By the time the Khmer Rouge launched its brutal assault in 1975, soft-spoken, dimpled Meas was a seasoned fighter. And by the time he quit the organization in the early 1990s, he had climbed through the ranks to become the head of a regiment, and a colonel in the army of Pol Pot, one of the most eccentric and brutal dictators in modern history. Meas was even summoned to Pol Pot’s jungle hideout in 1993, only a few miles from where we are now sitting eating dinner, to hear an address by the revered Brother Number One, about the internationally brokered Paris agreement that ended Cambodia’s decades of war.

Culturally, Cambodians have focused their efforts on reconciliation with former enemies, and there is a widespread fear that a war-crimes trial would disrupt that process. But the horrific past lives on in this country, in piles of skeletons dug up from mass graves and made into shrines and in the stories of the regime’s survivors. And pressure from the United States is mounting, meaning the process of justice might soon be underway.

In just 44 months between April 1975 and January 1979, the Khmer Rouge executed, tortured to death or effectively starved between 1.5 and 2 million Cambodians — nearly 1 in every 4 people — in killing fields across the country. Clocks, radios, televisions, all Western medicines, books, hospitals, stores and schools were banned during the Khmer Rouge genocide years. Teachers, doctors, even classical dancers, were forbidden to practice and thousands of them were executed. Khmer Rouge soldiers smashed thousands of wooden buildings in Cambodia’s gracious old colonial capital of Phnom Penh, to sell the wood to the Vietnamese.

But ask Meas Tung what he did during the genocide of Cambodians and you are not likely to learn much. “I was taught to repair trucks, and guarded a yard where trucks were kept,” he says, watching every word. “Later, I patrolled a big road.”

Like hundreds of former Khmer Rouge soldiers, Meas has not only blended into Cambodia’s new society but has been scrubbed clean of the past. He now heads the agricultural program for the district of Samlot, which runs along Thailand’s border. On this day, his task is to escort two foreign journalists around the area, to show them the land on which thousands of refugees and demobilized soldiers are now living and farming.

More than 25 years after the Khmer Rouge routed Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, and began its mass murder campaign, United Nations and American officials are nearing a deal to try some of those culpable. After more than two years of negotiations, delays and objections, Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen has promised to pass a law within the next month clearing the way for a war-crimes trial. There are hitches, however: Contrary to the original international plan, the trial will take place on Cambodian soil, in Phnom Penh, and involve both Cambodian and foreign prosecutors and judges. Even then, the foreign jurists will have to be approved by Hun Sen’s government. The deal is a slippery slope, one which many human rights groups believe will water down the impact of the trials.

The very mention of Cambodia has for years evoked images of genocide in the minds of Westerners, whose vision of the Khmer Rouge was immortalized in Roland Jaffe’s movie “The Killing Fields.” Then in the 1990s the horrors of Bosnia and Rwanda arrived to match those ghoulish associations. Yet there remains one crucial difference to set Cambodia apart: Both the Balkans and Rwandan wars have resulted in war-crimes tribunals, with Serbs on trial in The Hague and Rwandans in Arusha, Tanzania. Cambodia, by contrast, has yet to try a single official.

Only two Khmer Rouge officials have been arrested: military chief Ta Mok, nicknamed “the butcher,” and Duch, or Kang Kek Ieu, who ran the infamous Tuol Sleng S-21 prison, a torture and death center in Phnom Penh, where about 18,000 people died. Hundreds of other Khmer Rouge officials have slipped comfortably back into society. Duch himself had been working for an international aid organization near the Thai border until journalists spotted him, having recognized his face from the old days. And Pol Pot died suddenly — perhaps by suicide — in April 1998, maddeningly on the verge of being arrested.

Cambodian officials have long balked at putting the nation’s history on trial. Partly, they recoil from the idea of foreigners snooping into their affairs. More importantly, there are real fears that any trial could expose present-day officials, several of whom were active in the Khmer Rouge during the 1970s. Hun Sen himself, now 48, spent years as a Khmer Rouge fighter, even losing an eye during the 1975 invasion of Phnom Penh. And Pol Pot’s own deputy, Ieng Sary, keeps a low profile at home in Phnom Penh. Other key Khmer Rouge leaders live in Pailin, an old stronghold near the Thai border. And in remote areas like the villages of Samlot, where I share dinner with Meas Tung, the district’s agricultural chief, almost everyone owes old allegiances to Pol Pot’s fighters. “We have a saying in Cambodian: ‘When the water clears, you can see the small fish,’” a Phnom Penh journalist tells me. “So, a trial can point to a lot of people.”

