Cambodian Election Tests Californians’ Political Skills : Asia: ‘I learned how to campaign . . . in Orange County,’ says one who has returned to her homeland.

Among the candidates in Cambodia’s election this week are two princes, four generals, Communist Party cadres, barefoot peasants and even an escaped rapist. But nobody expected so many Republicans from Orange County.

There are believed to be at least two dozen U.S. citizens, mostly from Southern California, on the ballot for the new 120-seat Cambodian assembly. What’s more, Californians with political savvy and campaign skills have played a crucial, behind-the-scenes advisory role in the election campaign.

“I learned how to campaign from the Republican Party in Orange County,” said Nanda Chamroeun, 36, of Santa Ana. “They taught me how to get the message out and how to raise money. These are skills nobody knows in Cambodia.”

Chamroeun, assistant director of Pacific Gateway College in Garden Grove, is a native-born Cambodian who fled the country in 1975 as the Communist Khmer Rouge came to power. She is one of only a handful of women on the ballot in a country where most women are confined to the backbreaking work of the rice paddies.

“Women have never been recognized for their hard work here, and the men never really talk about women’s issues,” Chamroeun said. She reckons that with the voting population 64% female, she stands an excellent chance of being elected to the Constituent Assembly, which will draft a constitution and form a new government under U.N. supervision. Voting began Sunday and is to continue until Friday.

Chamroeun is a candidate of the Liberal Democratic Party, which has 11 parliamentary hopefuls from California and one from Connecticut. They include Chamroeun’s husband, Pok Thuan, who has joined the same party, although in Santa Ana he is a registered Democrat.

“It is a historic moment in the history of Cambodia, and we just felt an enormous desire to come back and help,” said Pok Thuan, who composes his political pamphlets on an Apple Macintosh. “It’s not that we don’t like Orange County anymore, but our heart is here.”

The Liberal Democrats are headed by Sak Sutsakhan, a former army general in the 1970s, who owns a Dairy Queen restaurant in Anaheim. So numerous are political parties with fast-food connections in California that some officials of the U.N. peacekeeping operation here have dubbed them the “Dunkin’ Donut Democrats.”

One such is Bun Tek Ngoy, known to nearly everyone as Ted. Ngoy founded a chain of doughnut shops and went from being a refugee to a millionaire with a lavish home in Mission Viejo. Ngoy’s election headquarters features a poster of Bruce Herschensohn, the television commentator and unsuccessful Republican candidate in last year’s California Senate race.

“I see this as an opportunity to set up the kind of freedom and democracy that makes America great here in Cambodia,” said Ngoy, who named his party the Free Development Republican Party.

Another crusading Republican is Kim Kethavy, who sold his two gas stations in Lakewood near Long Beach to set up the Republic Democracy Khmer. Kethavy has outraged the administration of Premier Hun Sen, a former Communist, by hanging an enormous banner from a balcony of his office that reads: “Communism is Evil: Ron Reagan” in both English and Khmer.

Kethavy figured he has spent $350,000 of his own money on the campaign, including paying each of the 120 candidates in his party $80 a month. “It sure is different here than in America,” he lamented about Cambodian politicians. “You not only have to give them an office but you have to pay for their food.”

After the fall of Phnom Penh to the Communists in 1975, thousands of Cambodians fled to the United States, many of them settling around Long Beach. The Cambodian population in the United States now stands at more than 200,000.

Californians’ participation in the election campaign extends to the Phnom Penh administration, even though Hun Sen has heaped scorn on Cambodians who sat out the tyrannical years under the Khmer Rouge, when 1 million died, in California.

Sem Yang moved to Los Angeles from Cambodia in 1963 and became an important figure in the resettlement of Cambodian refugees, working for the California Department of Social Services. He was a founder of the Cambodian-American Assn., one of the largest Cambodian political organizations in America, and he is active in the California Democratic Party. So it came as a shock to many when he turned up at a press conference supporting the Phnom Penh regime.

“I strongly believe the CPP (Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party) could protect the country from the Khmer Rouge,” Sem Yang said in an interview.

Sem Yang, whose wife and children are still in Los Angeles, said he returned to Cambodia with the intention of running as a candidate in the royalist party known by its French initials as FUNCINPEC. But he said he became disillusioned with the party leader, Prince Norodom Ranariddh.

Ranariddh, who has surrounded himself with a number of influential Cambodian-Americans, says that “the people who came from California have a lot of skills for a campaign that you can’t find anywhere else.”

Among them is Laysreng Lu, a die-hard Lakers fan from Long Beach, who honed his financial skills running a doughnut shop before joining Ranariddh in the early 1980s, when he was leading an armed insurgency against the Phnom Penh government.

Based on marketing skills acquired in Long Beach, Lu ran FUNCINPEC’s television and radio outlets during the campaign, which were among the most successful tools used by any party. Cambodians had never before seen a political broadcast or an “infomercial” of the kind popularized by Ross Perot.

One question looming over many Cambodians with California ties is what will happen to them if their political efforts are successful and they become members of the new Cambodian government. Most have family back in the United States, not to mention such prosaic concerns as jobs and mortgages.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do--my wife hates it here,” said Ahmad Yahya, an ethnic Cham who is a FUNCINPEC candidate.

Nanda Chamroeun and Pok Thuan, the Santa Ana couple, worry about their two children, who are still in school in the United States. Cambodian schools are prehistoric compared to those in America, and it could be hard to get kids to willingly move to a country with only one television channel.

Yet another problem facing the Cambodian-Americans is a U.S. law that bars Americans from holding public office in a foreign country. The law hasn’t been applied too rigorously lately but it’s still a worry.

“I guess I’d just have to give up my U.S. passport,” said one Cambodian who asked not to be quoted by name. “But man, I’d really cry.”