Nicolae Ceausescu was a murderous tyrant, and on Dec. 25, 1989, Romanian freedom fighters took him out and shot him. The rebels deserved low marks for judicial procedure but high ones for closure. As regards the judgment of Cambodia's Pol Pot, an incalculably worse tyrant, nearly the opposite appears true.
Last week, according to U.S. journalist Nate Thayer - the first Westerner in 18 years to see the monster and live to tell the tale - Pol Pot received a full (if not exactly fair) trial from the tattered remnants of the Khmer Rouge he once led. When the last denunciation had sounded, a people's court sentenced the ``traitor'' to life imprisonment - a pale penalty for the genocide Pol Pot inflicted upon Cambodia in the 1970s.
Worse, he will serve his time in shrouded limbo. At a minimum, no international tribunal will judge Pol Pot, denying the world a fuller cataloguing of his crimes, ruling out a public spelunking into the dark caves of a maniacal mind and shielding other Khmer Rouge from incrimination.
The inconclusiveness doesn't stop there. Thayer called the jungle proceeding a ``show trial,'' a political ritual in which the defendant had no chance of acquittal. The show, however, could have been staged for outside consumption, allowing the Khmer Rouge to delouse itself while Pol Pot controlled the movement's machinery offstage.
And the ragtag ``Red Khmers'' have no Alcatraz, no stationary facility in which Indochina's Hitler can be observably incarcerated. For reports on the killer's status, the world must rely upon the unreliable - the word of the bloody Khmer Rouge.
There would be considerable satisfaction in making Pol Pot answer for his atrocities before civilization. But in one sense it is perhaps apt that his fate is to be left alive with just a few knowing for sure where he is. He thus serves as a reminder that the spirit of evil is always at large.