IN THE SMALL TOWN OF SNOUL IN eastern Cambodia, along an invasion route from Vietnam, people have been lining up patiently outside an old building newly painted in blue. Inside they are photographed and interviewed by a voter- registration team to make sure they were born in Cambodia or have at least one Cambodian parent. Personal data, photograph and signature are recorded on a card that will entitle the bearer to vote in elections the U.N. is hoping to hold next May.
In towns and villages through much of Cambodia, millions of people have been repeating this process over the past few weeks. Their participation is one of the signal successes in an unprecedented and fragile experiment carried out by a huge international presence known as the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia, or UNTAC.
Understanding Cambodia has always seemed like trying to put together a three-dimensional jigsaw of morality, politics and geography. Some pieces are missing, some are scuffed and torn beyond recognition, some bent completely out of shape; a few fit nowhere at all. The picture appears to show a maze through which the country has been stalked by successive monsters: a coup followed by brutal civil war, careless U.S. policies, strategic bombing, a Marxist revolution so bloody that it came to be called autogenocide, international and regional power politics, liberation and occupation by a hated neighbor, famine, decay and renewed civil war.
Now Cambodia is in the midst of the strangest phase of all -- and the only one that could be said to have benign intent. Over the past few months, under the banner of the U.N., the devastated country has been inundated by 20,000 men and women from all over the world, equipped with white cars, white trucks, white planes and white helicopters. They are charged with giving Cambodia something it has never had -- democracy -- along with something it has not known for 22 years -- peace.
For Cambodia, the U.N. plan is the last, best hope to escape the maze. For the U.N., it is a test case of whether the world organization can adapt to the new demands of the post-cold war world. As Claude Cheysson, a senior member of the European Parliament, said recently in Phnom Penh, "UNTAC must not fail. It cannot fail." But what constitutes success?
The town of Snoul is a microcosm of the U.N.'s gamble. It is a poor place: pigs and cows root around the market; many of the goods on sale have come across the border from Vietnam. The town was destroyed during the American invasion of 1970; nine years later, Vietnamese tanks and trucks roared along the rutted dirt road as they invaded Cambodia to liberate it from the Khmer Rouge and establish an occupation that would last 10 years.
Now U.N. peacekeepers are the occupiers. The electoral process they oversee is impressive. Near Angkor Wat, Sajjad A. Gul, a Pakistani, says Cambodians have told him they really do want to vote -- though some of them wish they could vote for UNTAC. As of mid-December, UNTAC officials could take satisfaction from the fact that 4 million of an estimated 4.5 million prospective voters had been registered.