Cambodia

Washington -- WITH THE announcement last week that the legendary Prince Sihanouk will return once more to try to lead Cambodia, my thoughts were jarred with poignant memories of the man.It was 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War. We correspondents in Saigon loved to go to Cambodia then, because it was so incredibly beautiful and so mythically peaceful. And Norodom Sihanouk, the country's autocratic but wistfully charming leader, was always a delightful sovereign to interview.This day, a group of us journalists had gone with him to the northern city of Battambang, where he was showing us through one of his handsome motels (he had learned to love motels while traveling in the U.S.; don't ask me why)

LOS ANGELES - -Three Americans accused of traveling to Cambodia to have sex with children are expected to be charged in federal court here, officials said Monday, marking the first prosecutions under a new international initiative intended to combat child sex tourism. The initiative, Operation Twisted Traveler, targets Americans who exploit children for sex in Cambodia, which experts describe as a top destination for child predators. U.S. and Cambodian authorities, as well as nongovernmental organizations, were involved in the effort.

The United Nations has declared victory in Cambodia and the last of its 22,000 troops will be out in November. The $2.6 billion peace-keeping operation, the costliest ever, looks well spent. Most of the refugees in Thailand have come home. A fair election was held. The new regime is up and running. President Clinton recognized it.King Norodom Sihanouk, first crowned in 1941, abdicated in 1955, prime minister until overthrown in 1970, is king again. This time, he is supposedly a constitutional figurehead of limited powers.

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia -- The fears and profound losses still grip Chum Mei even now, three decades after the brutal Khmer Rouge regime terrorized him and millions of other Cambodians. One of only 10 people known to have survived Toul Sleng prison, where 14,000 died, Chum recalls how the Khmer Rouge arrived in this city in April 1975. Intent on abolishing religion and education, private property and money, the Communist militants ordered everyone to march into the countryside. Chum's infant son died for lack of medical attention on the trek.

SIEM REAP, Cambodia -- After a quarter century delay, the Terrace of the Leper King has finally been restored. Land mines no longer hinder a close-up look at the beatific faces of the Bayon Temple. Looters have been chased away from the temples and palaces that, a thousand years after being built, still define Cambodia's soul.For more than 20 years after the war in Indochina and the rampage of the Khmer Rouge that followed in Cambodia, Angkor Wat was practically unseen. Now Americans and other foreigners are returning to the splendid temples of gods and monuments to human kings.

The Cambodian reconstruction flowing from the election of 1993 is incomplete. It cannot yet be hailed as victory or dismissed as failure.The Khmer Rouge, who killed a million Cambodians in the 1970s, are still in the field terrorizing and destroying. Cambodians are not secure and reconciliation has not occurred.Human rights organizations are rightly disappointed in the government of the royalist Prince Norodom Ranariddh and of the titular head of state Prince Norodom Sihanouk. Co-prime Minister Ranariddh is in unlikely coalition with the former Vietnam-influenced Communists led by Hun Sen.They are stifling opposition and cracking down on dissent.

The Cambodian election was a victory for the United Nations and the peace accord of 1991, and a triumph of the human spirit. The U.N. supervised the country's administration and elections. This tortured, battered, decimated people turned out despite the threats of the Khmer Rouge in numbers that would put Americans to shame. Nine out of ten eligible Cambodians voted.That was a repudiation of the Khmer Rouge, which fearing loss had not taken part. It was also a defeat for the former Communist and Vietnam-influenced Cambodian People's Party of Prime Minister Hun Sen, which had violently harassed the royalist opposition, which won the most support.

The administration's suspension of $7 million in aid to non-Communist rebels in Cambodia sends the right message, at least to Congress. The administration is carefully studying whether the U.S.- aided forces cooperated militarily with the Khmer Rouge, which the U.S. is sworn not to help. In fact, they have no military significance except alongside the stronger Khmer Rouge. The administration is slowly discovering what its critics know.Message aside, however, the loss of even this minor aid is harmful to Cambodian people, whose crops and roads and schools have been destroyed by U.S.-aided insurrection and who might have benefited from this aid, small as it is. The U.S. should be helping the people, including those in camps operated by the movements of Prince Sihanouk and Son Sann.

