TBUNG MEANCHEY, Cambodia -- It's a long way from Chhum Ly Hieng's creaking silk loom in a straw-roofed hut deep in the Cambodian jungle to the glitzy home furnishing departments of New York's Fifth Avenue.

It is even longer if you have only one leg courtesy of a Khmer Rouge landmine, have never left your own country and think Saks are something you use to take vegetables to market.

However, now Cambodia has had the green light to join the World Trade Organization, the ex-soldier maimed in years of war against Pol Pot's guerrillas can now contemplate a global future -- albeit on a tiny scale -- for the shimmering fruit of his loom, Reuters reported.

The jury is out on whether WTO membership will really pay off for the war-scarred southeast Asian nation, but its handicraft makers, many of them victims of conflict, look set to gain as Cambodia wakes up to international trade, and vice versa.

The finer points of WTO accession and the global trading system may be lost on 40-year-old Chhum Ly Hieng but, in what remains one of Asia's poorest and most hopeless countries, any outside interest is welcome.

"I am very glad there are people overseas who are buying our products," he said, his shuttle hardly pausing for a second in its steady click-clack across the wooden loom. "There are very few jobs in the provinces -- lots of mines, but no jobs," said fellow amputee-turned-weaver Tom Reun, 35. "Because of this, I can at least look after my family." ----------------Silky Skills--------------

The Khmer Rouge genocide, four years of ultra-Maoist madness which left an estimated 1.7 million dead, destroyed Cambodia but its ancient art forms, some of which date back almost 1,000 years to the famed temples of Angkor, are rising from the ashes.

Silk in particular, for which the country was renowned in French colonial days, has caught the eye of several aid agencies as a rare route out of the mire of poverty.

At the Joom Noon or "Gift of Life" weaving center run by the Washington-based Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, 65 disabled Khmers are churning out a dazzling array of shawls, scarves and cushion covers aimed at Western shoulders and sofas.

Besides two exclusive boutiques in the capital Phnom Penh, some 300km (180 miles) to the south, selling mainly to well-heeled tourists, Joom Noon has toeholds in Singapore, Tokyo and Australia.

Project director Bud Gibbons, a beady-eyed 63-year-old U.S. veteran of the war in neighboring Vietnam, thinks the quality is now good enough to throw off the "aid project" mantle and go global as a fully-fledged business.

In a bid to jump aboard the WTO bandwagon and find the one or two international buyers needed to turn a profit, the language of the boardroom has landed in the jungle.

"By focusing on the marketing rather than the weaving, which we have accomplished already, I think we can find a substantial market for this product in the next 12-18 months that will make us self-supportive," said Gibbons. ---------One-Legged Material Girls, Boys----------

While Cambodian weaving operations can beat those in richer countries hands down on cost, the quality and consistency needed for top-end European or U.S. department stores are always going to be potential stumbling blocks.

A weaving center in such a sheltered and inaccessible area -- the one road from the capital is shattered and the shoulders still littered with landmines -- will never find it easy to match the vagaries of Western tastes.

However, analysts are optimistic that the blend of traditional, rediscovered patterns and techniques coupled with modern designs and colors could go down well with the likes of Saks, Liberty or Conran in New York or London.

The technical obstacles are also not insurmountable -- Joom Noon has long since ditched natural colorants for German-made dyes and a set of electronic scales measuring to 0.01 of a gram to ensure customers get precisely the colors they want.

"Although because of the problems Cambodia has been off the map for about 20 years, fortunately it's not such a long period that people have forgotten the traditional skills," said Virginia Korda, a textile consultant with the International Trade Center. "There are problems with production lines and standardization of the dyeing process in particular but, once these have been ironed out, the prospects are excellent."