Battered Cambodia Girds for New Round of Conflict

At 9 p.m., the electricity sputters off after a meager three hours, leaving this town in western Cambodia bathed in a primeval darkness. The last remaining Soviet-built cars and purring Japanese motorbikes abandon the rutted streets as a curfew descends.

Artillery fire begins a nightly drum roll in the distance. Tracer bullets fired by nervous militiamen sketch bright orange lines against the sky and vanish.

“There’s going to be a big fight soon,” says Try Chaeng Huot, vice governor of the province. “We will push them back, we are confident. But first there will be a big fight.”

Huot’s province, Bamteay Mean Chhey, is a new governmental region of 350,000 people that hugs the border with Thailand. It alternates between rice fields, many of them now abandoned, and the dense jungle favored by the three Cambodian guerrilla factions based in Thailand for infiltrating into their country.

Along provincial roads, farmers squatting in the geometric rice paddies shoulder M-16 rifles left over from the days of U.S. assistance in the early 1970s. Bridges are manned by militiamen with machine guns. An army base blocks the road to Poipet on the border, its entrance flanked by two aging Soviet tanks, 120-millimeter artillery and rocket launchers.

Rarely free of conflict in the last 20 years, Cambodia is once again girding for full-scale warfare. The fighting this time is expected to be a major test of strength after the withdrawal on Sept. 26 of the last Vietnamese troops from the country, a number Hanoi puts at 24,000.

The Vietnamese departure comes after a decade of costly occupation by as many as 170,000 soldiers. When Vietnam invaded Cambodia at the end of 1978, its aim was to topple the murderous regime of the Communist Khmer Rouge, which has been blamed for the deaths of more than 1 million Cambodians and which had begun slaughtering Vietnamese along the border. Vietnam succeeded, but at the cost of 15,000 killed and another 30,000 wounded, as well as seeing its own economy ruined by the conflict.

Last month, Premier Hun Sen, leader of the government that replaced the Khmer Rouge, held talks in Paris with the three insurgent factions, but the talks collapsed without achieving a political settlement.

When the Vietnamese withdraw, the three resistance factions--the Khmer Rouge, the rightist Khmer People’s National Liberation Front and the group headed by deposed Prince Norodom Sihanouk--are expected to begin assaults on Cambodian government forces who have moved in to replace the Vietnamese.

In fact, the test of strength has already begun. Last month, as the Paris talks were bogging down, the Khmer Rouge launched at least two major attacks in Kompong Speu and Kompong Thom provinces close to Phnom Penh, areas recently evacuated by the Vietnamese, according to officials in Phnom Penh and the provinces.

The battles were unusual on several counts: Such fighting is rare in Cambodia’s rainy season, and the Khmer Rouge mustered between 600 and 1,000 fighters in each assault, a scale far greater than the customary 20-member hit-and-run attacks. After what one foreign aid worker described as “vicious fighting,” the Khmer Rouge were repulsed.

Both Defeats and Victories

“In any fighting there will be defeats and there will be victories,” Ke Kim Yan, Cambodia’s first deputy defense minister, said in an interview. “In the recent fighting, there was some tension in the high points. In the end, we took over the high points which we had lost. I think it’s common on the battlefield.”

As such remarks suggest, the Cambodians so far are projecting confidence in their ability to withstand the expected onslaught, arguing that Vietnam’s phased withdrawal over the last two years has given them the opportunity to move into their places in an orderly manner.

But some diplomats in Phnom Penh remain skeptical about the strength of the government’s forces, noting that, in July, two units from Phnom Penh apparently broke in panic during a battle near the border town of Pailin. Eventually, reinforcements were sent in and regained the town, a center of Cambodia’s precious gems trade.

Perhaps even more worrisome to the Phnom Penh government is the impact that another round of fighting will have on Cambodia’s fragile economy, which is still recovering in stages from the devastation of the Khmer Rouge and ensuing years of mismanagement in the early phase of the Vietnamese occupation.

“The resumption of the civil war will set Cambodia back at least five years,” said a Western aid worker based in Phnom Penh. “There’s a real fear that things aren’t going to work out.”

These days, Cambodia presents an interesting paradox: To those who knew the country 20 years ago, when 60,000 American tourists visited the temples of ancient Angkor Wat, it now seems vanquished, a burned-out shell of a memory; to those who witnessed it 10 years ago, when the Khmer Rouge were forced out, it seems bustling and almost prosperous.