It might seem surprising that a veteran Khmer Rouge soldier like Meas would want a trial. He seems to believe the process would finally distinguish the communist ideals of the Khmer Rouge — ideals that seduced many Cambodians — from the horrors that were committed in the name of the cause. He says many of his old comrades “killed their own people,” and for that, should be convicted. But, he says, “Many people around here think differently.”

Despite international pressure, few in Phnom Penh have believed that a trial would ever come to pass. Then came President Clinton’s trip to Vietnam last month, with its promise of American aid and closer diplomatic ties. The visit was downplayed in the jittery Vietnamese press, but the full pomp and ceremony played big on CNN and was watched by officials in Phnom Penh. Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, traveling in Clinton’s Vietnam entourage, seized the moment. He made the quick side trip to the Cambodian capital to meet Hun Sen, and told the prime minister that if he ever wanted to welcome an American president to Phnom Penh, he had to put the Khmer Rouge on trial.

American representatives have set out to show the Cambodian government that they’re serious about justice. The U.S. government has funded the Cambodian Genocide Project at Yale University to investigate Khmer Rouge crimes. “We’ve collected thousands of documents,” a Democratic staffer of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee tells me on the telephone from Washington. “We had to make it clear to the Cambodians that we were not just doing this as an academic exercise,” he says. “There are Khmer Rouge leaders walking around with impunity.”

At stake for Hun Sen is desperately needed foreign aid. Cambodia’s average annual income is less than $300. Outside Phnom Penh, most roads crumble into muddy, rutted passes that have barely seen a dollop of tar for 25 years. It takes nearly four hours to drive a pickup truck over about 30 miles of dirt road between Cambodia’s second city, Battambang, to Samlot, along what used to be the major trade route to Thailand.

Around Phnom Penh, there are few signs of the devastation. The markets are teeming with traders selling fruits, batik textiles, cheap Korean toys, electronics and luggage with wheels. The traffic is thick with Honda motorbikes that buzz around town offering rides anywhere in the capital for 50 cents, along the old French colonial boulevards with wide islands that run along the gracious yellow-and-blue buildings. Most Cambodians are now too young to have any personal memories of the genocide. And astonishingly, there is no mention of it in Cambodian schoolbooks. Human-rights groups are only now raising money to produce children’s books telling them what their parents endured.

But travel Cambodia, and you will still hear countless tales of horror. “My father was a French teacher, so we were sent to a farm to work in the rice paddies,” says my translator, adding that several of his siblings died of starvation after the family was evacuated from their home in Battambang. One of Cambodia’s best known classical dancers, Proeung Chhieng, tells me he survived the genocide partly by hiding for months in the forests and not telling anyone that he had danced in the royal palace in Phnom Penh since he was 8 years old.

Outside the capital, several villages have simply gathered their skulls and bones into small shrines. People used to pay homage to the dead once a year on the date the government had designated “Hatred Day,” the anniversary of the Khmer Rouge’s ban on family meals. The day was officially abandoned a few years ago, but the shrines remain. In Phnom Udong, about an hour’s drive outside Phnom Penh, a glassed-in memorial shows a pile of bones and skulls that stare out at villages in the middle of the marketplace. And alongside a Buddhist temple in a community in Kompong Speu, a wooden shed shelters a small mound of skeletons dug up from mass graves in the village.

Yuok Chhang, 40, who runs Cambodia’s Documentation Center set up by Yale University’s genocide project in 1995, tries to list for me the victims among his own family. “Let’s see, there was one sister and her two children, one brother-in-law, one aunt, four uncles,” he says, and then adds, “You know, it’s easier for me to count those who are alive than all the ones who were killed.” Chhang travels between Phnom Penh and Dallas, to where to his parents emigrated while he was a teenager. Amid the Dallas Cowboys knickknacks in his office, walls of filing cabinets now hold about 600,000 documents, statements and photographs that could be used in war-crimes trials. Sitting in the center’s conference room surrounded by 25-year-old photographs of genocide victims, Chhang says the country is still reeling psychologically from the aftereffects. “We all look fine, we’re wearing nice clothes, but mentally we are still living in the past,” he says.

In fact, Cambodians are still counting the cost of the Khmer Rouge’s destruction. On the wall of a room in the Tuol Sleng prison, which now serves as the country’s genocide museum, there is a handwritten list of what was obliterated: 3,314,768 killed or disappeared; 635,522 buildings destroyed; 1,200 communes, or villages, “completely effaced.”

