Cambodia

PERMANENT WAR has returned to Cambodia with the coup that the Communist strong man, Hun Sen, staged against the royalist, Prince Ranariddh. It came with executions and arrests in Phnom Penh. Warfare returned to the provinces. Sadness and evil revisit the tortured land.This unravels the peace of 1991, which was a triumph of Asian diplomacy brokered under auspices of the United Nations. That peace got the United States off the hook of responsibility for having destabilized Cambodia in the 1970s.

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia -- Struggling to explain how his coalition government had collapsed only hours after its creation, Prince Norodom Sihanouk made clear yesterday that he placed the blame for the debacle on his son, 49, the leader of the opposition political party that won last week's elections.U.N. peacekeepers said it was still likely that Prince Sihanouk, Cambodia's ceremonial head of state and its former monarch, would form some sort of coalition government.But Cambodians who had long heard rumors of strains in the royal family watched anxiously as progress toward peace threatened to dissolve into a family squabble pitting father against son, brother against brother.

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia -- Just three weeks ago, opposition leaders were on the verge of boycotting the general election set for today, claiming that a campaign of manipulation and violence by Cambodia's leader, Hun Sen, had made a free vote impossible.But a boisterous, monthlong campaign has turned the situation here upside down. Enthusiastic rallies and internal party polls suggest that two major opposition parties enjoy considerable support among the country's 5.4 million voters.Diplomats say that if Hun Sen does not win the election, he might turn the tables on his critics and be the one to claim that the vote had not been free and fair.

THE BEST HOPE for war-torn Cambodia since the 1993 U.N.-brokered election that the Khmer Rouge boycotted, is the internecine strife and defection that is reducing that evil terrorist army. This is not peace in the land of permanent war that is still bedeviled by banditry, insurrection and land mines. But it is a reduction in fighting, a diminution of anarchy and a growth of authority for the democratically chosen if politically fractured government.The U.N.-hatched democratic process produced a government with co-prime ministers.

POL POT came from a prosperous Cambodian peasant family and was fortunate after World War II to be sent to Paris to study electronics. He flunked, becoming instead a person of unnatural evil and cruelty, who acted out of twisted nationalistic and ideological belief.He became boss of the little Cambodian Communist Party in 1963 and led an insurrection five years later. His band of armed children was dubbed the Khmer Rouge, or Red Cambodians, by Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who repressed them without mercy.

WASHINGTON -- When the subject of Cambodia comes up, many Americans probably associate the Southeast Asian country with its recent, turbulent history, as a part of the Vietnam War or the genocide waged against the Cambodian people by the Khmer Rouge during the mid- to late 1970s.Another side of Cambodia's past, obscured by years of turmoil, tells of a society steeped in gentility and tradition, and responsible for the creation of one of the world's magnificent architectural wonders: the royal Angkor complex.

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia -- Much of the world may have signed a treaty pledging to eliminate land mines, but in war-ravaged Cambodia -- with more mines per capita than any other country -- the problem isn't ready to go away.Communist Khmer Rouge guerrillas and royalist rebels battling Cambodian regulars in the jungles of northwest Cambodia are still laying mines, Western diplomatic sources say. For all practical purposes, they add, the treaty signed in Ottawa in early December is irrelevant, for now at least, in this troubled nation.

Twenty-five years ago in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, the family of Ly Y began its slow journey into the darkness of a four-year midnight. Forced to evacuate the city, his family was shunted along with thousands of others to a distant rural province. Psychologically speaking, his destination was a landscape somewhere between the Dark Ages, the Inquisition and the Reign of Terror. So began the rule of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, who from 1975 to 1979 presided over a cultural stripping-down of Cambodia that emptied its cities, schools and businesses while wiping out nearly a quarter of the country's 7.8 million people, through executions, starvation and disease.

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.

Sun-colored mangoes and papayas, golden-brown pineapples and small bags of shrimp chips and peanuts were heaped on wicker trays balanced on the heads of the children who formed a crowd following Ann von Lossberg along the water's edge of Ocheuteal Beach in Kompong Som, Cambodia. This encounter in 2001 was the first time von Lossberg, an Ellicott City resident for six years, met the "beach children." Most of the children are young teen-agers, and the money they earn helps support their families.