A combination of corruption, unfair ground rules and violent intimidation will likely hand the ruling Cambodian People's Party of self-described "strongman" Prime Minister Hun Sen a victory in national elections on Sunday.

International observers will endorse the results, tut-tutting over procedural irregularities, evidence of electoral fraud and the murders of at least a dozen non-CPP political activists since February and congratulate the CPP on a significantly lower body count than those of the bloody 1993 and 1998 elections.

But six weeks later, Cambodians will be granted a second chance at the meaningful change that they have been denied at the ballot box. During the Sept. 10-14 World Trade Organization ministerial conference in Cancun, Mexico, Cambodia is expected to become the first least developed country or LDC to enter the global trade body. Cambodia's lead WTO entry negotiator Sok Siphana expects to seal the last bilateral trade agreements needed for entry with the U.S., Panama and India within weeks, paving the way for WTO entry.

The accession will mark the culmination of eight years of quiet but urgent negotiations and preparation during which Cambodia's legislature has rammed through a blizzard of requisite laws. In addition, moves have been made to increase bureaucratic transparency and predictability in order to woo badly needed foreign investment.

For Mr. Hun Sen, Cambodia's WTO entry is primarily another trophy of international legitimacy for a government isolated for almost two decades after its installation by Vietnamese forces that overthrew the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime of 1975-78.

But facing a possible sunset in record high foreign donor assistance levels due to more urgent demands in Afghanistan and Iraq, Mr. Hun Sen is also playing WTO entry as a last desperate gamble to rescue an economy brought to its knees by mismanagement and bled white by corruption.

In spite of billions of dollars in development assistance in the past decade, 36% of Cambodians live under the official poverty line of less than a dollar a day, and human indicators such as infant mortality have skyrocketed.

Meanwhile foreign investors have left in droves, shaking their heads at a bribe-happy bureaucracy whose greed makes honest profits next to impossible, contributing to the fall in real GDP growth to 4.2% in 2002 from 6.7% the previous year. While neighbors Thailand and Vietnam have become hotbeds of investment for Fortune 500 companies seeking to develop regional production bases and domestic markets, big international investors have largely passed on Cambodia.

Phnom Penh-based diplomats tasked with dispensing the more than $600 million in donor assistance pledged in 2002 to keep the Cambodian economy on life-support express increasing impatience at a CPP government that ignores urgings to improve the country's foreign-investment climate. Those diplomats say that potential foreign investors will give Cambodia a wide berth until demands for official bribes fall to a level that at least allows them to earn equitable returns.

In place of serious, long-term investment Cambodia has become the favored hunting ground of smaller, cowboy-type investors who have contributed little in terms of meaningful economic growth or job creation and have prompted even Cambodia's Finance Minister Keat Chhon to deride the country's "casino economy" of fly-by-night investment.

But WTO entry holds the promise of tempering or even ending to the kleptocratic nature of the CPP's stewardship of a country that rivals Burma as the economic basket case of Southeast Asia. Like China's former Premier Zhu Rongji, the architects of Cambodia's WTO bid are using the global trade body and its criteria of transparent, predictable and rule-based behavior to force changes on an obdurate, corrupt bureaucracy unwilling or incapable of reforming itself.

After Cambodia enters the WTO its economy and the relevant ministries will be under the scrutiny of an organization whose membership requirements will dictate meaningful change in how the country is governed. And unlike the Cambodian electorate, the WTO can't be bought, bullied or bludgeoned into submission.

WTO membership will shine a light in some of the darkest corners of a Cambodian economy currently devoted to skimming off state funds and dispersing them to a balkanesque array of military and political power brokers paid to enforce the CPP line with a vengeance. That system has beggared Cambodia by denying government coffers urgently needed funds for basic education, health care and infrastructure while facilitating a wholesale rape of Cambodia's once vast virgin forest cover that qualifies as one of Southeast Asia's greatest environmental tragedies.

The hemorrhaging of public funds at every level of government has made Cambodia a country in which public hospitals are denied even the rudimentary equipment, medicines and qualified staff. Cambodian public school teachers on low, unlivable salaries that routinely go unpaid for months, are forced to demand private fees from students simply to ensure their own livelihood, condemning the children of the poor to futures of illiteracy, underemployment and stolen hopes. Policemen and soldiers supplement their meager state incomes with random armed robberies that sweep the after-dark streets of Phnom Penh in waves and increase endemic public fear and mistrust.

Meanwhile the diversion of state funds earmarked for public works renders the country's road network a bone-jarring ribbon of dusty potholes linking towns and villages outside the major urban centers where utilities and telecommunications connections are unreliable or nonexistent.

WTO membership will require the CPP to put an end to its culture of backroom deals, payoffs and nepotism in favor of a rules-based system that's designed to benefit legitimate domestic and foreign investors. The rules-based nature of WTO membership also holds the promise of long-stalled reform of a corrupt, incompetent and politicized judiciary that currently allows the grossest of CPP abuses to occur with impunity and threatens the legitimacy of a long-delayed tribunal to hear the case against the aging architects of the Khmer Rouge "Killing Fields" regime.

Under the CPP, rule of law has fallen victim to political and personal expediency such as Mr. Hun Sen's bizarre 2001 ban on karaoke clubs in response to the well-publicized violent excesses of his two nephews, who are burdened with a weakness for handguns, women and song. Typically, the victims of that decree were among Cambodia's most vulnerable, young women thrown out of their jobs as waitresses and hostesses and forced to choose between a return to grinding rural poverty or the dangers of street-side prostitution.

Mr. Hun Sen and his patronage network may bridle at how WTO-required changes disrupt traditional funding lines. But observance of international conventions has never been a CPP strong point, as the Thais learned to their horror on January 29 this year when Cambodian mobs burnt and looted the Thai embassy and Thai-owned businesses in Phnom Penh.

A U.S. State Department report obtained by the Associated Press in May placed responsibility for the violence at the feet of the CPP, noting that the violence had been fanned by rumors echoed by Mr. Hun Sen in state media that a Thai TV actress had insulted Cambodia by suggesting that the country's fabled Angkor Wat complex rightfully belonged to Thailand. The report described the Cambodian government's response to the violence as "irresponsible" and "incompetent."

Like China, Mr. Hun Sen may resort to crude but cunning ruses to forestall meaningful WTO compliance in some areas while politely turning a deaf ear to complaints from other members. But unlike Cambodia, China is a rising economic power with a huge domestic market for which trade partners are willing to hold their noses while pursuing a policy of engagement. Cambodia offers no such attraction.

The choice for Mr. Hun Sen and the CPP is a transformation into a less predatory, rule-based government or a pyrrhic victory over the global trading system that will leave them rulers of a bankrupt, near-failed state. The CPP can use the opportunity given in Cancun to reinvent a political and economic system upon which it has so long preyed to help Cambodia take its rightful place as a progressive, maturing member of the global economic system. Or it can continue its quarter century of corrupt, violent rule and face the wrath of that betrayed baby-boom generation at the ballot box or on the streets in five years' time.

The clock starts ticking in September.



Mr. Kyne is a staff reporter in the Beijing bureau of Dow Jones Newswires and a former managing editor of the Phnom Penh Post.