COLUMN ONE : A Ghostly Shiver in Cambodia : An end to civil war may give the Khmer Rouge, which left 1 million people dead in the ‘70s, a second chance at power. The despotic Pol Pot is believed to be pulling the strings.

“The Khmer Rouge,” said the Buddhist monk, nervously adjusting his saffron robes, “is like a creature with two faces. The face we can see is good, but the face we cannot see is evil. That is why all Cambodians are still afraid.”

On the one hand, he explained, there is Khieu Samphan, a dapper, French-educated economist who is now the official leader and spokesman for the pro-Chinese guerrilla group. Khieu Samphan apologetically wants to let “bygones be bygones” and speaks of the need for a “liberal democratic, pluralistic regime with a free-market economy” in a future Cambodia.

But the “other face” of the Khmer Rouge is Pol Pot, the chauvinistic, ultra-orthodox Communist whose rule in Cambodia from 1975 to early 1979 left more than 1 million people dead from torture, execution and starvation. The Pol Pot era emptied Cambodia’s cities, wiped out thousands of professionals whose only sin was to wear eyeglasses or speak a foreign language and transformed the languid rice-growing areas of the countryside into a nightmare of living skeletons that became known as “the killing fields.”

Officially, the 63-year-old Pol Pot retired as leader of the Khmer Rouge nearly four years ago and now works as a researcher at an institute deep in the Cambodian jungle. But Western diplomats and foreign relief workers believe that Pol Pot is still the real commander of Khmer Rouge forces and that the hard-liners he represents are the single greatest threat to the fragile peace in Cambodia.

The signing last month of a 19-nation agreement to end the 12-year civil war in Cambodia was greeted with relief around the world. But already there is growing concern that the agreement may allow the Khmer Rouge a second chance to grab power.

Britain’s Lord Caithness, a minister at the Foreign Office, said that outcome would be “incomprehensible and unacceptable.” Secretary of State James A. Baker III even suggested that the United States would support a war crimes tribunal for those responsible for the Cambodian bloodshed of the 1970s.

Khieu Samphan signed last month’s Cambodian peace agreement in Paris on behalf of the Khmer Rouge, officially known as the Party of Democratic Kampuchea. He will represent the group when Cambodia’s four-party coalition government meets in Phnom Penh for the first time next week.

While the signing ceremony was taking place in Paris, Pol Pot was reportedly in the Thai border town of Trat, where he owns a house, receiving a blood transfusion for treatment of the severe malaria he contracted during his years spent hiding in the jungle.

A Thai military official, who asked that he not be named, said Pol Pot now commands about 40,000 troops along the border with Thailand, the single most powerful military unit in Cambodia. The units are still receiving supplies from China and have stockpiled tons of ammunition in the jungle.

Pol Pot has not been seen by a Westerner since 1982, so little is actually known about his current thinking. When the four Cambodian parties sat down for peace talks in the Thai beach resort of Pattaya in July, there were widespread intelligence reports that Pol Pot was present in the town and had personally approved each concession by the Khmer Rouge.

His Radical Views

One hint that Pol Pot has not changed his radical views came in a lengthy speech in 1988, which an unidentified senior Khmer Rouge official made to a women’s association in the Cambodian jungle. An American expert on the Khmer Rouge, Stephen Heder, translated the text and concluded from a close reading of the speech that it was given by Pol Pot.

Delivered at a time when peace negotiations were just beginning, the speech details how the Khmer Rouge planned to go along with a compromise peace settlement, accept capitalist development and a coalition government to build up its strength in the country.

“Everywhere, both now and in the future, every office, unit of organization and village must grasp the functions of acting as a nucleus and join forces to preserve and protect the old forces already in our possession and incessantly fortify and expand our strength further,” Pol Pot said, according to Heder.

The lengthy, at times rambling, speech talks about the need to gain seats in the Cambodian Parliament to ensure the Khmer Rouge a role in key ministries while the guerrilla group enlarges the base of its support. Gone are any mention of the “great leap” to communism that led the Khmer Rouge to empty the cities of people and outlaw money during the 1970s.

“These days in conducting popular work, we don’t conduct boisterous rallies like we did before,” the speech went on. “Rather, it’s conducted one on one. It’s one on one, one after another, in continuous procession on to victory.”