Indeed, Phnom Penh has been transformed in the last 18 months by a series of pragmatic decisions undertaken by the Hun Sen government. Free markets were legalized and foreign exchange dealings permitted. Now the stores and street stalls are filled with food, television sets and videos imported from Singapore and Thailand.

Along Tep Phon Street in Phnom Penh, motorcycle markets have proliferated in the front yards of private homes. Seak Long, a 25-year-old merchant who stays poised by an old scale, selling second-hand motorbikes for rings of 18-carat gold, said business “couldn’t be better.”

The government recognized private property ownership, which in effect gave a legal deed to the thousands of squatters who had taken over houses in Phnom Penh at the time of the Vietnamese invasion. Farmers were free to plant whatever they wanted and to sell to the free market.

Near 1968 Levels

Un Bunha, an official of the government’s Planning Ministry, said in an interview that by 1988, the country was nearing its goal of reaching 1968 levels of production. In foodstuffs, it reached 85% of the 1968 figure, 66% in rubber, 65% in fish and achieved a surplus in timber over the 1968 production.

Phok Chhieng, director of foreign trade, said the country’s exports have increased from $1 million in 1981 to $32 million in 1988, while imports have soared from $42 million in 1981 to $166 million last year.

Officials conceded that the government does not have the know-how or wherewithal to measure either the gross national product or the rate of inflation.

Social changes were enacted as well. Buddhism was reinstated as the state religion after years of hostility in which thousands of monks were put to death. The people were also given the freedom to move around the country.

During a weeklong car trip in three provinces earlier this month, it was clear to a visitor that the countryside is also benefiting from the government’s economic pragmatism. Rice fields were in cultivation everywhere, fat pigs and cows lined the roads and new houses were under construction throughout the country, a sign of peasant confidence in the future.

Few Hours of Electricity

But the country is backward, even primitive, in many respects--two or three hours of electricity a day in most towns, horrible roads and virtually no communications.

At Battambang Hospital, a French colonial relic built in 1930, more than a dozen patients in the malaria ward received their daily shots from the same hypodermic needle. The infant mortality rate is 120 per 1,000 live births, compared to about 10 per 1,000 in the United States and 60 per 1,000 in Thailand.

Battambang’s chief of surgery earns a salary equivalent to $4 a month, supplemented by a bag of rice. Luckily for those patients with money, modern medicines are now for sale in the free markets along with Johnnie Walker Black Label Scotch and fancy English cigarettes.

Also in Battambang, one of the country’s few industrial jewels, a factory making bags from jute plants has slowly returned to life, thanks to assistance from the British charity Oxfam. It now employs 860 people. Touch Tieng, the factory director, noted that the facility reached 50% of its 1964 production level this year.

Spare Parts Shortage

The factory is desperately short of spare parts, which must be ordered from Britain. But another factor is that the 400 workers in the factory are doing half shifts, devoting the other half to training as a local militia to defend the town against guerrilla attacks.

The country’s education system is wrecked. Medical schools have no textbooks, so the teachers sell mimeographed notes in French. Most teachers have no formal qualifications: One history professor admitted to a foreign colleague that he had no education but had been the only applicant to respond to a newspaper ad.

Another major problem confronting the country is an upsurge in official corruption. With civil service salaries about 1,000 riels a month (about $4 at the unofficial rate of exchange), finding a way to supplement pay is a necessity.

For example, an accountant at the Ministry of Communications has opened a grocery store in the front of his ground-floor apartment, one of many now lining Phnom Penh’s main streets. Even an official guide assigned by the Foreign Ministry to escort journalists had begun a sideline business in dressmaking.

Even if the government survives the expected fighting this fall, it will remain relatively isolated internationally. The United States has led a boycott of the Vietnamese-installed government, recognizing instead the guerrilla alliance even though it controls no Cambodian territory.

“Nobody ever looks at whether the government is fulfilling basic human needs,” said one aid worker who described herself as “pro-Hun Sen.” “This government does within its financial limitations. They’re improving all the time.”

There has been speculation that if Cambodia proceeds with elections in November as announced, even without the participation of the insurgent factions, countries such as Australia may be tempted to break ranks with the United States and recognize the government in Phnom Penh.