 by Dr. Jeffrey Lant. Author's program note. When the Abbe Sieyes, one of the first three consuls of the new French government of 1799 was asked what he did during the Terror, he replied "I survived." Everyone who had done the same would have understood at once just how signal an achievement that was. It seems a particularly apt comment to apply to King Norodom Sihanouk... who lived to a venerable age which so many times looked unlikely, even impossible. It may well have been his most significant achievement. You may judge for yourself. Geography is destiny. To begin this article, go to any search engine and print out a map of Cambodia and its contiguous neighbors, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam. Then cast your eye North, to China, which monitored and influenced his every move his entire life. I suspect His Majesty knew every boundary, highway, minor road, river, city and town. He was no scholar, but on this subject I imagine he excelled. Much of what he could do, much of what he could not do was played out on the maps of Southeast Asia; his dreams, his fears, his rationales for so many shifts, turns, lies, deceptions, convolutions, "irrational" decisions made, reversed, made again, reversed again and again. You will never understand this man and his decisions, which so often infuriated and exasperated so many uncomprehending statesmen and diplomats, without understanding the geography of the place. I am writing this article with such a map at my fingertips. You should do the same. To achieve his goals of staying alive, keeping Cambodia independent and autonomous, and its population safe, he had to master every nuance of these maps and his options... options which changed as the goals of his contiguous neighbors (and their near and far-away allies) shifted... and above all whenever the shadow of great China crossed his path... as it seemed constantly to do. Born in the purple October 31, 1922. Cambodia at the time of King Sihanouk's birth was part of French Indochina, a protectorate since 1863. The royal dynasty reigned; the French ruled everything including the dynasty. To make this work as efficient and thorough as possible, they wanted young, naive, powerless princes at the helm. Shy 18-year-old Prince Sihanouk seemed tailor-made and so in 1941 French colonial authorities raised him to be king. No one, certainly no Frenchman, took this adolescent monarch seriously; he had wept after all when elevated. They wanted "a little lamb", Sihanouk said later. They got a tiger. The man had been misjudged and misunderstood from the beginning; that never changed. Everything else did, including the French Protectorate over Indochine. The beginning of the end of the French Colonial Empire. The breathtaking 1940 German invasion of France and the French capitulation (June, 1940) gave King Sihanouk the chance he needed to advance Cambodian independence. He worked with the new conquerors, the Japanese, as he had worked with the previous conquerors, the French. On March 9, 1945, the Japanese still in charge, King Sihanouk proclaimed an independent Kingdom of Kampuchea. The Japanese soon left; the French were prostrate. The King had had a very good war, despite General Charles de Gaulle's insistence that the ancien regime be resurrected. He might so desire, but he could not dictate; a lesson he found hard to learn, then or ever. In due course, October, 1953, Sihanouk declared independence. The "little lamb" had outmaneuvered the Cross of Lorraine himself. The King was now as grand as the kingdom proclaimed itself to be... and the Golden Age of his reign and his nation were at hand, a graceful time revered by every subject and remembered with joy, gratitude and bittersweet nostalgia. If only things had so remained... if only. But now one word hung over Cambodia, its king, its gentle people and their life of beauty, serenity, grace and tranquility. That word was Vietnam and in this single word there was an unimaginable horror and woes beyond measure. No one knew this better than the liberator King of Cambodia, at the very center of so much that went so wrong for so many, including himself. Saving his house from the inferno next door. Before continuing you must remember this man's objectives -- to save himself, to preserve his dynasty, to ensure the nation's freedom and self-rule, and to keep his adoring people safe from the collateral damage inflicted on them by bigger, richer, careless nations. It was not merely a tall order; it was the devil's own conundrum. And he could not avoid action or, in the way of so many academics, avoid making crucial decisions altogether; no, he had to decide, he had to act, he had to row his tiny boat and its 5 million vulnerable inhabitants through the growing maelstrom that emanated from and engulfed his proximate neighbor Vietnam. For 17 years, he kept his people out of the ever-growing civil conflict destroying his much larger neighbor. This is the key fact by which he should be judged, not the fact that he employed every single stratagem, tactic, ruse, insinuation, prevarication or deception he had to. He was a king, charged by heaven with the care of his people, whom he called and considered his "children". God would understand. As a result, Sihanouk became the very personification of the oldest Western stereotype, the Wily Oriental Gentleman (WOG). This and other far cruder characterizations and epithets permeated the CIA's "top secret" (1964) report "Prince Sihanouk and the New Order in Southeast Asia" by John W. Taylor, the word "patriot" seems hardly to have occurred to his detractors. And so as the fire consumed Vietnam one killing field at a time, King