How will Cambodia fare in 1998?

International rebuke of Hun Sen's 1997 violent ouster of his co-premier is fading. Will he lead Cambodia into a period of peace and stability? Satya Sivaraman of Inter Press Service reports.

BANGKOK: For perpetually troubled Cambodia, 1998 is likely to be as politically turbulent as the past year but it could finally confirm the true direction of the country's nascent democracy.

With general elections set for next May, international attention will be focused on whether it is possible for opponents of the Hun Sen government to carry out free and fair campaigning. The success or failure of the polls, likely to be monitored by global bodies like the United Nations, will also decide whether the long running civil war between government troops and the extremist Khmer Rouge will finally come to an end.

After three years of relative peace, Cambodia hit the headlines in July, following the violent overthrow of First Prime Minister Norodom Ranariddh and the takeover of government control by his co premier Hun Sen, who is also leader of the Cambodian People's Party (CPP).

Hun Sen claimed that Ranariddh, who headed the royalist Funcinpec party, had illegally imported arms and was plotting a violent overthrow of the government with the help of the Khmer Rouge. With several Funcinpec politicians, Ranariddh fled the country while, human rights groups say, many of his military and intelligence aides left behind were summarily executed.

The overthrow marked the end of three years of uneasy sharing of power between Ranariddh and Hun Sen, who had formed a coalition government after general elections in 1993 held following a two-year long UN sponsored peacekeeping mission. It also marked the crippling of Cambodia's tenuous return to democracy, an unraveling of what till Hun Sen's coup was considered a success story produced by a successful UN peacekeeping effort.

Though initially isolated by the world, Hun Sen's reconstituted government has slowly begun to win legitimacy especially within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which has been mediating a settlement between warring political factions in Cambodia.

While the United States has been spearheading the campaign against international recognition of the Hun Sen government, it has sent representatives to monitor the human rights situation in Cambodia and even discuss the peaceful holding of elections as scheduled in mid 1998.

In a sign that political normalcy could be restored soon in Phnom Penh, prominent dissident leaders like Sam Rainsy, a former finance minister and Funcinpec member, have returned to the city after claiming their lives would be threatened if they went back. The biggest blow to Ranariddh whose loyalists have joined the Khmer Rouge in the civil war against government troops has been the return of his father King Norodom Sihanouk to Phnom Penh to assume his duties as head of the Cambodian state.

"Governments all over the world are tired of Cambodia's endless domestic conflicts and many are pragmatically beginning to accept Hun Sen and the Cambodian People's Party as the single most important political players in the country," says a United Nations official based in Phnom Penh.

He agrees that the peace process between the Cambodian factions initiated in 1991 with the Paris Peace Accord, and culminating in the 1993 UN sponsored elections, is now dead. But nobody, he says, wants to go back to the pre peace accord phase.

Throughout the 1980s, western countries and ASEAN isolated the Vietnam backed CPP government in Cambodia. They even provided arms and material support to an alliance of the Khmer Rouge and the royalist forces fighting a civil war against the regime.

International response to the Cambodian political crisis also is tempered by the realization that if Hun Sen and the CPP have authoritarian tendencies, their opponents are no saints either. Western nations are particularly embarrassed by Ranariddh's alliance with the Khmer Rouge, which is still holed out in pockets along the Thai Cambodia border fighting a guerrilla war against the Hun Sen government it calls a "puppet of the Vietnamese".

Although the Khmer Rouge carried out a highly publicized but dubious show trial of its leader Pol Pot and put him under "house arrest", few believe the extremist group responsible for genocide during the late seventies has changed its basic nature as a ruthless killing machine.

Some say Pol Pot himself is believed to be in command behind the scenes even while offering interviews to the international media, for a reported fee of up to 20,000 U.S. dollars, portraying himself as an out of action "aging nationalist".

"With the end of the Cold War, the United States in particular is no longer interested in getting too deeply involved in the Cambodian conflict unlike in the previous decade, when they saw Hun Sen as being under Vietnamese and hence Soviet influence,'' says an Asian diplomat in the Cambodian capital.

For most ASEAN governments which had joined the U.S. sponsored isolation of Cambodia in the 1980s, there is no longer any animosity against Vietnam, which is now part of ASEAN. Winding up a three day trip to Phnom Penh in early December, John Shattuck, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State, said Washington was willing to fund the May elections and resume suspended aid if the democratic process was restored in Cambodia.

Already there are signs the Hun Sen government is willing to make necessary concessions to ensure the normalization of its foreign relations, and to win back billions of dollars in development aid that funds 40 percent of Cambodia's budget.

Hun Sen has insisted that Ranariddh must face trial on charges of threatening national security, but he also has hinted that the Funcinpec leader can be pardoned by King Sihanouk. "If he is convicted in a trial, we would like to see him gain amnesty and be allowed to take part in general elections," Hun Sen was quoted telling Japanese Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto during a recent visit to Tokyo.

Not everybody, especially Ranariddh's supporters, is convinced that the CPP will allow its leader to contest elections again. They point to new legislation being considered by the Cambodian parliament aimed at disqualifying from the polls candidates who have been convicted on criminal and other charges.

The new law, combined with the certain conviction of Ranariddh by pliable Cambodian courts, will keep out the only man who can challenge Hun Sen seriously in the elections, they say. If that happens, the coming year could prove to be as disastrous for Cambodia as 1997 has been.

For many Cambodians, their wish list for the new year includes hopes that better sense will prevail, that Hun Sen gives up his authoritarian ambitions, while Ranariddh cuts his ties with the Khmer Rouge. This may be asking too much of Cambodia's fratricidal politicians but it is the only way peace can return to this impoverished, battle weary South east Asian country.