COLUMN ONE : Refugees on Road to Nowhere : In a massive U.N. effort, 5% of Cambodia’s population is being repatriated. The missing element is a plan for their long-term survival.

The United Nations once symbolized a haven in the warfare that convulsed Indochina. But it can do little now to protect Meas Phalla as she faces the vast uncertainty of resettling in her impoverished homeland.

Like tens of thousands of others, Meas and her husband fled in 1979 during the onslaught of the Vietnamese army against the Khmer Rouge, the Maoist revolutionaries who then ruled Cambodia. Caught between two Communist foes, the couple ended up in Thailand in a sprawling refugee camp called Site 2, waiting 13 years for Cambodia’s agony to end.

Last August, Meas and her family returned home where today, struggling for survival, she sells her U.N. food rations from a tiny roadside food stall. “I feel a bit lost,” said Meas.

Since March, a total of 360,000 refugees, crowded into a necklace of camps along the long border with Thailand, have been told to go home as well.

Nearly 5% of Cambodia’s population is being sent back, a resettlement challenge equaled only by the huge refugee return taking place in Afghanistan.

In the process, the United Nations is learning the hard way the dangers of undertaking a mass repatriation on short notice, with little in the way of jobs or farms in place to support the returnees.

At the insistence of Thailand, which considers them a financial burden, the refugees must be resettled by next May, when--thanks to an international peace agreement signed last year--Cambodia will hold elections. The tide of refugees that began in 1979 and ran virtually unabated until March is being reversed in less than 15 months.

Meas’ family story is typical of the 200,000 Cambodian refugees repatriated so far. They fled Cambodia with nothing but their clothing and have returned home healthier and better educated--but just as poor.

Meas and her husband, Yim Yeoun, have four children, all born in the refugee camp, which had a population of more than 200,000, larger than any Cambodian city except the capital, Phnom Penh. While the camp’s open sewers and ramshackle huts appeared squalid to Western eyes, the refugees had steady food supplies, medical attention, schools and even libraries. Yim Yeoun worked as an elementary school teacher.

Last summer, the family was taken by bus from Site 2 to a resettlement site near Battambang in western Cambodia.

Meas moved in with a cousin who had remained behind during the war. The family had $200 from the United Nations, but not much else.

“In the camp, life was so much better. I had my own house. Here, everything requires lots of money,” said Meas, showing a visitor the crowded hut she shares with her cousin’s family of eight.

Contrary to Western fears, refugees such as Meas have encountered little hostility from other Cambodians, who seem content to welcome them back.

But a nagging worry remains: Meas earns just 50 cents a day from her roadside shop; what will the family do when its U.N. food assistance stops after 400 days?

Yim Yeoun has hiked into the nearest town, five miles away, to apply for a job as a teacher. But the municipality cannot afford new workers, and current teachers are paid barely $10 a month.

“We’ll have to do something to get an income,” said Meas, who like many Cambodians is reed-thin with large, moist eyes that seem to speak of hunger. “This store is just not enough to survive on.” Without the monthly donated sack of rice, cooking oil and canned fish, she said, her family would starve.

Meas and thousands of others have discovered how dramatically the war redrew the landscape in rural Cambodia. Old farms disappeared and, with few records of ownership left by the Khmer Rouge, land has been taken over by squatters. The Phnom Penh government, installed by the Vietnamese army in 1979, ratified the squatting because many in the government claimed new homes too. Land not already occupied was riddled with millions of mines and considered unapproachable.

Meas and her husband have revisited their old rice paddy, not far from their new home. “Somebody else is working the land,” she said. “It’s gone.”

The United Nations, too, has had to lower its sights. The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees embarked on this resettlement challenge with a concern for the long-term welfare of the refugees. Now the U.N. effort resembles a paternalistic transportation company largely intent on shipping people back.

While the return has been pursued by U.N. officials with impressive efficiency--a fleet of chartered buses and a rebuilt train ferry 7,000 people back each week--the failure to provide for the long-term survival of the refugees is a blot on the entire mission.

One aid worker calls the repatriation a “Rolls-Royce ride to nowhere.”

“Too many people are going back to dubious circumstances,” said Court Robinson, an American researcher who monitors the repatriation. “It’s all floating on this artificial cushion of (U.N.-donated) food. Not a single person I interviewed failed to ask, ‘What will I do when the food runs out?’ ”

Adds Ann-Marie Brege, administrator of a U.N. refugee reception center near Battambang: “The main ‘if’ is the question of income generation, and there is just not very much happening.”

Under the initial U.N. plan, long-term survival was to have been assured by giving each refugee family approximately five acres of land and the means to start a rice farm. But it soon became clear that the plan was a pipe dream--more than 2 million land mines dot the landscape, and no military force in Cambodia--not the 16,000 U.N. peacekeeping troops nor the militias of the four factions--is willing to remove them.

Cambodia is a land of rural people, with more than 80% knowing only one occupation: growing rice. Some refugees learned second careers in the Thai camps, but without land their chances of survival seem diminished.

