Night of the living dead: if you like the war in Bosnia, you'll love the one in Cambodia.

If you like the war in Bosnia, you'll love the one in Cambodia.

Mortar rounds were falling near the airstrip of the remote provincial capital of Siem Reap as I braced myself for take-off inside a United Nations C-130. It was the week in which Cambodia's first free elections were supposed to start. But the campaign took on a decidedly military turn as the Khmer Rouge declared war on the UN peacekeeping effort.

The UN thought it could trust Pol Pot's genocidal Communists to support the formation of a legitimate government following decades of atrocities, war, and foreign occupation - only to find that it is now the target of their terrorism. The Khmer Rouge intensified attacks across the country in April, as Pol Pot's spokesman, Ehieu Samphan, announced that they were pulling out of the Supreme National Council (SNC), a governing body created by the UN to bring together Cambodia's warring factions. "Are you a journalist?" asked a Canadian Mountie working for the United Nations Transitional Authority for Cambodia (UNTAC). "Just stick around: you are going to have a real war here."

As I left Siem Reap, electoral workers recruited by the UN were huddled inside the compound of an Army battalion from Bangladesh. The soldiers serving with UNTAC were also too scared to venture out. Cambodians helping to organize the elections had been systematically persecuted, and two Japanese working as electoral supervisors had been murdered by the Khmer Rouge during the past month. The Khmer Rouge have targeted UN workers from Japan because the director of UNTAC, Yasushi Akashi, is Japanese, and because Tokyo is providing a major part of the funding for the UN peacekeeping effort. It is terrorism in its most studied form. "But the UN continues with its original plan regardless," says Charles Bowers, a member of the Australian Electoral Commission, "as if all that is happening were just hiccups."

Bowers tells of how his interpreter's home was burned down and two Cambodian women registering voters in Siem Reap were machine-gunned to death during a Khmer Rouge raid on electoral offices. Bowers believes that elections held under present conditions - without security adequate to guarantee them - "would be a farce." Like many other foreign volunteers, he is preparing to leave Cambodia.

Lieutenant Colonel Robert Adolph of the U.S. Army Special Forces is not leaving, but he is not optimistic either. A published expert in psychological warfare, he believes that the Khmer Rouge is the only force in Cambodia with any "unity of purpose" and that the UN plan for Cambodia is "basically flawed." In Adolph's view, it would take a division of organized combat troops to provide the security necessary for elections to take place. Captain Decker of the battalion of Dutch Royal Marines in Cambodia believes that a pacification process would take five years.

Calling George Orwell 

Instead, the UN has leaned over backward to placate the Khmer Rouge, going so far as to strike out references to genocide from its official records on Pol Pot's government, which devastated Cambodia with its "ruralization" policy between 1975 and 1979. A Sorbonne-educated Marxist, Pol Pot had a rather existential interpretation of the Socialist utopia as an agrarian society entirely dedicated to growing rice for his army. He came a long way toward achieving this vision by emptying out the cities and slaughtering en masse all Cambodians with anything beyond a primary education. Pol Pot did not want his dream disturbed by even the possibility that someone might possess the faculty to think.

Just to be sure, he had many of the children of educated families killed along with their parents (mass graves have been unearthed outside the main towns), and for those who survived life has been an enduring trauma. Touch Heap was 12 when he was forced at gunpoint to watch the execution of his father and mother; he was told that if he so much as shed a tear he would be killed as well. "Our only ideology at the time was survival," explains Khieu Kanharith, who is among only three of his 1975 university class to five through the holocaust - the other two were out of the country. He managed to make his way into the remote countryside and pass himself off as a simple rice farmer until the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia in 1979. Receiving them as liberators, he went to work for the government set up by Hanoi, a rump of which has remained in power in Phnom Penh since Vietnam withdrew its troops three years ago. Kanharith is now a deputy to Prime Minister Hun Sen of the State of Cambodia (SOC), who served as Foreign Minister under the Vietnamese.

Pol Pot's Delusion

To be sure, it was not simply Pol Pot's oppression of his people that provoked the invasion by his brother Communists from Vietnam. It was his delusions of creating a new Khmer empire, based on an entity which existed in ancient times, when Kings of Cambodia ruled much of the region. Pol Pot has since pursued his own brand of "ethnic cleansing" by persecuting the Vietnamese migrant community in Cambodia. In recent weeks massacres of Vietnamese fishermen in the central lake region have caused an exodus of floating villages, which can be seen chugging their way down the Mekong River toward the open sea. Vietnamese-owned businesses get fragged with hand grenades and the SOC does nothing to protect them, as that would play into the hands of the Khmer Rouge appeal to Cambodian xenophobia.

