PAWNS OF POLITICS

Thus an unspeakable pact was made with one of history`s most certifiably criminal governments. Not only did the Khmer Rouge continue to exist, they were rearmed by the Chinese, given training bases inside Thailand by the Thais and allowed to control ”their” civilian populations along the Cambodian border. It was all done in the name of geopolitical concern over Vietnam.

To make the bitter pill a little sweeter, two other noncommunist forces were quickly organized among the Cambodian refugees along the border. One was led by Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia`s leader throughout America`s war in Vietnam until he was ousted in what many believe to have been a CIA-inspired coup in 1970. The other was led by Son Sann, an aged former Cambodian prime minister under Sihanouk.

Ostensibly a coalition, all three groups have been armed and field guerrilla forces inside Cambodia. The lion`s share of military support and supplies, however, has gone to the Khmer Rouge.

Each faction of this coalition has tens of thousands of refugees under its direct control, about 300,000 people altogether. The refugees have become, in effect, the ”constituency” of each faction, instruments to prove legitimacy. On the basis of this constituency, the coalition retains the seat representing Cambodia in the United Nations and other international bodies.

Among those 300,000 border people are Sam Neang Moul, her mother and her brother. When they escaped in 1979, they first found refuge just inside Cambodia in a camp called Ampil. That camp became a stronghold for the Son Sann, noncommunist forces called the Khmer People`s National Liberation Front . They were luckier than those who stumbled into camps controlled by the Khmer Rouge but not much luckier.

It was an extremely precarious existence because the war went on right around the camp, which was often subject to Vietnamese shelling. But Ampil was at least on the reception end of a jerry-built international relief effort organized by the United Nations. Sam and her family and the other camp inmates for the first time in four years began to get adequate food and regular medical attention.

In Ampil, Sam watched her teenage years slip by as she turned 17, 18, 19, 20 then 21. In 1984 the Vietnamese launched a full-scale offensive on the camp, and she and her mother and brother ran again. They found refuge in another Liberation Front camp for a year, then returned to Ampil. In 1985 the Vietnamese attacked again, determined to drive all the camp inhabitants into Thailand.

In the interest of keeping the anti-Vietnamese guerrilla forces active, the Thais allowed the United Nations to establish eight camps for Cambodians on Thai soil. But the Thais have insisted that the camp inhabitants not be considered refugees, calling them instead ”displaced persons.”

The agency that should be caring for these Cambodians is the UN High Commission for Refugees. The Thais will not allow the UN commission into the camps because to do so would give camp inhabitants the option of resettlement in third countries around the world, thus destroying the ”constituency” of the resistance. Instead, a special organization has been set up to care for the Cambodians, the UN Border Relief Operation.

The Relief Operation has no authority to provide protection for camp inhabitants. The Thais maintain strict control over the campsites, surrounding them with barbed wire and posting armed guards with orders to shoot any inmate trying to leave. The UN agency provides only food, medical attention and basic education for the inmates. It operates on an annual budget of $44 million, or 40 cents a day per person.

For 40 cents a day, you can`t provide many personalized services. You can drop off food, provide water and fuel, set up and staff clinics and hospitals, put together some schools and organize some teachers and hope for the best.

”Sometimes I equate what we`re doing here with a crisis-intervention center in a hospital,” said an American who works with Cambodians in the camps. ”We keep these people alive by attaching them to a life-support system, but then we just leave them there to vegetate.”

At 8 a.m. the gates swing open at Site 2, the largest of the border camps, home to 170,000 Cambodian refugees, including Sam. They are packed into 2 square miles of squalid, dusty, nearly treeless Thai real estate surrounded by barbed wire just a mile from the Cambodian border. When the gates swing open, the traffic is one way going in, as lumbering trucks arrive bearing firewood, food rations, medical supplies and enough water to give everybody in the camp a pail a day.

Interspersed with the trucks are smaller vehicles bumping over the badly rutted roads, bringing in the people who administer Site 2: UN Relief Operation and International Red Cross officials overseeing the camp, international church and humanitarian organization workers who organize the programs in the camp, Thai workers who run the programs.

