialism at the hands of a crusading Spanish jurist, Judge Baltasar Garzon. Garzon’s record is impressive in some respects but hardly consistent in the cause of human rights.

A murder indictment for the communist executioner, Santiago Carillo, who murdered literally thousands of clerics and monks during the Spanish Civil War, was thrown out by Garzon. Carillo is now secretary-general of the Spanish Communist Party. It cannot be said in this case that under Garzon justice has been either done or seen to be done, yet it is the same man who aspires to sit in judgement on Pinochet on the strength of the same private denouncements he rejected in Carillo’s case (as well as in the case of Fidel Castro who, oddly enough, seems to be a figure admired by Pinochet).

Chile left behind past crimes in order to ensure a bloodless transition to democracy, much as Spain observed a pacto del ovido (a pact of forgetfulness) after Franco’s death.

Democracy has been restored in both cases, with all that implies, which itself must be seen as a service to human rights. More recently, South Africa adopted the course of truth and reconciliation commissions in place of the prosecution of crimes. Prosecutions would doubtless have produced scores of convictions for South African security services personnel (and also various terrorist groups) who, facing no insurgency of the Chilean scale, killed far more people, over a longer period, than Pinochet’s DINA.

An amnesty is never a triumph for conscience or virtue, but it has sometimes provided the only possibility of a peaceful transition to democracy.

The results of reconciliation in South Africa have been mixed and fall far short of the results, in terms of compensation to victims, that have been achieved in Chile, but few have argued against it. Where the principals have accepted these undoubtedly imperfect arrangements, others should not second-guess them.

But the matter has not been allowed to rest there because Pinochet is a reviled figure in extreme left-wing politics, and with good reason. In the midst of the Cold War, Allende’s victory awakened the hope of the Soviets and their fellow travellers that communist rule might prevail, through democratic processes, in the West.

Chile was thought to be the precedent; the peculiarity and exceptional circumstances of Allende’s ascendancy were ignored. And from Chile, other Latin American states would take their cue; the fact that most of these were military dictatorships was also neglected. Whatever the calculations, Allende’s fall confounded their hopes.

Pinochet has been in their sights ever since. The antecedents to the coup have been ignored or distorted; the crimes of the DINA emphasised; the economic recovery of the nation neglected; and the return of democracy through peaceful means obscured. Thus the persistent calls for his extradition.

Nothing more clearly reveals the settling of an old score only ostensibly about justice than the fact that Fidel Castro, with a more impressive record of criminality, was being honoured on a visit to Spain even as Garzon lodged his extradition request.

Garzon has revealed his hand in another way. In charging Pinochet with serious crimes, he has not stopped short of charging him with genocide.

Whatever Pinochet’s crimes, there is no evidence of specialisation in mass-murder, still less genocide. To my knowledge, no one has identified the discrete ethnic or religious group he marked for extermination. That the charge arises at all in Pinochet’s case is but one index of the misuse of the term that has become current in international affairs, even when the crimes alleged self-evidently do not resemble what was done to Europe’s Jews or Gypsies or Turkey’s Armenians this century. Its presence in the Spanish writ brings into disrepute the integrity of those who are levelling other serious, credible allegations against him. The mere presence of such a charge in the Spanish writ before the Law Lords in London ought to have invalidated it as vexatious.

In Ocalan’s case, the priorities and indignation seem to be diametrically opposite. Ocalan is head of the Kurdish Worker’s Party (PKK), one of several groups fighting for various forms of Kurdish independence and security. The world’s largest stateless people, the Kurds have generally eschewed terrorism, certainly abroad. But the PKK, founded by Ocalan in 1978, is a Marxist-Leninist organisation, remor-selessly committed to revolutionary warfare. Its target for the past fourteen years has been Turkey, one of several countries within whose borders lies the Kurdish historical homeland.

