Monday's news is of the horrors of war, what with the leaks of atrocities in Afghanistan and the trial of a Khmer Rouge leader. Afghanistan is live, with us, too close. There is, though, a little distance between us and Cambodia's horror, a function of geographical and historical distance. And that makes for the different feel of the reporting today.

I only visited Cambodia as a tourist, but our guide had experienced the Khmer Rouge years. He’d argued that justice was not possible because of the scale of what’d happened: you’d have to haul a significant percentage of the population into the courts, and society would be destroyed in the process. He also remarked that people prefer to forget - only they don’t, of course. And maybe something else is possible.

That struck me, when the journalist who'd tracked down the Khmer prison chief Duch, talked of a quest not so much for Duch himself, as understanding. The great lesson, Nic Dunlop said, is that at the end of the trail you find a wizened old man who appears to be contrite about his role in some of the worst crimes of the 20th century. ‘As long as he remains a human being, and that’s what I found, there is hope.’

When there's no practical justice that can do justice to what's happened, it's as if an alternative imperative comes through: can we see what's happened in a place beyond good and evil, as it were, and with seeing, hold the horror - to comprehend a little, to punish in small part - but mostly to live on, with more awareness of the past. That’s valuable too because, as has been learnt from other atrocities, not least the European holocaust, the present carries what happened; it returns and can haunt successive generations. But what I heard Dunlop saying is that hope can return too, when individuals involved in the horror manage to commit to life still - even when perpetrators.