As each vehicle enters, it is stopped by Thai guards who count the occupants and make sure each has the proper authority to enter. Shortly before 5 p.m., the official closing time of the camp, the traffic flow is reversed. Thai authorities allow no nonrefugees except camp guards to be in the camp overnight.

During the day, the biggest fear is that the ever-present, muffled sound of Vietnamese artillery a few miles away inside Cambodia will become less muffled. That will mean the artillery is turned toward Site 2, as it was one day in 1987, when eight people were killed.

But during the day there is at least a semblance of purpose and civility to the place. Children go to school. The ailing go to medical clinics. Mothers with infants go to training courses in nutrition. There are always lines, long ones, to stand in to get rationed food, water and firewood.

At night it is a different story. Then refugees are sitting targets, vulnerable to Thai guards, to armed bandits who live in a forest just a few hundred yards north of the camp, to soldiers, and to their fellow refugees.

Since Site 2 opened in early 1985, people there have been murdered, robbed and raped with distressing frequency. The Thai guards, until recently ill-trained and underpaid, have an unpleasant history of general abuse of the refugees.

Bandit gangs, frequently numbering 20 men at a time, periodically enter the camps with the presumed complicity of the guards. Once in, they terrorize whole sections of the camp, beating, raping and sometimes killing victims while searching for hidden valuables. Drunkenness among Liberation Front soldiers returning on leave to visit their families also has created major problems, according to camp workers. Because the Liberation Front is split by factions, often at odds with one another, returning soldiers often raid areas of Site 2 controlled by rival factions, setting off shootings and mayhem.

Theoretically, weapons are not allowed inside the camp, but it is the crossroad of a guerrilla war, and they get inside anyway. They are a cheap commodity, especially grenades, which can be purchased by anybody for 5 cents. Early this year, two 8-year-old boys quarreled, and one threw a grenade into the other`s home, killing one person and wounding eight.

During the day the violence is less overt, but it nonetheless saps the spirit of the Cambodians who live there. ”Our fear before was that we`d be blown up by the Vietnamese,” said an American camp worker. ”Now I think we are blowing up from the inside out. People ax their neighbors for making too much noise. Men kick and beat their wives in frustration. Mothers beat their children.

”If you have no hope, you don`t care what happens.”

Aid workers in the camps almost universally worry about the loss of the best of Cambodian traditions and values inside the camp. They report seeing uncharacteristically un-Cambodian behavior on the rise in all the border camps. Teenagers organize into gangs for self-protection and racketeering. Young widows and girls offer themselves as prostitutes. Mothers decide camp life has become unbearable and retreat into an almost catatonic state, abandoning their houses, children and all social contact.

I was at a wedding reception inside Site 2 early this year, seated at a table with my interpreter and six other guests, all of them refugees and friends of the groom.

Above the din of a rented rock band, I tried through an interpreter to make what turned out to be awkward conversation with my fellow guests. One of them, a serious young woman seated across from me, had been listening intently for a good 30 minutes to the mostly inane chatter about food and wedding rituals, but she never joined in. Finally she spoke directly to me.

”You speak English,” I said, stating the obvious with some surprise.

”I am sorry,” Sam apologized, ”I am only learning. I do not speak it very well.”

Sam is now 25. She works as a secretary in an adult literacy program. She is slender, tall for a Cambodian, with long, flowing black hair. Her quiet, dignified diffidence completely masks the horror she has lived through for 13 years.

Later in the day, Sam related her saga in English.

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She said that when she followed her cousin to the Thai-Cambodian border in 1979, she found him again in the Ampil camp. He had been a soldier in the American-supported Lon Nol regime before Pol Pot took over Cambodia. In 1982, on the basis of his American connections, he was accepted for resettlement to the United States and left. His good fortune fired Sam`s imagination, allowing her to hope that she, too, might go to America. In anticipation of that, she began to teach herself English.

A few months after the cousin emigrated, however, Thailand unilaterally declared that no more Cambodians would be granted refugee status. Nor would the Thais allow any more Cambodians living on the border to emigrate to third countries through Thailand.

Certainly, the policy legitimized the coalition Cambodian government in exile that Thailand was supporting. And just as certainly, the policy closed off any possibility of a new life for Sam.