On the prison walls, thousands of blank faces of Cambodians stare out at the next generation. Photographed by the Khmer Rouge with macabre precision moments before their execution, they are the closest thing to a witness list that prosecutors could use to try to convict Ta Mok, Duch and others. “I wanted to see the real pictures in here, because my parents used to tell me what happened to them,” Sim Kamsan, a 20-year-old computer teacher visiting the museum on a Sunday afternoon, tells me there. To his generation, raised with MTV and direct-dialing to the West from mobile telephones, “it seems impossible that this will ever happen again.”

Perhaps so. But whether those responsible will be convicted and sentenced is another matter.

For days, Russians have waited for each scrap of news, glued to their television sets at home. Taxi drivers kept a close eye on their watches, raising the volume on the dial at the top of each hour, to hear the latest grim details. When the climax came, the bland words offered little relief. “There is no hope of finding survivors in the submarine Kursk,” said a Norwegian statement on Russian television.

With that sentence, the rescue operation was over. Now comes the morbid attempt to extract the bodies from the hull and bring them to the surface, where hundreds of relatives have gathered to grieve their dead and to vent their fury at the government.

Russian officials insist they will have the bodies out within a month, ready for proper burial. Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov said Monday he wanted international help to hoist the submarine out of the water. “Not a single country on its own can handle such an operation,” he said on Russian television.

Certainly, the operation is far beyond the technical abilities and budget of the Russian military, both of which have been exposed as seriously strained, since a massive explosion sank the Kursk.

Even dry, the submarine is a monstrous vessel. At about 500 feet long, it looks like a skyscraper lying prone. With its compartments waterlogged, it could weigh about 24,000 tons, experts said Monday. Beyond that, some fear that budging the submarine from the ocean floor could cause it to rupture or crack, risking a possible leak from the two nuclear reactors that powered it.

Divers on Monday found normal radiation levels both in the water and in the inside hatch they opened. But Norwegian officials say they were wary of sending their divers in to extract bodies from the murky tomb until they do further tests.

Russian military officials have insisted from the start that there were no nuclear weapons aboard the Kursk. And for now, they seem to have dodged another Chernobyl-style disaster.

But the fallout above ground, among Russia’s political leaders, has already begun.

Having just passed his golden 100-day mark, President Vladimir Putin seems to have come to a shattering end of his honeymoon with voters.

Away on summer vacation in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, Putin uttered his first public words about the crisis Wednesday — more than three days after the Kursk sank — appearing on television in a white, open-neck golf shirt, looking suntanned and relaxed. For anguished Russians, the contrast grated.

In fact, the first whiff of anything wrong came only Aug. 14, two days after the sinking, in a small media report that a submarine had run into problems. It was not until Wednesday that officials conceded a full-scale disaster — and only then, it seemed, because Western journalists had turned it into a round-the-clock, made-for-television drama. Now, analysts in Moscow are wondering whether the old-guard military rulers might have even hidden the details from Putin himself.

Indeed, for many Russians, the government’s handling of the disaster has seemed an all-too-familiar throwback to Soviet times, when Moscow’s leaders used obfuscation and denial to downplay disaster, including the Chernobyl nuclear leak. Worst still for many Russians was the government’s refusal to seek or accept help from the West.

Across the street from Moscow’s Gorky Park on Sunday, many Russians were basking in the late-summer sun in a sculpture garden filled with the city’s statues of Josef Stalin and Vladimir Lenin. Lolling on the park benches, many said they sensed the old Communist ghosts suddenly springing back to life, as they watched the submarine disaster unfold.

“Every day we have been waiting for better news, but it seems to me that the government is to blame, since they did not ask for help right away,” said Tatyana, 77, a retired researcher. She began spelling out her last name, and then stopped, too fearful to have it published. “In recent years, our tongues have become untied,” she said. “Now, we are worried that maybe Putin is taking us back to the past, when we didn’t know anything and when our mouths were shut.”

Near a large granite statue of Stalin, Mikhail Pronnin, 56, said he had lit a candle in church that morning and said a prayer for the seamen, even though he was certain they were all dead.

“The military leaders and the government put secrecy above the people. Even now, we don’t have any information,” said Pronnin, who said he had served in the Soviet army during the 1960s at the height of the Cold War, and now worked for the Moscow telephone company. He wondered whether Putin’s silence had been an outcome of his own grief or because he himself found the disaster “hard to digest.”

The Russian press has been far more merciless in its lashing of Putin and the military.

On the front page of Monday’s Moskovski Komsomolets newspaper, the acerbic headline said: “THEY DON’T DROWN.” Below were photographs of Putin, Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev and Russian Navy Commander Vladimir Kuroyedov. The article suggested that perhaps the leaders had deliberately stalled calling for foreign rescue teams to ensure that no sailor would be left to tell the world how the Kursk sank.

For now, officials have no answer to that question.