Turkey does not have a distinguished record where the Kurds are concerned. For years they were forbidden even to speak their own language and subject to an assimilationist policy aimed at eliminating their sense of separate national and cultural identity. There has, however, been some progress. In 1991, some assimilationist measures were discarded. A legal Kurdish party, Hadep, now exists. Greater cultural rights for Kurds have been promised and importantly, funding has been earmarked for the development of the Kurdish hinterland, generally held to be the most impoverished segment of the Turkish state. Against these promising developments, however, must be placed the continuing fact of harassment of the Hadep and the refusal of Ankara to concede the need for any legal minority rights and safeguards. It is a political situation open to the abuses of ideological revolutionaries, not merely nationalists, and the PKK is a case in point.

Drug-running, a major Middle Eastern operation pioneered by Ocalan’s former host, Syria, and extortion are the chief entrepreneurial activities of the PKK. There are genuine Kurdish grievances, but Ocalan cannot point to the need to avoid chaos and civil war -that is what he is trying to create; nor to protecting any legitimate interest of his people, whom he murders and on whose rival independence orga-nisations he wages war. A more clear-cut case of mass-murder would be hard to come by, although we shall arrive at a still larger one, in due course.

In time, the PKK has spread its tentacles to Germany, which is home to 2 million Turks and 600,000 Kurds.

Turkish-owned enterprises, rival Kurdish organisations and PKK deserters are the principal targets. The organisation is banned in both France and Germany, the latter following Turkey’s suit in issuing a warrant for Ocalan’s arrest. Turkey has taken further steps. First, it gave Syria an ultimatum last October to expel Ocalan or else face invasion. The Syrians complied. Russia at first offered Ocalan sanctuary, but an increasingly assertive Turkey has flexed its diplomatic muscles here too by threatening to call in outstanding debts and withdraw Turkish enterprises with potentially catastrophic effect on Russia’s failing economy. The Russians complied. Last November, 50 left-wing Italian MPs invited - invited - Ocalan to Rome whereupon the Turks immediately demanded extradition. But here they have come up against the PKK sympathisers in the Italian government of Massimo D’Alema and Italian law itself. D’Alema must shoulder the blame for Ocalan’s arrival, which he did nothing to stop, despite forewarnings from the Italian secret service.

Instead, he adds insult to injury by asserting, in the face of all evidence, that Ocalan has renounced violence. The Turks have understandably responded with frustrated anger and seek to retaliate by boycotting Italian goods.

The marked reluctance of Italy to extradite Ocalan to either Turkey or Germany, or to try Ocalan themselves, stands in marked and ominous contrast to the eagerness with which Spain seems determined to prosecute a man who might have been responsible for the deaths of 80 Spanish nationals. (No-one asks what these nationals were actually doing in Chile in 1973) Ocalan, although a mass-murderer, is not in the sights of the old extreme left; to the contrary, they court him. A record of gruesome murder excites no moral qualms, although these same sympathisers would doubtless be appalled if Pinochet were released. If there is a comparison to the Pinochet case, it is this: Turkey, like Chile, proved a massive thorn in the side of communist millenarians during the Cold War. Anyone who opposed their rulers is very much in the club, regardless of wrong-doing, and not merely past wrong-doing. It is because the PKK can wage a terrorist campaign against Germany that Bonn has dropped its extradition request and prevaricated on the need for an international jurisdiction. But Spain and Garzon need not worry, because no revolutionary group threatens to disrupt proceedings if Pinochet is sent to Madrid. Those who support Pinochetseem prepared to stay within the law.

Accordingly, in Ocalan’s case, one would expect human right activists to be worried at the prospect of justice being forestalled by terrorists. Not at all. The Amnesty International spokesman I telephoned had no news on Amnesty’s position on ‘that guy in Rome’ though he was reassuringly fluent on the organisation’s position on Pinochet. Amnesty backs an interna-tional jurisdiction, as provided by the recent agreement signed in Rome, but concedes this will solve nothing in the present, since the court, when finally established, will lack retrospective powers. Amnesty’s London office, it must be said, has reported widely on Ocalan’s activities; it revealed recently that he ordered some 40 arbitrary murders last year in the Turkish city of Smyrna alone. But there is no doubting the fact that he raises less interest than Pinochet, despite his record.