The speech also castigates Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the former ruler of Cambodia who was deposed in 1970 and is now returning to his homeland. Sihanouk, who led the rebel coalition fighting the Vietnamese-backed Phnom Penh government, was described as “rancid due to all sorts of hedonism, corruption, financial malfeasance, debauchery and hooliganism.”

This speech is part of a growing body of evidence that has convinced a number of Western academics who study Cambodia that the Khmer Rouge has adopted a long-term strategy, stretching up to 10 years, to slowly reintegrate the party into the Cambodian political fabric before again attempting to seize power as it did in 1975.

“Everything I have heard and seen convinces me that the Khmer Rouge is going to use this peace to turn it to their advantage, to increase their organization and work within the new democratic system for its overthrow,” said one academic who asked not to be named.

U.S.-Backed Regime

The Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia as the American-supported regime of Defense Minister Lon Nol collapsed, just as the U.S.-backed regime in South Vietnam also fell to the onslaught of Communist forces.

The Khmer Rouge had become a rallying point for a broad spectrum of Cambodians who opposed Lon Nol and his corrupt regime.

But the cheers of victory were soon silenced. The Khmer Rouge ordered the evacuation of all cities, forcing middle-class merchants, doctors and lawyers to abandon their jobs and march off to work rice paddies in the countryside.

Fired by the revolutionary ideology of China’s Mao Tse-tung, Pol Pot’s government adopted an obsessive nationalism that made it treason for anyone to know a foreign language or have contacts with a foreigner. Thousands of Buddhist monks were rounded up and slaughtered.

A high school on the edge of Phnom Penh was turned into a gruesome torture chamber, where the infliction of pain was prosaically recorded alongside biographical data. Thousands perished.

In the quick shift to Pol Pot’s idealized Communist state, money was banned and Cambodia’s central bank was blown up as a symbol of the new order. Pol Pot determined to return to “Year Zero” and build his country from scratch, a transformation depicted in the 1984 film “The Killing Fields.”

As the bloodbath took place, Mao even complimented Pol Pot’s revolutionary ardor during a visit by the latter to Beijing, saying, “You have achieved in one stroke what we failed with all our masses.”

Along with his policy of extreme nationalism, by 1977 Pol Pot had turned on his former comrades in Vietnam. He purged friends of the Hanoi regime from his government and began a series of cross-border raids into Vietnam.

In response, the Pol Pot regime was finally ousted from power in January, 1979, by an invasion of Vietnamese troops. The Khmer Rouge received a political reprieve when the United States, condemning the Vietnamese invasion and wanting to please Beijing, gave diplomatic support to the Khmer Rouge.

The group settled in Thailand and nursed its wounds, aided by arms shipments from China and humanitarian assistance from the West. It finally entered into a coalition with two non-Communist groups to fight the Vietnamese-installed regime in Phnom Penh.

Role Played Down

In one sense, history may be repeating itself: For years in the early 1970s, the Khmer Rouge used Khieu Samphan’s polished image as a Western-educated liberal to convince the world that the Khmer Rouge takeover of Cambodia would be benign. Pol Pot’s role was played down, and it was not until 1977 that it was revealed that Pol Pot was actually Saloth Sar, who had joined the French Communist Party in the 1950s while studying at an electrical institute in Paris.

Pol Pot returned to Phnom Penh in 1953 after three years in Paris, where he was apparently moved by the revolutionary propaganda then in vogue among leftists campaigning against French colonialism in Indochina.

He became a teacher at a private school in Phnom Penh and indulged a passion for French literature, especially poetry, which he reportedly could quote by heart.

At the same time, he secretly joined the budding Khmer independence movement. He took over the movement in 1962 and the following year disappeared into Cambodia’s jungles to avoid arrest by Sihanouk’s secret police.

By some accounts, Pol Pot spent five months in China in the mid-1960s at a time when the Cultural Revolution was gaining strength. It was apparently at this time that Pol Pot formed many of the radical, anti-imperialist views that later shaped Cambodia’s national policy.

