PERSPECTIVE ON CAMBODIA : A Peace That Bears Seeds of Chaos : The debris of war--political and economic, as well as military--must be cleared before refugees can go home.

Six months ago it would have been hard to believe that Cambodia’s warring factions would be ready to stop fighting, agree to settle all their differences and sign a comprehensive peace treaty on Wednesday in Paris.

Yet that is exactly what has happened since the Cambodians decided they couldn’t win on the battlefield. The agreement came so suddenly, in fact, that the United Nations, United States and other concerned parties risk being left behind. Without their influence and assistance, Cambodia will be plunged into a dangerous void. Land mines, malaria, shortages of food and medicine, renegade soldiers, bandits and rivalries over land and power all threaten the newborn peace.

Cambodian factions have been jockeying for position in anticipation of the Paris signing. Last week, in a particularly disturbing development, the Khmer Rouge moved soldiers and trucks into refugee camps along the Thai-Cambodian border to secure greater control over the civilian population. This gave rise to fears that the Khmer Rouge, under whose 1975-79 regime more than a million Cambodians died, will forcibly move the refugees into malarial and mine-infested regions they control inside Cambodia. Implementing the peace will be a dicey business. Traditionally conservative U.N. and U.S. diplomats who nursed the peace along since 1989 must now switch swiftly from planning to action, raising and releasing millions of dollars to help the return of half a million refugees and displaced persons. Never has the United Nations been as pivotal in the implementation of a peace agreement.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees must prepare for the possibility that after the peace pact is signed, many of the 350,000 refugees along the Thai border may try to rush home, lest someone else get their land.

Refugees and foreign aid workers say that the Khmer Rouge and other guerrilla factions plan to send hundreds of thousands of Cambodian refugees now in Thailand to remote areas in Cambodia, in order to control them after the peace accord is signed.

Cambodian leaders in Washington said recently that they want to shorten the 17 months the United Nations says it needs to prepare and run elections, which cannot be held until the refugees return. Yet the UNHCR has only received one-tenth of the contributions needed for its $109-million repatriation plan. Nor does the plan include the cost of returning 170,000 Cambodians displaced internally by fighting and still more by recent floods.

The U.N. aid role is not as fully defined as it should be. Pending the election of a new government, there will be some degree of U.N. control over Cambodia’s ministries of Defense, Finance, Interior, Information and Foreign Affairs. But there are no plans for control of ministries that will get the bulk of U.N. funds: Health, Education, Housing, Transport and Agriculture.

U.N. aid cannot wait another year or more until elections are held. The U.N. Development Program should immediately begin to release its accumulated $95 million Cambodia allocation to fix roads, bridges, water supply, electric power, pharmaceutical plants and other infrastructure that will benefit all Cambodians and reduce the likelihood of conflict over resources.

The UNHCR, U.N. Development Program and the U.N. Special Representative for Cambodia need to become operational in key pressing matters:

-- Soldiers who are no longer receiving food from the factions cannot be expected to lie down and die; someone has to see that they are fed or they will become marauding bandits.

-- UNHCR has still not established itself in the refugee camps in Thailand to provide protection against forced movement and to identify refugee home villages for return.

-- Immediate action is needed to identify, mark and clear minefields and to provide mine-awareness training to cope with the danger. Before the cease-fire in May, land-mine casualties ranged from 600 to 1,000 a month.

The UNHCR and the various factions have stated their intentions to prevent chaotic return. But the desire to go home can’t be held hostage to the U.N. plan. We must be ready to adapt the plan to the will to return, and immediately provide the security and food to protect and assist returnees. Efforts to control the situation should not lead to tightening the barbed wire around the refugees.

For years the factions and their backers in Washington, Hanoi, Bangkok and Beijing said they wanted peace. Now that it’s here, there must be action to give peace a chance.