Russian military brass at first insisted the vessel collided with something, perhaps a NATO submarine. But Western intelligence reports quickly picked up two underwater explosions, suggesting that perhaps an onboard torpedo had misfired.

What has jolted both Westerners and Russians this week are the risks of an overstretched Russian military, operating a large-scale force on a budget of barely $6 billion.

The Kursk, in fact, was one of Russia’s newest submarines and a jewel in the country’s Northern Fleet. Monday’s Wall Street Journal said a recent Russian military report last December estimated that maintenance and repairs for the country’s fleet had dropped to about 10 percent of what was needed.

Down a narrow side street in central Moscow, the anger and grief over the Kursk disaster has endured for days at the Soldiers’ Mothers Committee, a human-rights group established by mothers of Chechnya war veterans.

There, in a smoke-filled room up a dark staircase, no one doubted who was to blame Monday, after Russian officials admitted the entire crew was dead.

“It is very clear that the government doesn’t want to uncover the real reasons for what went wrong,” said Ida Kuklina, a member of the group’s coordinating committee. “The government is estranged from the people. And now, the people are estranged from the government.”

The conflict comes a time when Zimbabweans face a heavy decision about the future of their nation: whether or not to reject the leader who gave them their independence, but who also, many say, has been a party to its degradation.

Reuben Gwatidzo doesn’t look like a man who bears grudges. When I greet him in an elevator downtown, he is wearing a dark suit and silk tie and carrying a briefcase. The vice chairman of this capital’s chamber of commerce, he has just come from a meeting about opening up Zimbabwe’s telecommunications.

But within a few minutes, standing on the landing, we are deep in a discussion about Zimbabwe’s powder-keg politics. That’s when he tells me his grandparents — still alive, and nearly 100 — had taught him, from when he was small, the key tale of the Gwatidzo family: how they lost their land.

Sometime during the 1920′s, they had said, a group of white men, working for the government of the then-British colony of Southern Rhodesia, arrived at the gate of the couple’s farm. They packed all the couple’s belongings and moved them out to a scrap of land that was a lot less fertile. They were barred from returning, and never quite recovered. “They still have very vivid memories” of that day, Gwatidzo says.

In Zimbabwe, land has transformed every life. Acres, not dollars, have long been the real measure of a person’s wealth.

Since the farm invasions began this year, about 12 people — including two white farmers — have been killed. Almost all of the dead were known supporters of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change, which is trying to oust President Robert Mugabe in elections that are to be held sometime before August.

The current violence threatens to topple Zimbabwe into anarchy and economic collapse. Three cabinet ministers flew to London Thursday to press British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook to buy white land to redistribute among millions of landless blacks. It is a hugely expensive plan, but it would not be the first time the British government loaned millions for land repatriation in Zimbabwe. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government is alarmed enough to consider loaning about $57 million, on condition that Mugabe runs a clean election and evicts the invaders. Right now, that seems about as likely as snowfall on this steaming countryside.

Exactly 20 years after Mugabe’s guerrillas finally routed the whites from power, millions of blacks are now unemployed and desperate for money. Added to that, Zimbabwe now has one of the world’s highest AIDS infection rates: about one in four adults, further crippling the economy. Meanwhile, whites — less than 1 percent of Zimbabweans — own at least 40 percent of the productive farmland, and earn almost the entire commercial agricultural revenues.

With incredible cunning, Mugabe has managed to deflect the anger of millions of blacks, conveniently placing it squarely with the tiny minority. But observers say the leader clearly shares the blame for his country’s sad state. Early on in his presidency, Mugabe gave hundreds of farms to close associates and party faithfuls, who knew almost nothing about agriculture. From there, inefficiency, cronyism and simple intransigence has kept the status quo in place.

In all this melee, what’s been drowned out is a sense of how blacks lost their land in the first place.

Through decades of white rule, millions of blacks were stripped of their farmland, mostly without compensation. Now, many of their children and grandchildren earn minimum wages working on the large white farms, while others are eking out precarious livings in the cities. Some, like Gwatidzo, 36, have made it good. But that’s rare.

When I ask an ex-guerrilla near Harare what the violence is all about, he shouts at me: “We went to war for land. What did they think we wanted? A country in the air?” “They” are the whites, not Mugabe’s officials.

Drive in any direction out of Harare, and you quickly see why whites are the target. On either side of the road, corn, soy and tobacco crops stretch on, sometimes for a mile. Cows graze in sumptuous pastures. Swimming pools glitter in the heat.

One estate is big enough for its name to appear in giant white letters on the lush hill behind it. At the entrance to the dirt tracks off the road, neat boards display the owners’ English names. In many places the paint has faded: The owners have lived here for three generations.

