Pol Pot Power

By RICHARD HORNIK PHNOM PENH

How can a country that lost more than 1 million citizens to execution, starvation and disease caused by the cruel depredations of an outlaw regime possibly welcome back the architects of such madness? It is one of the saddest ironies in Cambodia today that the Khmer Rouge, whose reign of terror lasted from 1975 to 1979, have clawed their way back to a modicum of power. As the country's first democratic balloting in three decades begins this week, the party threatening to wreck the election is none other than the Khmer Rouge. Hope that the vote might usher in peace, along with a constitution and new government, has given way to fear that the balloting -- already tainted by violence, intimidation and corruption -- could turn into a bloody shambles. Even if the voting succeeds, the new leaders will still have to find a way to bring the Khmer Rouge to heel.

Although they signed on to the U.N.-sponsored peace plan in Paris 19 months ago, the Khmer Rouge refused to demobilize their fighters last June as called for in the accord, contending that the regime in Phnom Penh, installed by Vietnam in 1979, was still Hanoi's puppet. By March the Maoist guerrillas had launched a military campaign intended to destroy the credibility of the promised election. During April and May, Khmer Rouge fighters mounted scores of attacks, killing at least 80 civilians.

The Khmer Rouge seemed to fear that the Cambodian People's Party, which represents the government of Prime Minister Hun Sen, had used the powers of incumbency to reward and intimidate so successfully that it was likely to take a majority of the 120 seats in the new constituent assembly. The only solution was to terrorize voters into staying away from the polls. The Khmer Rouge forces, believed to number about 16,000, have aggressively moved men and armaments into sparsely populated regions within striking distance of many major towns and villages. Their hit-and-run attacks, says a U.N. military official, "are sending a message."

Many Cambodians acknowledge that they are afraid. Says a university student: "Even in Phnom Penh people fear a bomb going off when they vote." The anxiety extends to U.N. staff monitoring the vote. The Khmer Rouge have killed a total of 10 U.N. officials, leading more than 55 of 430 election supervisors to resign. As a result, the U.N. has had to reduce the number of polling stations from 1,800 to 1,500.

Operating from jungle hideouts, Pol Pot and his men began their comeback late in 1985, when the Vietnamese army seemed on the verge of wiping the movement out. Pol Pot joined with other anti-Vietnamese forces and launched an ideological campaign based on strident nationalism. His forces dropped all references to building a communist state. Villagers in Khmer Rouge zones were encouraged to cultivate their own plots and raise their own livestock, an approach designed to appeal to the 6 million subsistence farmers who form the bulk of Cambodia's 9 million inhabitants. During the early years of Pol Pot's reign, they suffered far less than urbanites, who were sent to work under harsh conditions in the fields, where they died by the thousands.

The peasants also find, says a U.N. official in western Cambodia, that "Khmer Rouge guerrillas make fewer demands on villagers than government soldiers do." Banditry in remote areas is a major problem for peasants. The government must tax them or extort contributions to finance local security, but the guerrillas provide it free out of the millions of dollars they have earned by selling logging and gem-mining concessions to Thai businessmen.

Even in the cities and towns, Pol Pot's forces enjoy some support among intellectuals. Their pitch is that only they can root out the rampant corruption of the present regime and force some 500,000 hated ethnic Vietnamese from the country. Says a 24-year-old university student: "The Khmer Rouge can do some things better than the government. They can abolish corruption. They can ensure Cambodia's sovereignty."

In the final weeks of the campaign, how to deal with the Khmer Rouge has become the defining issue. Pol Pot's forces say they will not peaceably accept victory by "the Vietnamese aggressors and their puppets." Hun Sen's party has promised to wage an all-out war to eradicate the guerrillas. FUNCINPEC, the opposition party founded by Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the country's interim head of state, has pledged to bring them into a coalition government. Sihanouk's eldest son, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, argues that with a government dedicated to expelling the Vietnamese and establishing social justice, the Khmer Rouge would participate in national politics. "If we solve those problems," he says, "how could the Khmer Rouge have a pretext to fight?"

Western analysts expect that no party will dominate the election. Rather, the probable outcome is a "Cambodian solution," as a senior U.N. official put it, in which an uneasy coalition is formed under the mercurial Prince Sihanouk. The Khmer Rouge would not be invited to participate in the new government, but neither would the government wage war on the guerrillas. Pol Pot's relentless hold on Cambodia, alas, is likely to continue.