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Analysis by Seth Mydans, New York Times

The workers were being held without bail on vague charges after they had advised protesters who rallied recently against the dumping of toxic waste at the edge of town. Ten protesters had also been arrested.

It is a contrast that highlights the inequities hobbling Cambodia's development into a free and democratic state. It also casts a harsh light on the claim that Cambodia might have its own way of dealing with its crimes and traumas.

This is still a land of arbitrary justice, where neither mass killers nor rights workers can be quite sure what treatment to expect.

Despite a liberal democratic constitution, a government of equal branches and a nationwide election five months ago, the key decisions are in the hands of one man: Prime Minister Hun Sen.

When he said Monday that Cambodia should "dig a hole and bury the past," buried it was. And when he said four days later that he favored a trial, a trial seemed to be in the cards again. Cambodia is still waiting for his final decision.

The two rights workers, Kim Sen and Meas Minea, are local coordinators for Licadho, the country's pre-eminent rights group.

Part of their work is to train local officials in basic principles of justice. Their own students are among their jailers.

"For people to trust the justice system," a Western diplomat said, "there needs to be some consistency. And the arrests of the Licadho workers are a stark reminder that there isn't this consistency, that there is a gross disparity between the small and the big in society."

The Khmer Rouge leaders, Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, came in from the cold on Christmas after three decades of revolution that included brutal rule from 1975 to 1978. They were welcomed with embraces from both Hun Sen and the former United Nations Secretary General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who was visiting town to promote the French language but took time out to pay his respects.

Boutros-Ghali praised Hun Sen for his policy of "national reconciliation." He said the mass killings by the Khmer Rouge were the internal affair of a sovereign state, immune from the "interference" of outsiders. He said Cambodians must find their own route to resolving their rights issues.

Not everybody sees it this way. The United Nations itself is investigating evidence and possible procedures to bring Khmer Rouge killers to trial if the Security Council or the Cambodians themselves will agree to move forward.

The democratization process that the United Nations tried to initiate here at the start of the decade, under Boutros-Ghali's leadership, has spawned a cadre of rights workers dedicated to principles of justice that challenge the feudal ways of this politically primitive country.

"National reconciliation should not be at any cost," said Kao Kim Hourn, head of the Cambodian Institute for Cooperation and Peace, a local rights group.

If the two recent defectors and perhaps a dozen high-ranking colleagues are not brought to justice, Cambodia will be bucking a worldwide trend toward accountability.

Tribunals are addressing mass killings in Rwanda and the Balkans. Truth commissions have examined the past in South Africa and Argentina. South Korea has convicted, then pardoned, two former leaders. Japan has been offering grudging apologies for its war crimes. Spain is trying to prosecute the former Chilean dictator, Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Even President Clinton, while visiting Africa, expressed regret about American participation in the slave trade.

Hun Sen has little to fear from a similar process, said Steve Heder, a scholar who is examining records in Phnom Penh for the War Crimes Research Office of the American University Law School. The Prime Minister is in firm control of the nation's politics and security forces.

"This is not an Argentina or a Chile where a military apparatus left over from a criminal regime can threaten stability," Heder said, adding, "There is no solid basis on which to base an assertion that Cambodians do not want a trial."

Heder said his examination of material collected by the Documentation Center of Cambodia, a private local research group, found strong documentary evidence implicating Nuon Chea and "a lot of circumstantial evidence" implicating Khieu Samphan.

The Khmer Rouge kept records. Many reports on interrogations and torture as well as confessions obtained through torture were sent to Nuon Chea, Heder said. And Khieu Samphan's position close to the Khmer Rouge leader, Pol Pot, Heder added, makes it hard to imagine that he was not involved.

At present the two men are embarked on the grand tour that has been afforded previous Khmer Rouge defectors. After returning from the beach town of Sihanoukville on Friday, they and their families traveled today to another tourist spot, Siem Reap, the site of the ancient temples of Angkor.

"I need to relax a bit," Khieu Samphan said, eluding reporters at the beach, "so please forgive me."

He was a walking advertisement for a problem cited by rights workers: impunity.

Rights monitors have been pointing out that no one has been seriously investigated for a more recent series of political killings, including a grenade attack on a March 1997 rally that killed 16 people and wounded more than 100.

The Licadho workers jailed in Sihanoukville were apparently doing what the United Nations intended and what Hun Sen's government has claimed to support: trying to assure that public issues were being dealt with legally and properly. Colleagues say they advised protesters on how to prepare a petition and how to stage a legal protest.

Rights experts said they believed it was the first time that rights workers had been formally charged with a crime related to their work.

"In six or seven years working here on the evolution of human-rights movements," said a foreign rights adviser who spoke on condition of anonymity, "I see this as one of the lowest points yet. I am concerned that this could be the first step in an attempt to break the back of the human-rights movement."