Cambodia Tense as U.N.-Assisted Election Nears

Bathed in the eerie blue light of a flickering fluorescent bulb, Heung Cham tells a haunting tale of Cambodia’s coming elections, a story filled with fear rather than the exuberance of budding democracy.

Heung is a 43-year-old party worker for the Buddhist Liberal Democratic Party, one of the 20 parties taking part in the U.N.-organized general election that begins Sunday. The BLDP is a tiny, pro-Western party headed by Son Sann, an elderly politician who served as his country’s prime minister in 1967.

Heung, based in Mimot, a district town about 120 miles northeast of Phnom Penh, was in the party’s tiny offices as the campaigning drew to a close last week when a government soldier burst in. The soldier fired his rifle into the building, hitting the party sign and the picture of the party leader.

Heung escaped through a back door and now refuses to go back to his hometown of 45,000 people. He is guarded after dark by unarmed police officers from Pakistan, India and Japan who are part of the U.N. contingent here.

“People are more afraid of government soldiers than they are of the Khmer Rouge,” Heung said, referring to the Maoist guerrillas who ruled Cambodia during a bloody, 3 1/2-year reign in the 1970s. “All the other party offices have been closed, too. There is no neutral environment for this election. The government has all the power.”

As envisioned in an international agreement signed in October, 1991, Cambodia is preparing to hold six days of U.N.-supervised voting May 23-28 designed to end decades of civil war and instability. But the voting is taking place under a twin curse of widespread voter intimidation by the Phnom Penh government and threats of violence from the Khmer Rouge.

“It will be far from an ideal, neutral political environment in which we will hold these elections,” Yasushi Akashi, who heads the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), said in an interview.

But Akashi insisted that, especially compared to Cambodia’s feudal past and history of corrupt politics, “I think it will be a fairly credible election.”

Despite such efforts to put an optimistic face on the voting, the country has been gripped by a feeling of intense nervousness during the campaign, which officially ended Wednesday. Business people have discreetly left for vacations in neighboring Thailand and Malaysia, and wealthy Cambodian families have sent their children abroad as a precaution.

Kompong Cham province in central Cambodia, where Heung lives, is a microcosm of the problems facing the country during the elections and the transition period that will follow. The voters here will choose representatives for 18 of the 120 seats in the new constituent assembly, the largest number of any province.

Kompong Cham is the home province of Premier Hun Sen, as well as his ministers of trade and education, so the government-backed party, known as the Cambodian People’s Party, has lavished money and attention on the province since the campaign began April 7.

But the Khmer Rouge is also present in the province, in numbers estimated by U.N. officials at between 1,000 and 1,500 guerrilla fighters. Although a signatory to the Paris peace agreement, the Khmer Rouge spurned the peace process last June and has vowed to disrupt the elections. Clandestine pamphlets have warned residents not to leave their homes to try to vote next week.

In addition, the province’s roads are now menaced by armed gangs of unpaid soldiers who rob travelers. The main highway to Phnom Penh, the capital, has been attacked four times in the last week and even trucks carrying pigs to market now carry armed guards.

“The people tell us they are very scared,” said Theo Noel, a civilian U.N. official who is the chief electoral supervisor for the province. “The people want to vote, but given a choice between life and a vote, they will choose life.”

Because of the deteriorating security situation, Noel and the UNTAC military commanders have been forced to cut the number of polling stations by 90 to 217 because there are only 850 Indian soldiers in UNTAC’s military contingent to guard three provinces.

“The people know UNTAC can’t protect them,” Noel said.

Nationwide, UNTAC has deployed 22,000 military and civilian officials to monitor the elections, a $2.6-billion operation that is the largest ever undertaken by the world body.

UNTAC has registered 4.9 million voters, a remarkable achievement considering the enormous obstacles, and brought home 360,000 refugees who had lived for a decade in camps along the Thai border.

About 1,400 international poll observers have arrived to take up positions around the country for the voting. Most polling stations will have an unarmed civilian police officer on guard, but only a third are likely to get full-time military protection. Last week, the United States donated 6,500 flak jackets and 10,000 steel helmets to the United Nations for distribution to poll watchers, a gift that appeared to be as worrisome as it was reassuring.

Most diplomats who have followed the election process doubt that any of the 20 parties will win an absolute majority. But the likely winners are the Phnom Penh administration’s People’s Party and the party founded by Prince Norodom Sihanouk, which is generally known by its French initials, FUNCINPEC, which stands for the National United Front for an Independent, Neutral, Peaceful and Cooperative Cambodia.

The People’s Party, which was installed in power as a Communist party by Vietnam in 1979, controls the government administration and commands the loyalty of the country’s civil service, army and police forces. It also enjoys a virtual monopoly of the electronic media to deliver its message: Only the Phnom Penh administration can save the country from the onslaught of the Khmer Rouge.

FUNCINPEC is now headed by Sihanouk’s son, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, a French-trained lawyer. Some analysts expect it to win a large vote because of voter loyalty to Sihanouk, whom many revere as a semi-god; in addition, they see a large protest vote against the administration, which has been denounced as corrupt and close to Vietnam. Vietnam invaded Cambodia in late 1978, ousting the Khmer Rouge regime in January, 1979, and staying for more than 10 years.

FUNCINPEC is campaigning on a promise to set up a government of national reconciliation that includes all parties, including the Khmer Rouge, which it sees as the only way to end Cambodia’s long civil war.

Sihanouk, who was deposed as Cambodia’s leader in 1970, had initially sought to have himself elected president at the same time as the legislative elections, but the Khmer Rouge warned him to stay out of the process, and he has remained secluded at his home-in-exile in China. In a gloomy pre-election message from Beijing this week, he said, “Cambodia is divided into feudal fiefdoms and split to the degree that a return to national unity will be impossible.”

Because the Phnom Penh regime apparently views FUNCINPEC as its nearest rival, intimidation against the party has been the heaviest. Five FUNCINPEC officials have been killed in Kompong Cham in recent months, and three others have been wounded.

“The people are afraid,” said Nuon Ninara, FUNCINPEC leader in Kompong Cham. “The Phnom Penh government doesn’t intimidate publicly. They do it secretly.”

According to UNTAC, there have been 180 killings in the last two months, of which about 120 have been blamed on the Khmer Rouge. Of the remaining 60, the Phnom Penh government is suspected of most but has been clearly identified in only 10.

“The political violence and intimidation has continued at an unacceptably high level in recent weeks, and we’ve told the parties this constantly,” said Dennis McNamara, head of UNTAC’s human rights component. “But we also say it is not unmanageable in the sense that it is a bar to the electoral process.”

In an effort to control the violence, UNTAC set up a special prosecutor’s office to try cases involving human rights violations. But Cambodians could reach no consensus about which courts should have jurisdiction, and the arrests have stopped.

In addition, two supporters of the People’s Party have been struck off voter rolls as punishment for illegal campaign activities.