An even more surreal situation has arisen in Cambodia. In January, two leading figures in the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot emerged in public in Battambang. The Khmer Rouge, conducting a policy amounting to slave labour and wholesale slaughter, coupled with starvation and disease, claimed 1.7 million lives between 1975 and 1979.

With a record of this order, Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea may have been expected to be hunted down or, at any rate, to lie low for the rest of their days. To the contrary, they were courted and officially welcomed by the Cambodian prime minister, Hun Sen, himself a reconstructed communist, who handed the men a bouquet. They were hosted in style at government expense for six days. Hun Sen himself is hardly a blameless figure. In July 1997, he orchestrated a coup against his co-prime minister, Norodom Ranari-ddh, with the usual accompaniment of killings and torture of opponents which have yet to be investigated. However, one month before the coup, both Hun Sen and Ranariddh requested of the UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, assistance in preparing for trial former Khmer Rouge murderers. Annan duly constituted a commission to assess the evidence of genocide which is due to present its report next month.

But this would be hardly apparent from the behaviour of the Cambodian government this month. The VIP treatment of the Khmer Rouge leaders and their subsequent return to Pailin within Khmer Rouge-controlled territory following their release, came despite a hailstorm of protest from human rights groups. In explanation, a government spokesman said they were free to go because there was no outstanding warrant for their arrest. Hun Sen himself first poured cold water on the chances of a trial, saying it would not be in the nation’s interests, then recanted four days later, pre-sumably in deference to the storm of protest. The two killers now profess to be sorry but deter-mined to leave the disturbing past un-disturbed and seemed genuinely puzzled that anyone might hold a different view. A "sorry, very sorry", apparently, is Khieu Samphan’s notion of acceptable admission and restitu-tion to the victims.

There has certainly been no accounting of the Khmer Rouge crimes. Pol Pot died a free, if sick, man in April 1998, and his followers live in quasi-autonomy in the Cambodian hinterland, a force capable of sabotaging democracy in the country. No pretence here of the reconciliation that has been tried in Chile or South Africa, or even Spain. Will either men be tried? Since it is unlikely that Judge Garzon will bestir himself to seek extradition of the two men for crimes against humanity and genocide, we shall all have to suspend hope until the redoubtable human rights activist ruling Cambodia sees fit to do something about it.

This then is the moral order on offer one year before the turn of the millennium. Three thousand dead, of no specific ethnicity or religion, can attract a judicial charge of genocide; one and a half million dead, including whole classes of a single society, do not. A foreign power, all but unconnected to the accused, can seek to extradite a former ruler travelling on a diplomatic passport; but genuinely aggrieved governments are stymied in seeking justice for tens of thousands of victims through incapacity or intimidation. One country may choose to forget political criminality in its own land but magisterially seek to undermine a similar arrangement in another country. Successor governments to genocidal regimes offer pardons to the chief perpetrators and seem almost surprised at the suggestion that they should embark on a course of justice.

We can thank several things for such a moral order, including no doubt Jean Paul Sartre’s insights into "institutionalised violence" which served as the intellectual palliative for terrorism and revolutionary violence.

There could otherwise be no accounting for the attitude of Judge Garzon, or the 50 Italian MPs, or the old pro-Soviet left, for whom indignation at injustice is in inverse ratio to the magnitude of the crimes committed. A degree of racism is also at work: 1.7 million Cambodian deaths, or 37,000 Turkish and Kurdish deaths, do not move many westerners in the way a similar atrocity in the heart of Europe would do. The expectation is that distant and exotic people like to kill each other and if that happens to be done on behalf of a revolutionary cause beloved of old Soviet sympathisers, then the issue of justice need not arise. Many Asian leaders themselves are remiss in their indifference to human rights abuses and prosecuting wrong-doers: no Asian government has signed on to the Rome statue for a human rights court.

Whatever the calendar says, we are not near the millennium.