Mercurial king who led Cambodia during years of strife

 Cambodias then king Norodom Sihanouk greets his subjects at the annual crop-planting ceremony outside the royal palace, Phnom Penh, in 2002. Sihanouk died of a heart attack at the age of 89 in Beijing last Monday 

The Irish Times 

Saturday, October 20, 2012  

NORODOM SIHANOUK: NORODOM SIHANOUK, the former Cambodian monarch who has died at the age of 89, was a perpetrator and victim of successive tragedies that overtook his country in the second half of the 20th century.

By turns infuriating and charming, absurd and shrewd, Sihanouk was a fervent nationalist who nevertheless spent much of his life in Beijing – where he died from a heart attack on Monday – and the North Korean capital, Pyongyang.

He made official pronouncements in flowery French prose rather than the Khmer language. Sihanouk claimed to be loved by Cambodians, but was protected by North Korean bodyguards provided by his friend, the late Kim Il-sung.

As he gently disengaged from Cambodia’s day-to-day politics in his last years, handing over the throne to his son Sihamoni in 2004, he became the nation’s “king-father”. Though that was his formal title, he was more commonly referred to as Sâmdech Euv, which translates roughly as “prince dad”.

But in the 1960s and 1970s, when Cambodia faced its greatest traumas, Sihanouk failed to develop a coherent strategic vision for the country and retreated into making amateurish romantic films as his nation was plunged into crisis by the Vietnam war.

His paternalism – he called Cambodians his “children” to the end – fatally inhibited the growth of modern institutions.

Sihanouk was born on October 31st, 1922, and educated at French schools in Phnom Penh and Saigon, unaware that he would become inheritor of a kingdom – by then much diminished – whose origins lay in the 12th-century southeast Asian empire of Angkor.

After King Sisowath Monivong, Sihanouk’s maternal grandfather, died in 1941, France, the colonial power, chose the 18-year-old Sihanouk to succeed him, partly because he was regarded as more malleable than other princes.

Although the ebullient and vain young king revelled in the pleasures of his office – he was a musician, gourmet, womaniser in the royal tradition with at least six wives, a number of concubines and about 30 children – he proved a disappointing puppet.

By 1953 Sihanouk had negotiated independence from France while moving to silence rival Cambodian independence campaigners.

In 1955 he resigned the throne in favour of his father in order to enter politics, becoming prime minister and monopolising power in Phnom Penh. In 1960 he became head of state on his father’s death.

Cambodia was “non-aligned” in the cold war but Sihanouk could not stop his country becoming sucked into the conflict between Vietnamese communists and the US-backed South Vietnamese government. Weapons for the Vietcong were delivered via Cambodia and South Vietnamese forces made cross-border incursions against the guerrillas.

As the economy deteriorated and insecurity spread in the 1960s, Cambodia had its own communist guerrillas – it was Sihanouk who dubbed them the “Khmers Rouges”.

He treated his political opponents with brutality, an unsavoury period now all but forgotten because of the greater horrors perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge.

In 1969, for example, several suspected opponents of Sihanouk’s regime were hurled alive off a cliff and their heads later displayed in the marketplace of Kampot, south of Phnom Penh.

In 1970, Sihanouk was overthrown in a coup by Lon Nol, his prime minister. Sihanouk blamed the US and became obsessed by the urge to avenge the insult and retake power.

He joined forces with the communist rebels he had previously sought to crush – or, to put it another way, the Khmer Rouge leaders exploited him and his royal authority over the peasantry while they defeated Lon Nol and took power in 1975.

Over the next 3½ years, the Pol Pot regime murdered and starved to death an estimated one million Cambodians in an attempt to build an agrarian communist state. Sihanouk became a prisoner in his own palace and several of his relatives were killed.

Although he was released by the 1978 Vietnamese invasion, which toppled the Khmer Rouge, Sihanouk again found himself obliged to work alongside the communists, this time in an attempt to oust the Vietnamese and their Cambodian surrogates.

Eventually the Vietnamese withdrew and the various combatants, cajoled by Sihanouk, signed the Paris peace accords in October 1991.

Sihanouk returned home a month later after 13 years in exile and with characteristic panache was driven to his palace in a convertible Chevrolet flown from Thailand.

The United Nations held elections in May 1993 that brought a coalition government to power. Sihanouk was restored as king, although on this occasion he agreed to be a ceremonial rather than an executive monarch.

But the trappings of democracy failed to calm Cambodia’s turbulent politics. Sihanouk was already sick with cancer and was soon spending more and more time in Beijing and Pyongyang – a reflection of his need for medical attention and his exasperation with the seeming inability of Cambodian politicians, including his son Prince Norodom Ranariddh, to reach a modus vivendi.

Eventually, in 2004, the mercurial king unleashed a final surprise on the people: he abdicated, and his son Sihamoni was appointed his successor.

Serious historians of Cambodia portray him as a vainglorious man unable to accept constructive criticism or build a modern nation-state. But they admit that Cambodia’s troubles were compounded by events in Indochina beyond his control.

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Norodom Sihanouk: born October 31st, 1922; died October 15th, 2012