NEARLY four decades after atrocities perpetrated by one of the cruellest regimes the world has known, two leaders of the Cambodian Khmers Rouges were this week convicted and sentenced for their crimes. After a trial lasting 222 days, with testimony from 92 individuals and 166,500 pages of written evidence, Khieu Samphan, now 83, and Nuon Chea, 88, heard the verdicts against them on August 7th. For the survivors of the nightmare their party imposed on Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 it should be a moment of catharsis. Instead, this may be one of those rare moments when life sentences feel like impunity.

This is not just because of the men’s old age. Neither man said he felt truly guilty—Mr Khieu Samphan even claimed that whatever he had done was “to protect the weak”. Yet the regime he represented was responsible for the death of perhaps 1.7m people, one-quarter of the population, through execution, torture, overwork, starvation and neglect. Nor is this the end of the two men’s trials. In order to bring at least part of the protracted judicial process to a conclusion, the cases against them were subdivided. This trial covered the forced evacuation of Phnom Penh and other cities after the Khmers Rouges’ victory in 1975. Another one includes a charge of genocide of Cambodia’s Muslim minority.

Moreover, other, more famous, culprits have managed to cheat justice. The Khmer Rouge leader, “Brother Number One”, Pol Pot, died in 1998. His brutal one-legged army chief, Ta Mok, known as “the butcher”, followed in 2006. Ieng Sary, the regime’s foreign minister, died last year. By then his wife, Ieng Thirith, also indicted, had been found too demented to stand trial. Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, in comparison a junior figure, is serving a life sentence for having run Tuol Sleng, a torture facility in Phnom Penh. He at least was contrite. Five other suspects have cases pending. These few aside, only Mr Nuon Chea and Mr Khieu Samphan are likely to face the courts to account for the Khmers Rouges’ misdeeds.

Not that they are small fry. Mr Nuon Chea was “Brother Number Two”, second only to Pol Pot in the hierarchy. Mr Khieu Samphan was head of state. But this “hybrid” judicial process, in a body that is a compromise between an international tribunal run by the United Nations and an indigenous Cambodian court, has been expensive and high-profile. At this important juncture in the court’s existence, it is hard to avoid the feeling that the drive for justice in Cambodia is ending with an unsatisfying whimper.

Foreign pressure for a more searching process has failed to overcome the resistance of the Cambodian government. On the face of it, that seems odd. This government—for all the instability, UN-administered interregnum, coups and rigged elections since—is the direct successor of the one installed by Vietnam after it invaded in January 1979 and put an end to the Khmer Rouge tyranny. The present prime minister, Hun Sen, was first appointed in 1985. His government long used its “liberation” of Cambodia as a source of legitimacy. But Mr Hun Sen himself is a former Khmer Rouge cadre. To consolidate his power in the 1990s, he did deals with his old comrades. Mr Hun Sen has good reason to keep retribution against the Khmers Rouges confined to a few figureheads.

What is more, the record of his own regime, which is accused of repression, electoral malpractice, land grabs and extra-judicial killings, makes Mr Hun Sen not keen to have the spotlight shone for much longer on his country. He has an interest in the inviolability of Cambodia’s judicial sovereignty. And many Cambodians feel it wrong to see the Khmers Rouges as a purely domestic phenomenon. The movement grew as a reaction to a corrupt American-backed administration and America’s bombing of Cambodia in the Vietnam war. It was backed by China.

Mr Hun Sen can also argue that his country has gone further than many others in confronting its past. In China a show-trial of four purged leaders in 1980 drew a symbolic line under the horrors of the Cultural Revolution. None of those responsible for the worst man-made famine in history in the late 1950s and early 1960s has been called to account. In Indonesia, the slaughter of perhaps 500,000 alleged Communists and others in 1965-66 has never been properly investigated. Hopes that a new regime under Joko Widodo, the president-elect, may end the tradition of impunity seem over-optimistic. He was fought hard to the presidency by a former general accused of serious human-rights abuses. Voters do not seem to be pressing for accountability.

What transpired when Myanmar’s president, Thein Sein, met its opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, in 2011 is secret. But after that the former general embarked on a remarkable set of reforms, apparently satisfied that members of the junta that misruled Myanmar for half a century would not face prosecution.

What’s the point of trying?

Even where tribunals have been staged, they have been coloured by politics. Many Bangladeshis celebrated the sentences handed down in the past two years on alleged leaders of pro-Pakistani groups involved in the murder of perhaps 3m of their compatriots in the country’s liberation war in 1970-71. But many would also recognise that it is a flawed, partisan process, which in any event ignores the role of soldiers from what was then West Pakistan. In Sri Lanka the bloody end of the civil war with the Tamil Tigers in 2009 remains contentious. There is no prospect of the government in Colombo admitting that its army, as many allege, was guilty on occasion of indiscriminate violence.

In Sri Lanka the wounds are still fresh. It seems obvious that they will never heal unless both sides recognise that they made mistakes and did wrong. But the same is true of countries like Cambodia and Indonesia, where wounds have festered and scars seem ineradicable. That nowhere in Asia seems yet to have achieved a form of justice that both imposes retribution and fosters reconciliation is no reason to stop looking for one.

Economist.com/blogs/banyan