Western media are full of grim and dire predictions for Cambodia these days. But in both Cambodia and the West, a new generation of young Cambodians is determined to give their country a future. PNS commentator Sophal Ear, born in Cambodia and raised in France and the U.S., works in Washington D.C. as a development consultant.

WASHINGTON-- It is fashionable to dismiss my country, Cambodia, as a "basket case" and Cambodians, whether they live in Cambodia or Long Beach, as "too traumatized" to help themselves.

The return of two top Khmer Rouge leaders to Phnom Penh last month triggered international condemnation of their VIP treatment by Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen. His initial call to "dig a hole and bury the past" had the international community screaming for Cambodia to bring the Khmer Rouge criminals to justice, although his behavior towards his erstwhile enemies certainly showed improvement over the years when he himself was a Khmer Rouge commander.

Those depraved Cambodians, the critics could be heard telling each other, they're at it again! The most outraged included the French -- who single handedly financed the "Gendarmerie," which helped Hun Sen keep his grip on the country during his July 1997 coup and for the full year of intimidation that followed before his party was elected. The French were joined by the U.S. State Department, which refused to call the coup -- in which at least 100 opposition members died -- a coup.

This is the kind of thinking that produced the preposterous idea, floated over a year ago, that U.S. military personnel should capture Pol Pot and bring him to an international court to be tried for crimes against humanity. Preposterous not because it could not be done, but because after all these years, the Westerners were suddenly taking this whole business so personally. As it turned out, Pol Pot died, but the thinking is still, "you can't trust the Cambodians, they need to be told what to do."

The title of a recent New York Times article puts it in a western nutshell. "In the Killing Fields, Even the Future Died."

Fatigue about Cambodia is nothing new. People were so fatigued after the Vietnam War that no one lifted a finger when dead bodies started to pile up in those killing fields. But imagine that being said of an America at the nadir of the Civil War, or immediately following, during reconstruction and the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson.

In fact, twenty three years after the fall of the country to the Khmer Rouge on April 17, 1975, Cambodia is by no means a country that cannot help itself.

A small but growing generation of Cambodians is rebuilding the country. Just last month (January) 200 college graduates protested the lack of jobs, amid burning tires and banners. Monsoons arrive, life goes on.

This new generation includes, for instance, the young Cambodians I met in 1996 who were studying in Japan but had returned on regular summer homecomings to distribute notebooks and other supplies to hundreds of school children in Kampong Speu province, one of the poorest rural parts of the country. Their grass-roots development work made more of an impact on that community than the colorful Japanese-printed and financed literacy texts that were turning up at the Central Market, selling for a fraction of their $10 printing cost. In red and on the front cover was printed "Sale Prohibited" in Khmer. The running joke was to compare all development projects to the helicopter money drop-test, randomly scatter money and feel the impact of development.

There are also highly dedicated Cambodian reporters, some of whom have paid for a free press with their lives, Cambodians working in NGOs, and Cambodian technocrats who work long hours every day in unimaginable conditions. In Takeo province, a young woman had started an NGO to combat domestic violence, operating from her home and with only one volunteer staffer, a former film student from Long Beach.

Even in Long Beach, where we are told by an expert that "Cambodians are the worst group in every respect except arrest," there is reason for hope.

There's the young Cambodian woman (fresh off the boat) who will graduate Stanford next spring after hardly a dozen years in America (her brother started at Berkeley last fall). There's the young man entering Columbia Law School, the young woman who makes good on a promise to finish UC-Hastings after a master's at Cornell. The list goes on: Yale, Harvard, MIT. Though still few and far between, these young people represent a future that is far from dead, and their stories should be told alongside the hopeless nightmares and abysmal numbers.

Theirs are the lives that will someday lift Cambodia from a basket case to a bright future that goes beyond the legacy of the Khmer Rouge.