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With their traditional sources of support running dry, Khmer Rouge guerrillas are engaging in heroin trafficking as a way of financing their fight against the Cambodian government.

The new source of funding is something of a nightmare for the Phnom Penh government. The guerrilla group, which used to be bankrolled by China, lost most of its traditional political support when it signed an international peace agreement in 1991. The hardwood forests and gem mines that the group still controls kept the money coming in for a while, but those sources are wearing thin.

"Wherever you have insurrectional movements, where guerrilla groups have to finance their weapons, drugs appear," said the United Nations Drug Control Program's (UNDCP) executive director, Giorgio Giacomelli, who wound up a three-day visit to Cambodia on Wednesday. "Until now the Khmer Rouge has had other sources of finance, but I know the government is worried about this."

A senior advisor to the Ministry of the Interior said there was no shortage of evidence that the guerrilla group was moving into the heroin trade. "We know they buy (raw) opium from the Golden Triangle, and ship it in to Thailand to be refined. Then they ship it back out through Cambodia," said Skadavy LyRoun.

Giacomelli said traffickers used Cambodia as a trans-shipment point because controls were extremely lax. "Better control efforts by neighboring countries, particularly Thailand and now Vietnam, simply add to the attraction of Cambodia as a shipment point."

LyRoun, himself a police general, explained part of the problem: "Our police have no way of controlling this. They have not even been trained to recognize drugs; they have no test kits. They can't tell heroin from flour .. We have no training, no budget."

Cambodia, where marijuana can be bought openly in markets and is used to flavor soups and stews, is a new kid on the block as far as drug trafficking goes.

Add its technical inexperience to a generally chaotic social and physical infrastructure and you get just the kind of fluid situation on which traffickers thrive.

Giacomelli said: "Drugs, like water, seek a place to flow where there is a fragile framework of control."

Bengt Juhlin, based in the UNDCP's regional headquarters in Bangkok, said a rise in currently low rates of drug abuse was inevitable if trafficking continued to flourish.

"The growth is already exponential. I'm not sure the government has fully taken that fact on board," he said.

Neighboring Vietnam, which is also witnessing a rise in addiction, has said it is aware of a growing volume of heroin coming across the Cambodian border, an area over which the traditional enemies are once again squabbling.

Giacomelli said he was encouraged by Cambodia's signing of an agreement on drug control with Thailand, Burma, China, Vietnam and Laos.

"They are aware that if they want to make progress it is indispensable that they find a way to cooperate even if they have conflicts," he said.

Slowing the flow of drugs will not be cheap. The UNDCP and other donors have yet to come up with a cost estimate for basic control programs, though Giacomelli expected Cambodia to see an initial inflow of around US$100,000 to help establish a framework for control.

Such sums are considerably less than a trafficker's profit on a single large heroin deal.

"The big fishes can afford to sacrifice a lot of people and a lot of kilos of stuff," Giacomelli said.

Copyright 1996 Asia Times.

(c) 1996 Chamber World Network International Ltd.