Sihanouk perfected his mastery of the legerdemain that kept his most vulnerable realm as secure as a world of insecurity would allow. Item: He became the darling of the world's left-leaning non-aligned nations while discouraging the growth of Cambodia's left-wing parties. Item: After the Vietnam war broke out again in 1961, he secretly allied with North Vietnam and began allowing Viet Cong troops to use Cambodia as a military base. At the same time he tacitly approved limited US bombing runs on Cambodian soil. Item: But you get the picture. His Majesty would do what His Majesty needed to do... and he did it until it no longer pleased all the people all the time, which had always been His Majesty's special, impossible assignment. In March, 1970 the United States tacitly approved a CIA coup that removed Sihanouk, turned the nation over to Lon Nol, a former military adviser who gave the United States what it wanted: a friendly regime that turned neutralist Cambodia into an American base, corrupt, propped up by lavish US aid. The golden days of Sihanouk's Cambodia were done and truly over. War, genocide, an impatient, impotent ex-monarch watches. Now the great Cambodian tragedy began; Lon Nol tethered to US interests, Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge Communists infiltrating, destabilizing from the left. Sihanouk, in exile in Beijing, condemned Lon Nol and backed the Khmer Rouge which in 1975 imprisoned him in his palace thereby effectively silencing the Cambodian people's best friend and "father". The genocide of Pol Pot's regime, responsible for over 1.7 million brutal murders, starvations, and exterminations as it tried to convert the entire nation into an agrarian collective, showed just how good the "good old days" had been. And so he watched from afar as the nation he had built was destroyed; the people he loved were killed in their tens and hundreds of thousands and the United States condemned him for his unaccountable advocacy of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. A realist to his royal fingertips, the ex-monarch knew he must explain himself on this matter, or languish on the sidelines forever, anathema to the Great Republic and its "do as I say, not as I do" approach to international relations. "War and Hope," my dinner with King Sihanouk, my ticklish assignment. The result was Sihanouk's book "War and Hope: The Case for Cambodia" (Pantheon Books, 1980), a ringing denunciation of the Khmer Rouge and its spectrum of brutalities, a denunciation he took to Harvard and its Center for International Affairs; where in those days I was a marketing, public relations and development consultant to Professor Samuel Huntington. As such I was invited to his lavish black-tie dinner in honor of the man called "Former Chief of State" and his Samuel L. and Elizabeth Jodidi Lecture. Before that dinner, Professor Huntington handed me the evening's hot potato: on the pressing need to ensure the Prince's traveling concubine did not attend the festivities in honor of her aging but agile Lothario. "Girls, girls, girls"... but not at Harvard! Sihanouk, like all the kings of Cambodia, was a sybarite, a libertine, a frequent, frequently indiscriminate, lover and prodigious producer of princely children (at least 14), a real life character like Mrs. Anna Leonowens found in Bangkok in 1862. The CIA made much of his concupiscence; he enjoyed his droit de seigneur. In any event, it helped pass his gilded exile. But whatever was acceptable elsewhere, such behavior did not suit Fair Harvard, at least the residual Puritans at the Center for International Affairs (now called the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs). They wanted no part of his current traveling companion. And because I was a hired consultant I was told to get the lady gone. I can see her to this day and even smell her intoxicating Rue de la Paix scent. She was lovely in the Cambodian manner, young, lavishly dressed, a doll. She disdained me... and no wonder. Had it been me alone, I would have invited her, but I was merely following orders. And so while she filed her nails and cast her eyes down, I stumbled through the message and her contempt. She knew my discomfort and dragged it out. I felt like a worm, for all that they paid me well. She was not in attendance that evening. But King Sihanouk was, to deliver his "mea culpa, mea maxima culpa" on the Khmer Rouge, toppled in 1979 but not forgotten or forgiven in Washington, D.C.. When I was presented, I murmured the expected compliments which he, the consummate man of the world, reciprocated without a moment's thought. It was what he'd been doing for a lifetime, saying the expected, while doing what needed to be done. But what was clear was that he was in Cambridge, at Harvard, because he wanted to return to Kampuchea and if exchanging small talk with someone like me, if giving up his play fellow for a time were required, he would do it all, and more. For Cambodia was his real love, his one and only love, and he missed her to distraction. And so after Pol Pot fell; after the Vietnamese were expelled he got his fervent wish, to be reunited with the beloved. Now this man, this king, this tiger once thought to be a little lamb, this lover of women and great patriot, this evasive man, ambiguous man, deceptive man for whom mere truth was a luxury he could hardly ever afford is dead. We shall never see his like again in our time. Go then to any search engine. Find "Nokor Reach", the national anthem of the Kingdom of Cambodia... "Heaven save the king/ Give him happiness and glory/... rule the Khmer Land and/ make it high and filled with honor", as in his way he did. |