Kanharith is pessimistic about the chances of successful elections in Cambodia, where 18 political factions are competing for a majority of the vote. Even if they do take place, whatever shaky coalition emerges could still easily be broken by the terrorist strategy of the Khmer Rouge.

He describes the UN effort in Cambodia as one of "well intentioned people who are tragically out of touch with the country's reality." One of these could be James Lynch, a lawyer from Los Angeles who got bored with asbestos litigation and now works as a UN field officer in a grass hut in the heart of Khmer Rouge territory. He is allowed to function there because the relief supplies he directs to repatriated Cambodians coming from camps in neighboring Thailand provide the Khmer Rouge with more people to control.

Although Lynch has copies of National Review scattered around the hut where he receives the world's most unrepentant Communists, he describes his relations with local Khmer Rouge commanders as "positive." A local market is now allowed to operate in his village and some of the commanders "even have local girlfriends," Lynch says, as proof of how the Khmer Rouge have mellowed. But asked if the upper leadership of the Khmer Rouge has undergone similar changes, he remains silent. He agrees later in our conversation that the one-legged Khmer Rouge chieftain in the neighboring province of Siem Reap has a reputation for ruthlessness which matches even Pol Pot's. And when I ask to go to their camp and take some pictures, he automatically replies, "I don't want to be responsible for seeing your head broken and having the film ripped out of your camera." We drive a few miles down the dirt road, passing a Khmer Rouge roadblock where sentries stand alert with their Chinese Ak-47s.

Further down the road, the SOC roadblock stands abandoned. "The guards are at the local village getting drunk or setting up an illegal toll somewhere" to extract money from civilians, speculates Lynch. The SOC army has not been paid in six months; the Khmer Rouge, meanwhile, is the richest political faction in Cambodia, with a treasury estimated at about $1 billion, gained from exporting gemstones and timber from the areas it controls. Pol Pot's armed strength is between 15,000 and 20,000 battle-hardened veterans with the resources to fight on for years-whereas none of the aircraft and very few of the tanks the SOC inherited from the Vietnamese are in serviceable condition.

Out of Accord

The main reason for the sorry state of Phnom Penh's army is that, unlike the Khmer Rouge, the SOC had begun demobilizing its 50,000-man force in compliance with the 1991 Paris agreements. According to these increasingly irrelevant accords, drawn up at the time of Vietnam's withdrawal from Cambodia, all the factions would disarm 70 per cent of their forces and canton their troops. The Khmer Rouge never complied.

There were very early signs that the Khmer Rouge had no intention of disarming. In April 1992, an officer of the Australian Special Air Service regiment serving with the initial group of UN military observers was helicoptered to Khmer Rouge headquarters in the district of Anlong Veng. His mission was to obtain information about the size and location of their arms caches. He was totally ignored. "The atmosphere was oppressive," he recalls. "People were told not to talk to me and Khmer Rouge commanders kept putting me off." After waiting a day, he returned empty-handed. The UN was never even able to draw up a plan for Khmer Rouge disarmament.

The Commander of UN forces at the time, General Michel de Lorridon, strongly recommended taking tougher measures against the Khmer Rouge, such as outlawing Pol Pot and moving combat units into his areas to force compliance with the Paris agreements. But Lorridon's outspoken views earned him his dismissal, and an Australian general, John Sanderson, was named to command the military component of UNTAC, which grew to 15,000 men from 33 different countries, the largest UN peacekeeping operation up until that date.

While Sanderson has toed the official line, which has been to play down the problems with the Khmer Rouge, his deputy commander, who comes from the French Foreign Legion, leaves no doubt that "we have to all intents and purposes a partitioned country." General Robert Rideau believes that the more aggressive steps recommended by Lorridon stood a good chance of working a year ago, when the Khmer Rouge were in a weaker state, but that now it would be much more difficult. Pol Pot's army has had time to regather its strength, decimated by the ten-year struggle with Vietnam. Rideau has previously served in Lebanon and several parts of Africa. It is the first time that he has worked with the United Nations, and he hopes that it is the last. The Legionnaire considers the UN to be "very special," a polite French way of saying that something is not quite right.