Malcolm Norvall, who manages a 300-cow dairy farm outside Harare, tells me his father was 20 when he moved up from South Africa. Norvall’s father bought a chunk of farming land during the 1920′s (right around the time that Reuben Gwatidzo’s grandparents were thrown off their farm). That land was owned by the concession set up by colonial founder Cecil Rhodes. But Norvall’s payment was a forgettable token, since white settlement, not money, was the aim of the company.

“My dad knew nothing about farming, but he got a few cows and began,” says Malcolm Norvall, 53. He built a thriving business. Eventually, Malcolm and his two brothers took it over, and expanded further, before selling it after Zimbabwe’s independence in 1982.

Drive further down the road from the Norvall land and you reach Porter Farm, named for the white family who have long since cleared out. It is now state-owned land, and the site of the country’s largest shantytown.

How Robson Machauda and 7,000 other blacks came to live here with no electricity or running water is a story that demonstrates the complexity of the current conflict. When Queen Elizabeth II came to visit Zimbabwe in 1991, Mugabe ordered a cleanup of the city, which by that stage had become a public-relations disaster. And so hundreds of shanties were dismantled, their residents trucked out of town to a vacant plot of land, miles from any source of employment.

“I just sell some bags of meal to survive here,” says Robson, 30, who found himself unable to move back to Harare. He has married and had two children in the squatter camp, and doubts he will ever be able to leave. “Even if there were land for us, we have no money to buy it,” he says.

Mugabe’s supporters in Porter Farm have been busily organizing invasions of the sprawling white estates which surround the squatter camp. Matthew Chadambuka, 54, runs the local branch of Mugabe’s ZANU-PF party, and like Robson, was dumped at Porter Farm the week before the Queen arrived nine years ago. Having finally given up waiting for land, he has grouped together people from the camp to occupy chunks of farm land nearby.

Who should pay the farmers for their land, I ask? “The government has no money to buy farms,” says Chadambuka. And anyway, why should they? “The land was grabbed from us free of charge in the first place.”

Those of us who were born and raised in Africa will never forget the day exactly 20 years ago, when Mugabe’s guerrillas won their independence, and dismantled 90 years of white rule. The euphoria was dizzying. Not only had the Zimbabwean battle been grueling, its end also foretold the inevitable demise of white rule next door, in South Africa.

It took another 14 years for Nelson Mandela to come to power. But the path to that moment began in 1980, here on the streets of Harare.

Twenty years later, land — the promise for which thousands of black Zimbabweans died fighting — is still unfulfilled. Mugabe has resettled about 70,000 families, a tiny fraction of those whose land was seized, and well short of his own target of distributing land to 162,000 families by 1985.

Down South, there are growing anxieties in South Africa, whose president Thabo Mbeki flew to Zimbabwe on Easter weekend to try defend Mugabe’s actions to a baffled world press.

Indeed, Mbeki faces the prospect that his own voters might finally invade the plush white farmlands of South Africa. Of the millions of blacks who lost land under apartheid, only 13,500 families have so far received restitution from South Africa’s land court.

Amazingly, only one copycat invasion has taken place in South Africa since February. But if a similar revolt began in a country immensely more powerful and better-armed than Zimbabwe, the entire region could catapult into chaos.

In both countries, history has entangled blacks and whites in a battle over their future.

In Porter Farm, Chadambuka says they have no intention of leaving the white farms, despite a court order for them to evict, and despite Robin Cook’s demand in London on Thursday that Mugabe force them off the farms before Britain lends Zimbabwe money to buy land for its people.

“We’ll wait for the whites to finish harvesting their crops, and then we’ll begin tilling the land,” says Chadambuka. Last week, he began handing out parcels of land on the white farms to his group of invaders.

When I visited Malcolm Norvell last week, he had just watched the squatters, next to his milking shed, as they began to stake out bits of land on the farm for themselves. His brothers have left for South Africa. His daughter has emigrated to Texas.

But Norvell, like most whites, says he’s not going anywhere. He fought Mugabe’s guerrillas for 12 years before independence, and despite the fact that his side lost, he says: “This is my country. I have nowhere to go.”

“Some parents sat in trees for days,” says Alda Macuacua, a Roman Catholic nun from Xai-Xai, the capital of the stricken Gaza Province. “They might have fallen down from hunger.” Last week, Macuacua made it to this village to help. Since then, she has found 58 children wandering alone in the camp, having lost their parents in the frantic scramble to safety.