The days of massive resettlement of Indochinese refugees in the West seem nearly over anyway. About 1.5 million Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian refugees have been resettled in the last nine years. Most of the receiving countries do not want to be confronted with 300,000 more Cambodians, 80 percent of whom are illiterate and unskilled peasant farmers.

”There is no way to go,” Sam said in dry resignation. ”Even if you dream of going, it is impossible.”

She talked matter-of-factly about the past, as though she had long since come to grips with it. She had more difficulty talking about her present life- of numbing, endless boredom-and about her future, which seemed to loom before her like an immense, impenetrable blank wall. On those subjects she spoke haltingly, her voice sometimes cracking, though she never lost her composure.

”From time to time we are told we can go back to Cambodia,” Sam said.

”They have been saying this every year since 1982. But nothing. We still live on the border. I often ask myself, what will my future be? Will I be on the border forever? Someday I want to marry but not here, not in the camp. I`ve had many men ask. I want to have my wedding in Cambodia. I have no confidence in the future, living here, living like this.”

What is Sam`s future? The only reason she has been trapped on the border for nine years is that she and her fellow Cambodians are being used as pawns in an international chess match. The game is to keep Vietnam so off-balance in Cambodia and so isolated internationally for its Cambodian occupation that the Vietnamese will give up and go home.

It appears that the game may be coming to a close. Vietnam began removing some of its 120,000 soldiers from Cambodia earlier this year and has sworn to remove all of them by 1990. Condemned by most of the rest of the world, bedeviled by its own bankrupt economy and an incipient famine, the Vietnamese seem to be sincere in wanting to leave.

Their departure will represent a victory of sorts for the outside powers: the Chinese, the Thais and the Western alliance. Unfortunately, nobody thus far has come up with a suitable plan to fill the void the Vietnamese would leave in Cambodia. And that void could be cataclysmic for Sam and all of Cambodia because it is one that the Khmer Rouge plan to fill.

The countries that resuscitated the Khmer Rouge as a matter of geopolitical expediency are now horrified at the prospect of the monster they have nurtured trundling back to power in Cambodia. The Thais do not want such an unstable, venomous government next door. The Chinese do not want it either and have invited the most notorious Khmer Rouge leadership to ”retire” in China and allow more moderate men to inherit Cambodian leadership.

The Western alliance, headed by the United States, tacitly went along with arming the Khmer Rouge against Vietnam but is now searching for a way to block the Khmer Rouge from regaining power. The alliance pins its hopes on returning Sihanouk to Cambodia as head of state.

Nothing erases the fact, however, that the Khmer Rouge has been fighting a war on behalf of other foreign powers for the last nine years. The Khmer Rouge has maintained an ongoing presence inside Cambodia, while Sihanoukist and Liberation Front forces have not. The Khmer Rouge are not likely to drop out of the race willingly.

The Khmer Rouge already may have fired their opening volley in a civil war for the domination of post-Vietnamese Cambodia. Early in July, Sihanouk, to the consternation of his Western backers, resigned as the leader of the guerrilla coalition. He resigned, he said, because the Khmer Rouge were already starting to kill his men.

The suggestion that the manipulation of her life by powers beyond her control might now condemn her once again to the deadly embrace of the Khmer Rouge is unfathomable to Sam.

”Oh,” she gasped, shaking her head, ”I`ve had enough of that. I speak loyally, I do not want the Vietnamese in my country, but I don`t want any more of that.”

What she would like most, she said, is to return to school.

”I still want to go back to school. The reason I have only six years of schooling was the war. My older sisters were going to the university, and I know I would have gone, too. My father wanted that.”

Sam paused for the longest moment, as though she was considering what might have been with her present predicament.

”I feel my life is like a frog in a well,” she finally said. ”The frog can look up from the bottom of the well, and he can only see the sky. He never sees anything, never sees anything new. He only understands the life in the well. I`ve never seen anything new. I know about new things like computers, but I`ve never seen one. While I am here, I know nothing. I only know the people in the camp.”

Tuesday in Tempo: Life and politics in the oldest camps of all.