Next Step : Which Way to Peace in Cambodia? : U.N. is losing its grip on its most ambitious operation ever. Now, it may have to postpone free elections.

By CHARLES P. WALLACE

Feb. 23, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia —

When diplomats from 17 nations gathered at a conference in Paris in October, 1991, they had genuine cause to celebrate: After years of intractable negotiations, the long nightmare of Cambodia appeared to be over. The four parties in the country’s civil war had agreed to a blueprint for ending the fighting and choosing a new government through free and fair elections rather than at the point of a gun.

Now, with those elections only three months away, the celebratory clinking of champagne glasses in Paris is being mocked by events on the ground. Large parts of the carefully crafted agreement on Cambodia’s future have been violated or simply ignored. The U.N. peacekeepers sent to organize the transition from war to peace are increasingly disliked. Even the elections themselves are now in doubt.

“I am still not satisfied that the conditions for free and fair elections can be met,” Yasushi Akashi, the head of the U.N. Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), said in a statement last week. If the situation does not improve, his spokesman said, the election--now scheduled for May 23-27--could be postponed until security improves.

And if it doesn’t improve? Then the United Nations would face the hard choice of whether to prolong the peace process.

The Cambodia peace accord was meant to be a showpiece for the United Nations in the post-Cold War era. The U.N. peacekeeping operation is, by most measures, the most ambitious it has ever undertaken, costing $2.6 billion and involving 22,000 troops and civilian officials. If it falls short, along with the costly failures in the Balkans and Angola, will the world body ever again be able to marshal sufficient support to grapple with a new crisis that threatens the peace?

In the case of Cambodia, no one said it was going to be easy. The four factions include the Khmer Rouge, which ruled Cambodia from 1975 to early 1979 with a Maoist zealotry that cost an estimated 1 million lives, and the present Phnom Penh government, which was installed by the Vietnamese army after it deposed Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot. The other two factions are small, non-Communist groups supported by the West but lacking large military resources.

Given the group’s appalling human rights record, the inclusion of the Khmer Rouge was greeted with suspicion by many parties, both inside and outside Cambodia. “How could they be trusted to live up to democratic ideals?” went the usual argument.

By June last year, many of those suspicions were confirmed. The Khmer Rouge refused to go along with a key plank of the peace agreement to send their troops to U.N.-supervised camps and permit them to be demobilized and disarmed. U.N. troops were not even allowed to enter Khmer Rouge-held areas, mostly in the north and west of the country.

With the enemy still on the battlefield, the other three factions balked at sending their own forces into camps. Eight months later, although thousands of U.N. peacekeepers have been sent to the field, the level of fighting still follows the time-honored ebb and flow of the monsoon season rather than international protocol. And it is now higher than when the “blue helmets” arrived, according to Lt. Gen. John Sanderson, an Australian army officer who is in command of the U.N. military contingent.

Despite pleadings from the United Nations and the imposition of economic sanctions by the U.N. Security Council last year, the Khmer Rouge has refused to budge. The election, if it goes ahead, will not take place in areas under Khmer Rouge control and without the group’s political party on the ballot. In an ominous sounding statement last week, the Khmer Rouge warned that if UNTAC proceeds with the election, it will be “held responsible” for all the consequences.

Rather than taking heart that its main adversary had pulled out of the process, the government in Phnom Penh appears to have panicked last year when it became clear that its own popularity among the electorate was not very high, according to diplomats.

Although public opinion polls are unknown in a backward country like Cambodia, even a casual visitor soon learns that many Cambodians are fed up with reports of massive corruption by the Phnom Penh authorities and suspicious of the ruling party’s promises to forsake communism for the free market. At the same time, the fortunes of the non-Communist parties have soared.

In apparent response, a wave of political intimidation has blanketed areas controlled by the Phnom Penh regime. UNTAC has recorded 38 killings for apparent political motives since November, with many other people wounded. Most of the political attacks were aimed at FUNCINPEC--the French abbreviation for the political party founded by Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia’s nominal head of state, and now run by his son, Prince Norodom Ranariddh.

One of 20 parties that have registered for the election, FUNCINPEC is widely favored to gain a plurality in the balloting and thus is seen as the biggest threat to the government-backed People’s Party.

Dennis McNamara, who heads the U.N. human rights component, said that of the 50 incidents reported, the Khmer Rouge appeared primarily responsible for attacks against ethnic Vietnamese civilians, while attacks against political opposition had occurred mainly in areas under Phnom Penh government control.

“The level of ethnic and political violence jeopardizes the neutral political environment necessary for holding free and fair elections,” McNamara said. An internal U.N. assessment quoted by the Phnom Penh Post went even further: “The election process is in grave danger of being completely compromised,” it said. The Phnom Penh government “is undertaking a systematic effort to terrorize the political opposition and the population at large.”