In the devastated flood areas of southern Mozambique, there are countless such tales of heartbreak and loss. From the helicopters crisscrossing the huge terrain, one can see the destruction stretching in all directions. Tiny groups of cows stand dazed and marooned on tiny patches of mud, unable to reach any grazing land. Fields of crops have turned into lakes, wiped out just weeks before the late-summer harvest. The grids of town maps have vanished. From the air, only the tips of electric poles and the red roof tiles offer clues to what lies underneath. There are bridges whose spans have disappeared underwater, and roads and rail lines that have been chopped in pieces.

Until two weeks ago, Cheaquelane was a thriving community, linked by a main national road to the capital, Maputo, 100 miles south. Now, it is an island surrounded by water, the road having been cut in four. The village has become the country’s biggest relief center, most of its victims having come from flood-soaked Chokwe, about 30 miles east. Tens of thousands of people have camped on open ground here for a week, having trudged for miles through shoulder-high water and mud to find the nearest dry land.

In Chokwe, where about 15,000 people normally live, there hasn’t been a drop of clean water to drink or bathe in since Feb. 26, when the pounding floodwaters came roaring through the Limpopo River Valley, “sounding like a train coming,” as one local man put it. Repairing the shattered water pumps would be useless, since the electricity to run them has likewise collapsed. Instead, the few hundred people remaining in the town are drinking increasingly contaminated floodwater, some of it mixed with chlorine in an attempt to kill the germs.

When I visited Chokwe’s Catholic mission hospital on Monday, flood survivors looking for help had jammed the dark hall. The sole nurse on duty, Gloria Rivez, a Spanish volunteer for Doctors Without Borders, had arrived just that morning.

First, Rivez organized a group to scour the town and pick up the corpses that began to surface as the floodwaters receded. A group of men collected six bodies, removing them to the back of a pickup truck. Then, she dispatched others to try to scrub the mud off the infirmary’s supplies, in a vain effort to save its small stock of bandages and antibiotics. “We have to prepare ourselves for people coming back to the town in a week or so,” she said. “At the moment, people know there’s no food or water in town.”

Cyclones and floods are a regular event in Mozambique. But the staggering damage of the latest one caught both the government and aid organizations off-guard. Pounding rains began early in February. Then, on Feb. 22, the cyclone Eline hit Zimbabwe and South Africa. It burst the banks of the giant Limpopo River, the artery that links those two countries to the Indian Ocean, through the vast Limpopo Valley in Mozambique.

Within days, Mozambique’s valley communities were drowning in floodwater. Neither aid workers nor the government has an accurate tally of the death and destruction. Aid workers think about 350 people have died, and that about 600,000 people have lost crops and animals. About 250,000 people are now being fed with donations from the United Nations’ World Food Program.

The disaster has become an international showcase for relief. For weeks after the floods began, a small group of South African helicopter pilots flew rescue missions over the south. And Maputo’s airport, usually a tiny operation with a one-room traffic control department, has been transformed into an international staging post. Tents and hangars serve as strategy rooms for at least six military forces.

On Tuesday morning, the U.S. Air Force finally rolled into town, in the first of five huge C-130 Hercules cargo planes. But it had been beaten to the relief operation by Spanish, German, French, British and even Libyan military forces, which have sent two cargo planes to offload food and medicine. Maj. Gen. Joe Wehrle, task force commander, described the U.S. operation as “large”: By week’s end, there will be more than 500 American military personnel in the region.

“I don’t remember any operation that has been so dependent on helicopters,” says Brenda Barton, a spokeswoman for the World Food Program who has worked in African disasters for years. “It’s very, very costly and gives very little bang for the buck.”

In fact, no one has yet tried to tally the cost of this giant operation. And while many aid workers have done so privately, no one has officially computed the cost against the relatively low loss of life — compared, for example, with the average Bangladeshi monsoon that kills thousands of people.

Privately, aid workers admit that the huge response is partly a factor of Mozambique’s welcoming features. Maputo, a port city with stunning white beaches, a palm-lined seafront and excellent prawns and lobsters, is a 45-minute flight from Johannesburg, South Africa, and for decades was a beach playground for South Africans.

Most Mozambicans are crushingly poor — the average household income is about $200 — and the country faces major malaria and AIDS epidemics. About 1.8 million people are infected with HIV, according to the United Nations.

The country of 17 million has become a darling of Western governments. Since signing a peace treaty with the South African-funded Renamo guerrillas in 1992, it has never returned to battle. After dismantling a bungled socialist system, essentially under orders from international financial institutions, Mozambique now has one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. Its average annual growth rate was about 10 percent between 1996 and 1998. “The country will do just fine,” says Sherri Archondo, deputy resident representative for the World Bank in Mozambique.