Although photographs of Pol Pot are rare, he is invariably shown in his revolutionary uniform of Mao cap, long black shirt, loose trousers and sandals. An unusually tall man with a chubby, moon face, Pol Pot was usually seen wearing a kramar, the checkered red neckcloth that became a sinister symbol of the Khmer Rouge.

Despite his reputation for ruthlessness, Pol Pot impressed visitors with his courteous manners and his ready smile. It was a fatal misapprehension for a number of his colleagues, whom he ordered killed in various party purges.

While a student in Paris, Pol Pot fell in love with a fellow Cambodian student, Khieu Ponnary, whom he married. She was the sister of Ieng Thirith, who went on to marry Pol Pot’s Communist colleague, Ieng Sary. The far-reaching influence of the two sisters and their husbands prompted Prince Sihanouk to dub them “Cambodia’s Gang of Four.”

The Sinister Side

Even before the signing of the peace agreement last month, events along the Thai-Cambodian border had provided relief officials a glimpse of the more sinister side of the Khmer Rouge.

In August, a refugee camp called Site 8 south of Aranyaprathet, which was under the nominal control of Khmer Rouge supporters, was visited by a senior Khmer Rouge commander named Ny Koan, who told the refugees to get ready because “the time to return to Cambodia is at hand.”

The speech alarmed the Western community because the four Cambodian parties had already reached agreement that repatriation of refugees would take place only under auspices of the United Nations.

In September, Ny Koan summoned the so-called Committee of 16, the camp’s Khmer Rouge administrators, to a meeting inside Cambodia. The civilian administration, which was considered liberal by Khmer Rouge standards, was summarily replaced by a group of Khmer Rouge military officers.

“There was overnight panic by 43,000 people,” said Susan Walker, who works for Handicap International, a private relief agency, on the border. “The ghost from the past has come back. It’s the worst I’ve seen in 12 years in this area.”

There are now 340,000 people in refugee camps paid for by the United Nations along the Thai-Cambodian border. Most fled to Thailand in advance of the Vietnamese army invasion, and it was pure chance that those in Site 8, along with two smaller camps, ended up under the effective control of the Khmer Rouge.

The threat of forced repatriation by the Khmer Rouge prompted S. A. Kibria, a special representative of U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar, to issue a statement saying “these reports are extremely disturbing and are of the utmost concern to the U.N.”

The Khmer Rouge leadership officially backed off Ny Koan’s actions, saying “the Party of Democratic Kampuchea fully respects the principle of free choice of the camp population and of voluntary repatriation.”

But when four of the 16 dismissed camp leaders returned to the camp, two of them immediately asked for U.N. protection. A U.N. survey of the camp population conducted in late October produced another startling result: The overwhelming majority of people asked to be repatriated to areas far from the control of the Khmer Rouge.

The apparent Khmer Rouge plan is to bring thousands of refugees to an area just inside Cambodia at Phnom Proek, five miles southeast of Site 8, where they will be given land. But the drawback for the refugees is that they will have to clear the land of timber--to be sold by the Khmer Rouge in Thailand--in an area pockmarked by land mines and with some of the worst malaria infestation in the world.

Of equal concern to relief officials: Ny Koan, the Khmer Rouge commander, is believed to be the younger brother of Son Sen, the Khmer Rouge’s defense minister, who along with Khieu Samphan represents the Khmer Rouge in the coalition Supreme National Council.

Even after the Khmer Rouge said it supported “free choice,” the group circulated a pamphlet in the camp blaming the recent problem on Vietnamese and “troublemakers,” a reference presumably to Western aid officials. The pamphlet asked menacingly: “If you go with the Red Cross, will you have security? Will you have land? Please consider carefully.”

It remains unclear, both in the refugee camps and in Cambodia, just how deeply rooted is the popular suspicion of the Khmer Rouge, now that a dozen years have elapsed since the Vietnamese army deposed Pol Pot and sent his guerrillas into sanctuary in Thailand.

The Khmer Rouge radio has maintained a drumbeat of propaganda against the Vietnamese, touching deep-seated Cambodian feelings of nationalism that may work against the Vietnamese-installed regime in Phnom Penh.

The guerrillas have also been less corrupt than the other groups in the resistance coalition fighting the Cambodian government, which has won them some support in the countryside.