Dissidents Cambodia

Climbing slowly from his bed, Leng Loeung grimaced in pain and delicately touched his head where a bullet had entered his skull only a week before. "I am not afraid," he said. "They can't intimidate me. I want to have democracy in Cambodia." Leng Loeung is the deputy editor of a newsletter being published weekly by the Khmer People's National Liberation Front, a resistance faction funded by the United States.

Fifty opposition figures have been killed in Cambodia since August, more than doubling the previously known toll of political slayings following a mid-1997 coup, the United Nations said. Thomas Hammarberg, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's special representative for human rights in Cambodia, announced the new evidence on the killings at a Geneva news conference. Information about the killings, some as recent as March and coming on top of a previously documented 41 executions blamed by U.N.

Despite a gloss of achievement, four days of unprecedented face-to-face talks between warring Cambodian factions ended Thursday with the old foes locked in rigid positions. "We have a breakthrough . . . a psychological breakthrough," Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas said at a closing press conference. But according to participants in the talks at this hilltop resort, his statement was based primarily on the fact that the contending factions had sat down together.

At a reeducation camp on the outskirts of town, dozens of captured soldiers are learning the lessons of the losers of war. They sit in listless clusters in a pavilion aerated by jagged holes blown in the wall by tanks, listening to the drone of a victorious commander reciting what they are now to believe. "They told us it was not a coup," one soldier said of the bloody uprising that toppled Cambodia's co-premier earlier this month, leaving Second Prime Minister Hun Sen in sole power.

Fifty opposition figures have been killed in Cambodia since August, more than doubling the previously known toll of political slayings following a mid-1997 coup, the United Nations said. Thomas Hammarberg, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's special representative for human rights in Cambodia, announced the new evidence on the killings at a Geneva news conference. Information about the killings, some as recent as March and coming on top of a previously documented 41 executions blamed by U.N.

At a reeducation camp on the outskirts of town, dozens of captured soldiers are learning the lessons of the losers of war. They sit in listless clusters in a pavilion aerated by jagged holes blown in the wall by tanks, listening to the drone of a victorious commander reciting what they are now to believe. "They told us it was not a coup," one soldier said of the bloody uprising that toppled Cambodia's co-premier earlier this month, leaving Second Prime Minister Hun Sen in sole power.

Khmer Rouge dissidents won support from Cambodian Second Prime Minister Hun Sen for a pardon for their leader, renegade revolutionary Ieng Sary. Hun Sen and a three-member dissident delegation held daylong negotiations in Sisophon aimed at cementing a break in the Khmer Rouge that may hasten an end to Cambodia's civil war.

Khmer Rouge dissidents won support from Cambodian Second Prime Minister Hun Sen for a pardon for their leader, renegade revolutionary Ieng Sary. Hun Sen and a three-member dissident delegation held daylong negotiations in Sisophon aimed at cementing a break in the Khmer Rouge that may hasten an end to Cambodia's civil war.

Climbing slowly from his bed, Leng Loeung grimaced in pain and delicately touched his head where a bullet had entered his skull only a week before. "I am not afraid," he said. "They can't intimidate me. I want to have democracy in Cambodia." Leng Loeung is the deputy editor of a newsletter being published weekly by the Khmer People's National Liberation Front, a resistance faction funded by the United States.

Despite a gloss of achievement, four days of unprecedented face-to-face talks between warring Cambodian factions ended Thursday with the old foes locked in rigid positions. "We have a breakthrough . . . a psychological breakthrough," Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas said at a closing press conference. But according to participants in the talks at this hilltop resort, his statement was based primarily on the fact that the contending factions had sat down together.