Cambodians From S. California Go Home To Seek Political Office

KOMPONG SPEU, Cambodia - Among the candidates in Cambodia's election this week are two princes, four generals, Communist Party cadres, barefoot peasants and even an escaped rapist. But nobody expected so many Republicans from Orange County, Calif.

There are believed to be at least two dozen U.S. citizens, mostly from Southern California, on the ballot for the new 120-seat Cambodian assembly. What's more, Californians with political savvy and campaign skills have played a crucial, behind-the-scenes advisory role in the election campaign.

"I learned how to campaign from the Republican Party in Orange County," said Nanda Chamroeun, 36, of Santa Ana. "They taught me how to get the message out and how to raise money."

Chamroeun is a native-born Cambodian who fled the country in 1975 as the Communist Khmer Rouge came to power. She is one of only a handful of women on the ballot in a country where most women are confined to the backbreaking work of the rice paddies.

She reckons that with the voting population being 64 percent female, she stands an excellent chance of being elected to the Constituent Assembly, which will draft a constitution and form a new government under United Nations supervision.

More than 4 million votes - from 85 percent of registered voters - have been cast. Voting ends Friday.

Chamroeun is a candidate of the Liberal Democratic Party, which has 11 parliamentary hopefuls - including her husband - from

California and one from Connecticut.

The Liberal Democrats are headed by Sak Sutsakhan, a former army general who owns a Dairy Queen restaurant in Anaheim. So numerous are politicians with fast-food connections in California that some officials of the U.N. peacekeeping operation here have dubbed them the "Dunkin' Donut democrats."

One such is Bun Tek Ngoy, known to nearly everyone as Ted. Ngoy founded a chain of doughnut shops and went from being a refugee to a millionaire in Mission Viejo, Calif.

"For more than 20 years, people have been living under dictatorship and communism. They're fed up," said Ngoy, who named his party the Free Development Republican Party.

Another crusading Republican is Kim Kethavy, who sold his two gas stations near Long Beach to set up the Republic Democracy Khmer. Kethavy has outraged the administration of Premier Hun Sen, a former Communist, by hanging an enormous banner from a balcony of his office that reads: "Communism is Evil: Ron Reagan" in both English and Khmer.

Kethavy figured he has spent $350,000 of his own money on the campaign, including paying each of the 120 candidates in his party $80 a month.

After the fall of Phnom Penh to the Communists in 1975, thousands of Cambodians fled to the United States. The Cambodian population in the United States now stands at more than 200,000.

Californians' participation in the election campaign extends to the Phnom Penh administration, even though Hun Sen has heaped scorn on Cambodians who sat out the tyrannical years under the Khmer Rouge, when 1 million died, in the relative safety and comfort of California.

Sem Yang moved to Los Angeles from Cambodia in 1963 and became an important figure in the resettlement of Cambodian refugees, working for the California Department of Social Services. He was a founder of the Cambodian-American Association, one of the largest Cambodian political organizations in America, and he is active in the California Democratic Party. So it came as a shock to many when he turned up at a news conference supporting the Phnom Penh regime.

For the next two days, mobile polling teams will be entering areas that were considered too insecure for fixed voting sites because of their nearness to near Khmer Rouge zones.

The Khmer Rouge had been expected to attempt widespread disruption of the election. However, the guerrilla group, which was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people during its 1975-78 rule of Cambodia, has allowed many people to vote in regions it influences.

-- Material from the Associated Press is included in this report.