Phnom Penh Premier Hun Sen at first flatly denied any connection between government officials and the political violence. But Khieu Kanharith, a spokesman for the government, later told a press conference, “We don’t rule out this possibility.”

The level of violence has shocked many former supporters of the Hun Sen regime, while more cynical observers note that the government is composed of many former Khmer Rouge officials, and their promises of reform should be regarded as suspect.

The Phnom Penh government “is engaging in a self-defeating exercise,” said one Western official who has spent years studying Cambodia. “They are reverting to type, which is thuggery. They are de-legitimizing themselves as the sole focus for international hope for Cambodia’s future.”

The United Nations and the Phnom Penh regime have locked horns over the recent abduction of five FUNCINPEC supporters from the western city of Battambang. Although Tie Banh, the regime’s defense minister, has denied any knowledge of the incident, U.N. investigators have found 70 witnesses who have named the abductors as well-known officers of the Phnom Penh army.

The level of political violence has had two dramatic side effects: It prompted Prince Sihanouk to publicly break off his contacts with the Phnom Penh regime and the United Nations in protest, and forced the United Nations to take unprecedented steps to curb the violence.

Sihanouk is the chairman of the Supreme National Council, a largely powerless committee composed of all four factions. But as Cambodia’s former king, Sihanouk is widely revered and his biting criticism of the Phnom Penh regime was considered a serious blow to the government’s prestige. Sihanouk even demanded “U.S.-style presidential powers” to keep the peace in Cambodia after elections, but later dropped the idea when the Khmer Rouge reacted coolly.

The United Nations responded to the crisis by appointing a special prosecutor, an unprecedented step in U.N. peacekeeping missions, to handle serious human rights violations.

The special prosecutor has brought criminal proceedings against a Phnom Penh government policeman accused of murdering a FUNCINPEC party official and a second case against a former Khmer Rouge soldier alleged to have taken part in the massacre of 15 ethnic Vietnamese.

Both trials are awaiting resolution of the question of which judges have legal jurisdiction over human rights cases. The United Nations is considering using American and Australian judges to hear the cases.

Ironically, the negotiations leading up to the 1991 peace agreement were repeatedly delayed by Phnom Penh demands that a “Nuremberg-style” tribunal be set up to hear the accusations of genocide against the Khmer Rouge. While the idea was subsequently dropped, it has been revived in a manner of speaking to hear accusations of human rights violations against both the Khmer Rouge and Phnom Penh.

While the Phnom Penh authorities attacked U.N. efforts to put the culprits on trial, the Khmer Rouge has intensified its campaign of accusing the peacekeepers of bias toward one faction, of wrecking the Cambodian economy with their huge expenditures, even of bad driving.

One Khmer Rouge radio broadcast accused Akashi of “collusion with the Vietnamese aggressors and Phnom Penh puppets to carry out maneuvers and all kinds of fascist activities.”

Documents recently captured from the Khmer Rouge indicate that as late as February last year the group’s leadership, headed by the mysterious Pol Pot, had plans to proceed with the peace process. The assumption is that the decision was changed when it became clear that UNTAC did not intend to dismantle the Phnom Penh government.

“Everyone expected the U.N. to come in here and take control of Cambodia like Douglas MacArthur did in Japan,” said one diplomat. “It didn’t happen that way at all.”

Diplomats also said the Khmer Rouge leadership was unprepared to have hundreds of U.N. officials entering their territory preaching democracy and free and fair elections. This was borne out by recent reports that Khmer Rouge officers have confiscated voting cards from villages under their control; when Phnom Penh officials confiscate voter cards, they are usually from people loyal to opposition parties.

Even U.N. officials privately fault the weakness of two key components of the UNTAC mission: civil administration, which was charged with taking over ministries in five key areas but never really asserted itself, and the U.N. police component, which has largely failed to supervise the Phnom Penh police.

The one area of UNTAC’s performance that is uniformly praised is the election component, which has registered 4.64 million voters, an impressive 96% of the eligible population.

The electoral component is using invisible ink, registration cards and computers to make sure the election is not rigged by any party and to ease concerns that individual votes remain secret.

Cambodia Peace Plan Pact signed in Paris on Oct. 23, 1991, calls for these actions:

* Demobilize 70% of four major factions’ troops and send the rest to special camps.

* Create interim administration (Supreme National Council) composed of four factions. Each faction keeps control of areas it held at time of cease-fire.

* Ban on all outside military and financial assistance to any faction.

* Remove Vietnamese forces from Cambodia.

* Forbid neighboring countries such as Thailand to give sanctuary to combatants.

* Supervise repatriation of 360,000 Cambodian refugees living along Thai border.

* Organize multiparty elections for constituent assembly to write new constitution, by May 1993. Source: Los Angeles Times Reports

Cambodia: Peace Keepers and Breakers

Military Sector: 1

Battalion: Netherlands

Provinces: Banteay Manchey

Military Sector: 2

Battalion: Bangladesh

Provinces: Siem Reap