Cambodia One Step Out of a Nightmare

By JAMES WALSH

A man quick to laughter and tears, Prince Norodom Sihanouk was bursting with both. An Air China jetliner from Beijing had just brought him home to Phnom Penh after a tortuous personal odyssey of nearly 13 years. For all the flag waving and jasmine petals that greeted him, though, the return last week of Cambodia's exiled former head of state brought no certain end to his homeland's generation-long nightmare. The Sino-Soviet rivalry that had helped drive Cambodia's civil war may be history. U.N. troops and officials may have arrived to help restore peace. But the seeds of further ordeals remained strewn everywhere in Sihanouk's tragic country.

Under the auspices of a U.N.-brokered settlement, the Prince has returned to lead a transitional Supreme National Council composed of Cambodia's four warring factions. It includes, by necessity, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, whose Maoist-inspired ideology had devastated the country from 1975 to 1979 and resulted in more than 1 million deaths. Sihanouk on his return called for an international trial of Khmer Rouge leaders on charges of genocide -- which poses a stern test for even his powers of adaptability, since those same leaders will sit on the council he is to head.

The Paris agreement signed on Oct. 23 calls for the council to assume authority over international relations, but actual day-to-day government will remain in the hands of Hun Sen's Vietnamese-installed regime, pending elections some time in the next 18 months. Said a Soviet diplomat: "This settlement was drafted by a bunch of vice foreign ministers who have never been to Cambodia."

The legacy of 20 years of warfare is explosive. Land mines dot the countryside like rice seedlings, and fighting forces remain heavily armed. U.N. troops may eventually demobilize regular units, but retrieving militia weapons will be harder. Banditry has been rising since a cease-fire took effect last May. A superficial boom in the capital conceals a generally wretched standard of living in the provinces. Major highways can suddenly dissolve into swamps, and 80% of bridges are patched-up affairs.

The U.N.'s peace-monitoring troops, which perhaps will number 10,000 in all, are to arrive in full force early next year; until then, just 268 soldiers and civilian officials will be on hand. Their limited mandate -- training Cambodians for mine-clearing operations, for example -- makes them little more than window dressing.

< Meanwhile, some rural Cambodians will probably remain susceptible to Khmer Rouge populist appeals as Pol Pot's men cultivate votes. Their propaganda, though crude, can be effective. Near an abandoned pagoda about 50 miles northeast of Phnom Penh, a wall is inscribed with the caricature of an urban intellectual. His fat tongue bears the message, THE RICH MAN HAS POWER. THE POOR ARE SCARED.

Even if Pol Pot's candidates get only 20% of the vote, it would be enough to re-establish them as a legitimate political force, able to disrupt the government from within. The Prince may have come home, but jasmine petals cannot quite hide the smell of dangers ahead.

With reporting by Richard Hornik/Phnom Penh