Phnom Penh, Cambodia. -- Imagine a three-story yellow stucco schoolhouse with tiled floors and whirring ceiling fans pushing 90 degree heat out the open windows, beyond the balustrade to the paddy fields that subsume the outskirts of Cambodia's capital, Phnom Penh.This school is an historic place. It has outlasted several generations of violence. It may outlast several more. It was to this school that I was brought, from Baltimore, to train a cross-section of Cambodian society as interpreters for the first Cambodian elections in 38 years.

PHNOM PENH -- Optimism flows easily here these days.The long-running civil war has ended, at least on paper. The exiled god-king, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, whose ouster in 1970 marked the start of all the trouble, is back in the fairy-tale Royal Palace on the banks of the Mekong river. And the largest, most expensive peacekeeping operation in the history of the United Nations has taken over the town, transforming it from a dazed and desolate shell of a city into a kind of madhouse.White U.N. vehicles dominate the now-bustling traffic, and an international assortment of blue-bereted soldiers pack the once-deserted hotels and restaurants.

Critic's Pick -- Host Jason Chambers travels to Cambodia to study the fighting art of pradal serey in Human Weapon (10 p.m., History).

This week's deals include three specialized offers for trips to three distinct places. Although New Englanders have visited islands around the world, many have never seen two Massachusetts ones: Cuttyhunk and the Elizabeth Islands. The Massachusetts Audubon Society will offer day trips there this month. The exploration begins with a 1F-hour boat trip from Woods Hole through Vineyard Sound and Buzzards Bay along the Elizabeth Islands, with commentary focusing on landmarks, geology, wildlife and the history of the quiet, protected islands.

Laurence J. Bourassa, whose long career as an international aid worker took him to countries across Asia and Africa, died of kidney and respiratory failure Thursday at Long Green Center, a long-term care facility in Baltimore. He was 75. Mr. Bourassa's life was most notably shaped by two episodes, friends and colleagues said - his stint in Somalia with the first group of Peace Corps volunteers, which first gave him a taste for overseas humanitarian work, and two harrowing years he spent in Cambodia during the bloody era of the infamous killing fields.

I'm planning a trip to Italy to visit Venice and Florence with my daughter. She is a glass blower and would like to take a factory tour and a class or workshop. Can you help us with ideas? You and your daughter will enjoy Venice and the island of Murano, famous for its glass-blowing artisans. Neither we nor the Italian Tourist Office were able to find classes for your daughter, but she'll get to watch craftsmen at work on Murano. Many factories are connected to glassware shops and are open to the public.

My wife and I first met Veng Preap on a sultry fall day when we walked into the offices of the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization on a busy street in the center of Siem Reap, near the Angkor Wat complex in Cambodia. We carried a letter from a friend of his in Washington and a pile of World Bank books on international development that Mr. Preap's friend suggested for him. Veng Preap, not his real name to protect his privacy, took us everywhere to see the Angkor monuments and spent evenings speaking with us about his life and such subjects as civil engineering and Buddhism and his views toward organized religion.

As the trial of Saddam Hussein was set to open today, Iraq joins the long list of nations - from Germany to South Africa, Yugoslavia to Cambodia - that have tried to deal with a violent and oppressive past to help carve out a more peaceful future based on the rule of law. The experience of these countries has shown that it is a difficult task that could either rally Iraqi society around its nascent democracy or deepen the divisions that threaten to...

"Cambodia: Report From a Stricken Land," by Henry Kamm. Arcade publishing. 251 pages. $24.95.One of the saddest tales of the 20th century is surely the rape and unraveling of modern Cambodia. An essentially peaceful, self-contained backwater of Southeast Asia - a place best known for enigmatic smiles, working elephants, elegant ruins and mercurial monarchs before the devastation began - Cambodia has been transformed in a quarter-century of warfare into a traumatized stump of a nation. Henry Kamm, a longtime New York Times correspondent, was there for much of the descent.

Andrea Marie Woloszyn, daughter of John and Gina Woloszyn, of Baltimore, MD, was married on June 11, 2005 to Jonathan Herman Kully, son of Thomas and Sandra Kully, of Chicago, IL. A six o'clock outdoor wedding was held at Conservatory Water Terrace in Central Park, NY City. Fr. Henry Fehren and Rabbi Joel Goor officiated the interfaith ceremony. A reception followed at The Frick Collection. Matron of Honor, Christine Walsdorf, and bridesmaids, Allison Brill, Poppy Buppert, Lori Decillis, Janet Kim, Deborah Kully and Melanie Sventy, attended the bride.