Cambodia in 1990 seemed without hope. The political opposition had not been back in the country for 20 years; the king and the queen were in exile. The Khmer Rouge had probably 15,000 troops with which they controlled huge portions of the country. In Phnom Penh, the Cambodian People's Party, the Communist Party, had installed a system under which there was no respect for human rights, no political freedoms, and several thousand political prisoners. There was little press freedom, no non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or human-rights organizations. But the UN agreement and the UN-supervised elections produced a dramatic transformation; all of these things changed quickly. Suddenly the opposition was back in the country and they won the most votes when the election was held. They took leadership positions in government, the king was able to return, political prisoners were freed, and newspapers could be reopened. There was a euphoria in the international community about that, but then the situation deteriorated in 1996 and 1997. When I arrived in Cambodia in 1996 as ambassador, after just 30 days I asked the State Department to let me return to Washington. The message I conveyed to them was that the situation was likely to result in violence, because there were two opposing factions that increasingly mistrusted one another. Violence did erupt in July 1997, although I would not describe it as a coup, but as a return to civil war. Essentially you had two sides, each in Phnom Penh, fully armed, with sandbag bunkers around the houses of their leaders. One weekend, they started shooting each other. My own house was hit with a rocket, with my family inside, and most Americans had to be evacuated from the city. That was heartbreaking for all of us who had worked on the Cambodian peace agreement. It left the sense that all our effort had been lost.We entered into a period of about a year and a half of negotiations, pressure, and cajoling to finally push the Cambodian government to hold another internationally supervised election in which the political opposition could safely return. That has been the start of a sort of second beginning for Cambodia. It has been a slow, step-by-step process since then of trying to move in a positive direction. We no longer have that sense of euphoria, but I think now we have recouped much of what was lost in the first round of fighting in 1997.

There have been calls in the international community urging the formation of tribunals in Cambodia, whether to make legal judgments on war crimes, prosecute offenders, or hear testimony from victims of Khmer Rouge policies. Meanwhile, efforts such as South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which aims at healing rather than prosecution, have been criticized by many as toothless. What should a tribunal attempt to do in the Cambodian situation?

There are several roles: the primary one is bringing senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge who were responsible for crimes in the 1970s to trial. The United States played a significant role in bringing about the arrest of Ta Mok, the last remaining Khmer Rouge military commander. Also, before Pol Pot died, he was being tracked down in an attempt to capture him so that he could be taken to an international tribunal for trial. The United States was intimately involved in that effort, even making the arrangements for Pol Pot's transportation out of the country.

Beyond that, the question of how Cambodians deal with the tragedies that have happened and whether they have a truth commission or some other process is something that needs to be done carefully, with the Cambodians themselves taking the lead. Having gone through this terrible experience in which upwards of two million people, or one quarter of the population, may have died, virtually every family is affected; it has left a very deep scar. Moreover, it is easy to have that trauma return. I remember one day when there was an explosion at the edge of Phnom Penh-some old mines were being detonated by the Cambodian Mine Action Center to get rid of them. This set off a panic downtown because people heard the noise and thought it was 1975 again and that the city was about to be retaken by the Khmer Rouge. Markets were closed, schools emptied, and people raced to find their families and get to safety. The impact on Cambodians has been very dramatic. Whatever is decided needs to be based on what Cambodians from all levels of society want to have happen, and not something that is fore-ordained by outsiders.

You seem to strongly favor policies of engagement that involve cooperation and partnership between Cambodia and the United States. The notion of normalizing relations with Vietnam highlights a similar sort of alliance relationship. Is the US/Vietnam relationship similar to that between the United States and Cambodia? Should policies be similar in terms of partnership and engagement?

Obviously the geographic proximity of Vietnam and Cambodia tends to make one think the policies should be somewhat parallel. I always start out by asking what our national interest is. What are we hoping to achieve? Whom do we have to deal with? In Cambodia, my sense was that first and foremost, we should feel an obligation to the people of Cambodia who were worthy of assistance, even though the government might not be as worthy. In Vietnam, the overriding interest that was articulated in America for many years was a full and complete accounting for our POW/MIAs, since thousands of men were unaccounted for after the war. Vietnam is a much more difficult environment in which to work; there are not the same political freedoms there as in Cambodia.There is just one political party, so you have to deal differently with the Vietnamese government than the Cambodian. All our assistance programs in Cambodia, for instance, went through NGOs, not the government. You probably can't do that in Vietnam. So, we have a different environment in which to work. At the same time, Vietnam has an interest in improving relations with the United States, and we certainly have felt some obligation to the Vietnamese people. After the war we were involved in humanitarian projects in terms of mine clearing, assisting Vietnam in finding its own missing men, and providing humanitarian assistance.We haven't had the open environment that we have had in Cambodia; our policy must be more nuanced, but basically we hope to move toward a relationship that is increasingly normal. Obviously it will be generations before the war is removed from the forefront of American memory, and vice versa, but we have taken some important steps. Certainly the relationship the United States has with Vietnam now, compared to 10 years ago, is much improved.