Confronted with the obstacles to returning land, the U.N. refugee agency offered the refugees a choice between two alternatives: Option B--a basic wooden house in kit form; and Option C--cash. The majority of refugees who choose Option C get just $50 for each adult in the family and $25 for each child. The idea was that they would join relatives and get set up in a village or town while waiting for land to be cleared.

Two people who were among the first to come back to Cambodia under U.N. auspices were Prak Boeun, 37, and her husband, Rin Vin, 40. Prak was only 24 when she left Cambodia, and the way of life in rural Cambodia has been nearly erased from her memory.

“I didn’t want to go back to my home village again,” Prak said. “My family was killed by the Khmer Rouge. We have no one there. We are alone now.”

They were among the few given farmland under Option A, but when they arrived at the resettlement site in Omal, 10 miles by rutted dirt road from Battambang, they found that the land they had been given was useless.

“They promised us land, but nothing will grow there,” said Prak, who noted that each family received only 50-yard-square plots. Land set aside by the authorities for the refugees’ houses and rice plots is barren, but it is surrounded by the verdant rice fields of farmers who remained behind.

Prak and Rin could afford to send only three of their four children to school, a shock after benefiting from free schooling in the refugee camps.

“We have to find some kind of income because this land cannot be farmed,” said Prak, who has turned their small thatch house into a shop. Asked how she had found the money to open the store, she said a Japanese journalist had taken pity on her when repatriation began March 31 and gave her $100.

For 15-year-old daughter Vanny, returning to Cambodia is a glimpse of a world she knew only through stories. Forced to flee the family farm in 1979, Prak and Rin trekked into Thailand to escape the Khmer Rouge, carrying her to safety.

“I like it here,” the teen-ager said. “I’m happy to see my grandmother. And I’m happy to see my homeland. I have new friends. It’s also safer than in the camp. Life is better here.” Despite the evidence of their parents, the other children agreed.

Researcher Robinson considers Omal a fiasco, a “totally artificial community” with houses just feet apart, a firetrap with water shortages and no arable land available for refugees. Because of early experiences such as Omal, the United Nations gave up trying to provide farmland to everyone.

“We realized that the land option is not what the refugees want, not what we can deliver and not feasible,” said U.N. refugee official Jahansahah Assadi.

Option B, under which returning refugees were given a “shelter kit” with which to build a house, has proved more successful than the land option, in part because the kit is portable and requires only a small plot of land.

The shelter kit, however, forms only part of a house, and the refugees need $30 to finish it--forcing them to dip into their small savings.

Nim Mao became a widow 17 years ago when her husband was killed by the Khmer Rouge, and she fled the country with the first refugee stream. Her daughter became a widow a year ago, when her husband stepped on a land mine planted near the Thai border.

With six children to feed, the two women have been camped out since May in a resettlement center at Prey Dat under a bright blue U.N. tarpaulin because neither has the money or energy to finish the house.

“We need to set it up quickly because the cold season is here and the children are sick,” Nim Mao said. Apart from their having no income, the settlement has no water supply, and Nim Mao’s daughter must go out daily to collect rain water from the fields.

The U.N. food distribution point is so far away that the family must sell part of its food rations to pay for transport to get back home.

“We have nothing,” said Las Ngath, a 23-year-old woman who arrived at the resettlement site in May after living for 10 years under the control of the Khmer Rouge at a camp along the border.

U.N. refugee officials believe that the refugees now taking the cash option, more than 60% of the current batch of returnees, have the best chance of success in Cambodia because they are more mobile and tend to start out by settling with relatives. “It gives them the most flexibility,” said refugee official Assadi.

Mao Neang, who has twin daughters, arrived in the Omal resettlement area from Site 8, the Khmer Rouge-controlled camp in Thailand. She took the cash option but then bought a house at the resettlement site from a refugee who decided he could not survive under the bleak conditions there. Now she has just $50 left.

“We feel safer than in Site 8 because of the U.N. presence,” Mao said. “I’ll have to find some way to feed my two children.”

Even though she survived for years under the control of the Khmer Rouge, for the first time she is afraid.

“We’re really concerned the Khmer Rouge will come to collect the people to go live with them in the jungle,” she said, recalling the years of Khmer Rouge rule when the cities were emptied and peasants were forced to live as porters for the guerrillas in the jungle. More than 1 million people died in the 1970s.

Beneath it all is a fear that when the refugees run out of food, they will become wards of international relief agencies, much as have several hundred thousand “internally displaced people” who fled their homes in the war but who never made it across the border into Thailand.

They now live in camps inside Cambodia, where they survive on international handouts.

“We are not rebuilding the U.N. camps inside Cambodia,” said Adrien Cros, a former French army officer now working for the U.N. refugee office in Battambang.

“The refugees start a new life, a free life here. It is not easy giving people this idea.

“For us, the best returnee is the one you drop at a distribution point, and come back the next day, and he is gone. The worst is the one you drop off, and three weeks later he is still sitting there. They have to solve the problem themselves.”

But for many refugees, the obstacles seem insurmountable.

Kro Sokhom, 23, mother of two, arrived at a distribution point in Battambang in early November with all her worldly possessions in three large blue bags. She and her husband took the cash option and will live with her brother-in-law, at least temporarily.

And then what? “We have no jobs,” she said. “We don’t know what else to do.”