Cambodian

Peace, if it really happens, has been a long time coming to Cambodia.For more than 20 years before the signing of a peace agreement Wednesday in Paris, that unhappy country experienced an unbroken succession of violent upheavals that killed millions, uprooted millions more, and devastated Cambodia's land and spirit.The Cambodians themselves, including the leaders of all four factions involved in the peace settlement, bear a heavy share of blame for the barbarism, death and misery their country has endured for so long.

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.

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.

The American Diner Cookbook, by Elizabeth McKeon and Linda Everett. Cumberland House. 256 pages. $16.95. I confess to a latent susceptibility to Camp, and can there by Higher Camp than diners, and diner food? While sadly weak on Maryland diners -- only one, Baltimore's Overlea -- this compendium of the presence and menus of 100 diners across the United States includes some 450 recipes. You might try hogwaller or bejeweled carrots or Dorothy Jean's Dropped Biscuits. But, more likely, you will find very straightforward, very on-the-road American ways of preparing standard fare --- the most basic elements of the mid-range diet of a century of eating out reasonably.

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.

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia -- The Khmer Rouge, the communist guerrilla group that once brutally ruled Cambodia and has now joined the new coalition government under a peace accord, is hiding troops and a huge cache of weapons in preparation for the possible resumption of the Cambodian civil war, diplomats and relief workers say.The move, they say, violates disarmament provisions of the United Nations peace treaty that the Khmer Rouge signed in Paris only last...

The year-old Cambodia settlement plan is failing because one of the belligerents -- the Khmer Rouge guerrilla army -- never meant it to succeed. After other forces agreed to partial demobilization in cantonments set up by 15,000 United Nations troops, the Khmer Rouge reneged. Its excuse was that all ethnic Vietnamese in the country, where many immigrated for decades, are disguised soldiers who have not been withdrawn by Hanoi.The U.N. would be a better judge. The Khmer Rouge is shooting its fellow Cambodians because it still craves a monopoly of power, still means to purify its people just as it slaughtered a million in the late 1970s and still believes in rule by terror.

It has been 16 years since the last Marine helicopter lifted off the rooftop of the U.S. Embassy in Vietnam. If all goes according to plan, American diplomats will be back within two years.After making a policy U-turn just before the Persian Gulf crisis erupted last summer, Washington and Hanoi have made steady, purposeful strides toward unfreezing relations and establishing diplomatic ties.A four-phase "road map," as it is popularly called inside the Washington Beltway, is now on the table, proposed to Vietnam six weeks ago. It calls for Hanoi to use its influence over the Cambodian government installed by Vietnamese forces in January 1979, after they invaded Cambodia and stopped the killing fields of Pol Pot's regime.

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.

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia -- The campaign to brin democracy to Cambodia two decades after it degenerated into genocide and Communist rule ended yesterday with political rallies, parades and occasional gunfire.On Sunday, about 4.7 million Cambodian voters will begin six days of balloting to choose leaders from among 20 new political parties. The multiparty elections are the first since 1972 and are being held under the eyes of a huge U.N. task force.But there is widespread fear that the nation's fragile new political system -- established at a cost of billions of dollars and involving 22,000 U.N. personnel and 50,000 Cambodians -- might not survive what is supposed to be a cooling-off period between now and Sunday.