While Rideau and some other military observers say the Khmer Rouge leadership is not as monolithic as it may seem, very few believe the movement can be broken up as long as Pol Pot and his Politburo remain in control. The architects of Cambodia's genocide meet frequently to deliberate in secret at various hideouts in the mountainous region straddling the border with Thailand. It was at these meetings that they decided to buy time and whatever other benefits could be gotten by signing on the UN's dotted line in Paris. The Khmer Rouge also calculated that the SOC would collapse before elections could take place and that they would be left as the only force strong enough to fill the vacuum, taking power in Cambodia under UN auspices.

But Pol Pot's gamble has not quite paid off, because the SOC has proved more resilient than many anticipated. The large UN presence has given Cambodia an economic boost. Direct reconstruction and relief aid have not been all that effective; public-works officials I spoke with complained that the UN planners have allocated virtually no budget for such specific tasks as rebuilding schools and hospitals. But UNTAC's 21,000 well-paid personnel have created a dollar economy virtually overnight in Cambodia's main cities, and stolen goods have flooded in from Thailand to fill the stores and the open street markets. Everything from Johnnie Walker Black to Japanese cars is widely available at black-market rates. Motorbikes clog Phnom Penh's wide boulevards, which are lined with piles of decomposing garbage, mutilated beggars, and the carcasses of French colonial mansions, which squatters have turned into slums.

Rats skitter through the corridors of the dilapidated old hotels, while Vietnamese rock bands play the latest tunes at a variety of new nightclubs, which are filled with businessmen, UNTAC soldiers, and surprisingly elegant-looking prostitutes. Illicit trading is so common in Cambodia that one of the new entrepreneurs applying for a business-management course with the International Labor Organization states on his form that "I sell stolen motorcycles from Thailand and would like to learn how to do it better."

But many are asking what is going to happen to this bizarre economic boom once UNTAC closes up shop on August 22. The national currency, the riel, is virtually worthless, and losing value by the day. The resulting inflation has quintupled the price of rice and other basic goods. Never missing an opportunity, the Khmer Rouge have used their veto power on the Supreme National Council to block a $65-million loan from the World Bank by insisting on conditions to which the lending organization cannot agree.

"The way to deal with the Khmer Rouge is through persuasion and negotiation" was the formula prescribed by UN Secretary General Boutros-Ghali during a visit to Cambodia in early April. "We have been invited in here." He appeared at the news conference held at the Royal Palace on the banks of the Mekong River accompanied by Cambodia's "Last Emperor," former lung Norodom Sihanouk, who is the nominal chairman of the SNC and a man on whom the UN is relying heavily. "We are solidly behind lung Sihanouk," said the LTN Secretary General.

Sihanouk, however, has failed to keep the SNC going-just as he failed to keep Cambodia neutral during the Vietnam War, when the fence-straddling lung allowed North Vietnam to turn his country into a logistical base. He was overthrown in a U.S.-backed coup led by General Lon Nol in 1970, and when that government in turn fell to the Khmer Rouge, Sihanouk was brought back by Pol Pot as a nominal head of state under house arrest in his Chinese-style palace. During the Vietnamese occupation, the King went to live in China and North Korea. He has apparently grown close to the hardline Communist regime in Pyongyang, which is developing atomic weapons in violation of the Non-proliferation Treaty. He moves around protected by North Korean bodyguards. And the extent to which Sihanouk takes his cue from Asia's rogue nuclear power is evident in his views on South Korea: "As long as I'm alive there will be no relations between Cambodia and South Korea." UN officials explain that there is no other national figure they can work with in Cambodia. Sihanouk's son leads a political party which is a heavy favorite in the elections.

The place to meet most other educated Cambodians who would be leading their country toward democracy is at the Monument to The Genocide, about ten miles outside of Phnom Penh. Their skulls stare at you from behind panes of glass in a pagoda which rises from the spot where nine thousand bodies of writers, lawyers, diplomats, businessmen, and others who would not adjust to Pol Pot's farming collective were uncovered in a mass grave. Cambodia is like a country which has been given a lobotomy, and the monstrous doctor who performed it is now back to reclaim the life of the walking corpse.