Millions of rural farmers have seen none of the boom, however; even before the floods they were struggling to survive.

Ironically, the current disaster may turn out to be a blessing for the average person. A casual glance at the congested tarmac at Maputo Airport reveals that many Mozambicans may actually get some benefits from the calamity. Helicopters shuttling into the interior are stocking rural warehouses with sacks of donated grain and remote clinics with boxes of medicines.

“A lot of stuff has come into the country,” says Brian MacMahon, an executive of Goal, an Irish relief organization that has run projects in Mozambique for more than a decade. “If anything, it’s focused attention on this place. It looks like many organizations will follow the emergency with a rebuilding program.”

“They” are the Council of Music, a unique creation
of the 21-year-old Islamic Revolution, which
requires written approval before any bar of music
is played in public anywhere in Iran. Along with
the Council of Poetry, which vets every word of
every lyric written, it is housed within the
Ministry of Islamic Guidance and Culture. That
department is charged with keeping Iran a pure
Islamic country, by enforcing a mass of rules and
regulations: which books people can read, what
music they can hear, which foreigners they can talk
to.

Iran, to be sure, is changing dramatically.
Reformists won a landslide victory in Friday’s
parliamentary elections, thanks largely to the
millions of Iranians who are far too young to
remember the 1979 Islamic revolution.

By Wednesday, with two-thirds of the votes counted,
the reformists had won more than 70 percent of the
votes, capturing at least 141 of the 195 seats
decided so far. Reports show reformers are leading
for the 30 outstanding Tehran seats. The remaining
65 seats will be decided in run-offs for the
290-member parliament, or Majlis.

The immensely popular liberal President Muhammad
Khatami, who swept into power nearly three years
ago, promised to liberalize Iran and ease control
by its hard-core Muslim clerics. The landslide
victory this week was won by those who backed
Khatami’s reforms. Even veteran conservatives were
kicked out — in the traditionally conservative
city of Mashhad not a single incumbent kept his
seat.

About 60 percent of Iran is younger than 25. And
while most have a deep attachment to Islam, the
stunning vote suggests that they have had enough
of the intense scrutiny and control over their
lives.

In the days since the election, the new
representatives have begun sketching out in
interviews their vision for a new Iran. Among their
priorities in the new parliament, they say, is to
give youth some freedom to live life the way they
want.

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For years, young Iranians have chipped away at the
prying forces of the government, so that today,
there are two pop cultures in the country:
official and real.

Officially, Western movies are forbidden. But
countless Iranians use a bootleg video-rental
service, a huge network. Someone appears at the
front door each week with a suitcase containing
tapes of the latest Hollywood releases. Iranians
in the United States shoot them from their theater
seats using small hand-held cameras, then ship the
tapes to Tehran, where they are copied in bulk.
The sound is muffled and the picture jerks wildly
in parts, according to several people I
interviewed.

But being current is much more important than
quality in a country where the government has spent
years trying to seal people off from the
corrupting West. “I bet we saw ‘Titanic’ before
you did,” one Tehran student boasted to me. “We see
movies the week they come out.”

Officially, Western rock music is banned, and
everyone arriving in Iran is required to present
CDs and tapes for inspection. In reality, countless
CDs slip through, by mail or by hand, and are
instantly copied.

At the hugely popular Iranian concerts held in the
United States and Dubai every March to celebrate
the Persian new year, performances by forbidden
imigri singers are also taped. Within three days,
the tapes are blasting from stereos and
televisions in living rooms around Tehran,
according to those I interviewed.

But the youth who helped oust scores of
conservatives this week ought to hear Bahraini’s
tale of trying to produce a new rock album. It is a
tale that demonstrates the religious bureaucracy
governing culture is still a force to be reckoned
with.

More than four months ago, Bahraini made a master
recording of his latest find: a group of friends
who had been jamming together in their Tehran home,
with a guitar, synthesizer, saxophone and drum set.
They had managed to create some fine rock songs,
shot through with traditional Persian rhythms and
Farsi-language harmonies. It was strikingly
different from what was being played in Tehran.

Bahraini snapped up their tape for 8 million Rials
– about $1,000. It was great money for an obscure
band that had played only a couple of concerts in
the city’s government cultural centers. Bahraini,
whose Tannin Sote Records produces “new wave and
new age” music, has made a name over the past few
years for spotting big talent early on.

Then began the struggle. Following the law,
Bahraini typed out all the lyrics and made a
cassette tape of their music. He dropped the
material off at the offices of the Council of
Music and the Council of Poetry, and waited weeks
for a response. The music council finally sent
word: The offending instrument was the saxophone,
whose sensual riffs sounded unsettlingly
provocative. “They said it was the Western style
of playing,” said Bahraini, who spoke through an
interpreter.

