COLUMN ONE : War Over, Out Comes the Pate : A Cambodian peace treaty brings boom times and cafe society to capital city, Phnom Penh. Foreigners rush in, prices soar. One route to riches--strip the nation of its resources.

The Cafe No Problem is an emblem of Phnom Penh’s sudden rise to riches.

Set in a painstakingly restored French mansion, the No Problem, which opened in January, has become the “in” gathering place in the Cambodian capital for expatriates, visiting U.N. officials and Cambodia’s growing number of nouveaux riches.

Whereas two years ago, it was hard to find food or drink of any description in Phnom Penh, the No Problem features sausages, cold cuts, pates and fresh Camembert and a decent house wine served amid wicker fan chairs redolent of the French colonial era. There are waiters in silk shirts and a bar shaped like a piano, and the only noise heard above the murmur of French, Italian and English is the gentle clacking of billiard balls emanating from a back room.

“This is Phnom Penh today,” said Jean-Marie Bertron, the amiable French maitre d’, gesturing around his cafe. “Things are improving every day. But, alors, I admit it’s not really Cambodia.”

Ever since the signing of a peace agreement in Paris last year among the four factions that have been fighting for control of Cambodia since 1979, an economic boom, already slowly taking shape, has exploded in Phnom Penh. The country may not yet have peace, but after being perhaps the world’s poorest capital city, it now has the trappings of some of the richest.

Phnom Penh’s gloomy streets formerly had so little traffic that it was possible to walk down the center of the Boulevard Achar Mean, the city’s main drag, without encountering a vehicle apart from an infrequent Soviet jeep and the ubiquitous, eerily silent bicycle rickshaws known as cyclos.

Now, Phnom Penh has traffic jams beginning at 5 a.m. Bicycle owners have switched to motorcycles, and those who owned motorcycles now dash about in shiny new Japanese cars.

Last year, a Mercedes-Benz was such a rarity here that one owner, the proprietor of a jewelry shop next to the Monorom Hotel, kept her car parked behind the counter along with the silver. But Lim Meng, a car dealer whose name is spelled out in diamonds on his chunky wrist bracelet, has in the last month sold 200 Mercedeses imported from a cousin in Newport Beach at $30,000 a pop.

“It is hard to believe, but we have big traffic problems,” said Kry Beng Hong, the vice mayor of Phnom Penh, who is also the only qualified planning expert in the country. “The people are becoming rich and buying big cars and a lot of motorbikes.”

Fueling the boom is an explosion in the price of real estate in Phnom Penh, with some speculators doubling their investments in just three months.

The peace agreement signed in Paris unleashed vast demand for property on several counts: It raised the prospect of 22,000 U.N. peacekeeping soldiers and officials arriving in the country soon looking for shelter, it touched off an influx of Western embassies that have neither offices nor housing and, by lifting an economic embargo, it promised opportunities to scores of Western businesses.

And the peace agreement, although not yet fully honored, has been seen as the green light by thousands of adventurous tourists looking for hotel space in a city that still bears many of the signs of ruin.

As a measure of the size of the boom, Vice Mayor Kry Beng Hong said he has signed 3,000 building permits in the last year alone.

“They joke that rents in Phnom Penh are higher than Paris,” he said. “But it’s no longer a joke.”

A small house rented to a Western diplomat now runs in the $4,000 to $5,000 per month range, payable 10 months in advance. One U.N. agency is negotiating for a small office building whose landlord is seeking $35,000 a month.

All this in a city that was emptied of its population when the hated Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975. When a Vietnamese invasion ousted the Khmer Rouge in 1979, refugees wandered back into Phnom Penh on foot and chose new homes literally at random.

The Hotel Cambodiana, the first major renovation project in the country and the largest building in Phnom Penh, charged $90 a night for a room in November, upped that to $120 in January and now gets $180. The average wage in Phnom Penh is still $10 a month.

Take Sok Sin, for example. Three years ago, he was a cyclo driver popular with journalists because he spoke a smattering of French and English, but he was earning only $1 or $2 a day. Now, Sok Sin controls a fleet of rental cars and has a business card that boasts: “Personal Guide. Real Estate Agent. Intermediary.” He has closed deals on 10 houses in the last month, and he muses about whether to send his children to school in the United States or France.

The economic boom is almost entirely limited to Phnom Penh, as was clear from a recent trip to the countryside of Kompong Thom province. There, the favored means of transportation is still a cart pulled by a water buffalo, and life is spent mainly in the backbreaking pursuit of caring for the rice paddy.

Apart from real estate, fortunes in Phnom Penh are being made in selling off Cambodia’s supply of raw materials, ranging from rubies to timber. A study commissioned by the U.N. Development Program concluded that Cambodia’s trees are now being cut down at a rate equivalent to eight times the sustainable yield--eight trees cut for every new one planted.

“The country is being rapidly stripped of its resources,” said the Development Program’s Rajeev Pillay.

The economy is controlled by so few people that local legend has it that the daily gold price is established over tea by six ethnic Chinese merchants every morning.

Late last year, two Thai banks with branches involved in local business deals bought up so much of the local Cambodian currency that the money literally ran out in Phnom Penh.

The local riel, as the currency is called, shot up from 1,200 to the U.S. dollar to 300 in a matter of days. The money has gradually fallen back to around 850 since January.

The local Cambodian economy has its own eccentric logic. Several merchants have become millionaires by selling portable electric generators to homeowners eager to switch on their newly acquired color TVs and video players in a city that still has power outages virtually every night.

The boom has attracted a number of overseas investors, including Cambodians who fled the country before the collapse of the U.S.-installed regime in 1975.

Sam Oum gave up a profitable real estate business in Long Beach, Calif., sold his house and moved back to Phnom Penh two years ago. In January, he opened a small hotel and restaurant called International House in a building owned by Haing Ngor, the Cambodian actor who starred in the film “The Killing Fields.”

“Once people saw the possibility of U.N. involvement in Cambodia, money began to pour into the country,” Oum said. “Land is up 10 times, even 20 times. I think in the last analysis that’s fair, but I disagree with the selling of my country to foreigners.”

Oum has discovered a market niche of his own. Washing up in Long Beach in 1973, he marveled at a local specialty called the cheese steak sandwich. Now Oum’s International House is filled with U.N. soldiers from New Zealand eager for a cold beer and a cheese steak.

“Everybody is trying to capitalize on the U.N.,” Oum said with a grin.