Who in the international community would not welcome the idea of bringing Pol Pot, one of the most brutal dictators in the 20th century, to justice? But don't for a moment believe that his capture and removal from Cambodia will end the trauma that continues to grip that country's 6.5 million people. PNS editor Andrew Lam, a Vietnam-born short story writer living in the Bay Area, has traveled in and written extensively about Cambodia over the last decade.

Pol Pot has come to an ignominious end.

Captured by his own crazed and disillusioned soldiers, the man responsible for the deaths of nearly two million people seems now more a frightened deer than the feared Brother Number One who would order the execution of entire families at the drop of a hat.

Pol Pot, leader of the Khmer Rouge, came to power in Cambodia in 1975 and was driven out by invading Vietnamese in 1979. During his reign, he enforced a radical, agrarian-based reform that included the systematic elimination of the ruling and bourgeois class. One in four Cambodians died.

Yet the United States, perhaps traumatized by its lost war with Vietnam and still believing in the "domino theory," continued to recognize the Khmer Rouge as the country's representative in the United Nations in the 1980s. And China, angry over losing a war with the Vietnamese in 1979, continued to arm the Khmer Rouge until the early 1990s.

Many pundits have announced that Cambodians will experience closure if Pol Pot is finally brought to justice. But while his capture certainly marks an end to the bloodiest chapter in Cambodia's history, it won't end the tragedy unleashed when the war began. Years of factional fighting following the Khmer Rouge reign of terror have left a nation of 6.5 million traumatized and impoverished.

Consider:

Even after the most costly UN peacekeeping mission ever mounted, Cambodia is in desperate need of capital for rebuilding. But it lacks all the basic infrastructure -- roads, an educated work force, investment law, electricity -- needed to draw foreign investment or tourism.

After more than three decades of war, two of three Cambodians are female, a disastrous ratio in a country where 90 percent of the population depends on labor-intensive agriculture to survive.

Partners in the country's coalition government, set up by the UN-sponsored election four years ago, continue to bicker among themselves, and some observers say this may lead the country once again into civil war.

In the meantime, government officials vie for the right to cut down Cambodia's forests and sell them cheap to neighboring Thailand and Vietnam. The depletion of forest lands contributes to landslides and flood, and to the loss of top soil.

Although the war with the Khmer Rouge may be over, Cambodia is a nation armed to the teeth. Almost every family owns a gun or a rifle for defense against demobilized soldiers who have turned to banditry.

The worst problem of all is the presence of landmines. Cambodia has more mines per square mile, and more amputees per capital, than any country in the world. Every month, on average, some 400 Cambodians are maimed or killed by mines. The task of removing mines will take half a century.

In East Asia, a region experiencing unprecedented growth, Cambodia has become a kind of embarrassment. "We don't really include Cambodia when we talk about economic miracle and investment," a Bangkok businessman remarks. "Cambodia depresses us. Cambodia belongs to a different Asia."

As it is now, a tourist brave enough to visit Cambodia goes not simply to gawk at the magnificent ancient ruins of Angkor Wat, but to ogle the aftermath of a holocaust. The maimed and wounded and distraught survivors, the fields piled high with skulls, the bombed out buildings, and the Tuol Sleng museum -- the high school converted into a prison now filled with photographs that meticulously capture the varieties of torture committed by the Khmer Rouge -- all serve as a reminder of what human beings are capable of doing to one another.

For many in Cambodia, and elsewhere, Pol Pot is horror incarnate. And if his trial eases the Cambodian psyche, then it might be a small, good thing. But after the media limelight moves on from this wretched nation, the fear is that Cambodia will once again be left to fend for itself in the dark.