Bahraini returned to the group, which re-recorded
some parts. He took the tape back to the council.
The saxophone had been tamed. But that only drew
fresh attention to the other instruments. “Then
they wanted us to change the electric guitar,”
Bahraini said.

The Council of Poetry was no easier. Bahraini
remembers the moment he first played the group’s
rock songs to them. “The members of the council
were shocked,” he says. “The style was shocking.
It was totally different to what was on the
market.”

Bahraini says he greatly respects the music council
members, whom he describes as a group of skilled
players with a sophisticated grasp of their field.
The twin poetry and music councils are headed by
the creator of Iran’s national anthem.

But music is tricky to categorize. So, the council
considers two main questions when trying to decide
whether a song will undermine the Islamic
Republic, says a council official, sitting in his
office. “First, any music that’s related to the
style of the previous regime, when the Shah was in
power — the style before the revolution — is
forbidden,” he says. That would rule out much of
the music played by Iranians living in the United
States. But the second factor is far more
important, he says: “If the music makes you want
to jump up and dance, it is not acceptable. Even if
they are not singing words, if the meaning of the
music itself is to make you jump and dance, it
cannot be approved.”

At 28, Shahkar Binesh Bajooh finds it hard to
resist jumping and dancing. He is the drummer in
the band Bahraini is trying to produce. Performing
publicly, he says, has become a tense experience.
“We cannot move our bodies to the music. And this
music is hard to stand still with.” In addition,
he says he dare not wear anything other than a suit
when he is on stage. “I just don’t want to risk
trouble.” When I ask whether people in the
audience can dance or bop around in their seats, he
looks at me, confused, and then busts out
laughing. “No, of course not!”

Indeed, just finding a performance venue can be
daunting. First bands have to play a tape of their
planned concert for the managers of each venue they
apply to perform in.

“If one center agrees to let you perform, then the
center has to send a letter to the Ministry of
Islamic Guidance letting them know,” says Binesh
Bajooh, a reed-thin man in dungarees. Next, the
musicians take a cassette to the ministry “and
submit a photograph of every band member. We also
have to submit all the words to the Council of
Poetry. Then we wait for their permission.”

The government’s decision can take weeks — or
days. “It’s totally unpredictable,” says Binesh
Bajooh. Approval sometimes comes a few days before
the performance date, making it impossible to
advertise the concert. Two years ago, the staff at
one venue canceled Binesh Bajooh’s three-night gig
after one performance, fearing trouble from
conservatives. “We had already sold tickets for
the other nights, and we’d rented a piano,” he
says. “It was a big headache.”

But life in Iran is changing. And young artists
like Binesh Bajooh are beginning to sense the
shift. No longer do musicians worry about some of
the audience getting arrested by police on their
way home for holding hands in the street or for
wearing their hair too long. “You don’t see these
things so much any more,” he says. No longer does
it take several weeks to get approval for
concerts. The process is gently accelerating in
some parts of the system, he says. “Everything has
become much better since Khatami.”

Ahmad Bourghani agrees. He is one of the key
members of the reformist Iran Islamic
Participation Front, which led last week’s winning
coalition. The party is headed by the president’s
younger brother, Muhammad Reza Khatami. “Before,”
Bourghani said, “we were insisting on getting
Islamic approval for everything. But now, it’s
more based on thinking about whether or not it is
against Islam.”

Speaking in the makeshift campaign quarters set up
by the party in a basement restaurant, Bourghani
said the new parliament would push for a hands-off
approach to youth culture. Jobs and inflation are
more important issues for many voters, but freedom
is not far behind, he says. “The most important of
all the reforms are those for the youth,” he said.
“It is the youth who made these elections.”

That does not mean the Islamic revolution is over.
Far from it. Like every winning candidate,
Bourghani says they dare not tread on voters’
Islamic sensitivities. “Any government has to
consider those beliefs or it will collapse,” he
says. And so, women will probably continue to wear
head scarves, and open touching between men and
women will not be welcomed.

The new parliament still faces possible roadblocks.
The powerful Guardian Council, a 12-member
conservative body appointed by the Iran’s clerical
leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has the power to
veto its reforms. And there is always a chance
that conservatives could take on the fight
themselves, if the Ayatollah’s representatives do
not.

But if the new parliament gets its way, unmarried
couples might no longer be stopped at roadside
checkpoints and arrested, as they have been for
years. And rock musicians might be free to play
where they like.

Bahraini is still waiting for approval to bring
Binesh Bajooh’s band to the market. “I’m waiting
for the next parliament. This is going to make a
big difference.”