 |
 |
|
Stephen Shaver/Agence France-Presse
Norodom Sihanouk was crowned king in 1941 and held on to some form of power for 60 years.
 |
|
|
Associated Press
Mr. Sihanouk, left, marking the 15th anniversary of National Independence, in Phnom Penh on Nov. 9, 1968.
By ELIZABETH BECKER and SETH MYDANS
The New York Times
Published: October 14, 2012
Published: October 14, 2012
Norodom Sihanouk,
the charismatic Cambodian leader whose remarkable skills of political
adaptation personified for the world the tiny, troubled kingdom where he
was a towering figure through six decades, died early Monday in
Beijing. He was 89.
Related
-
IHT Rendezvous: The Bloodied Legacy of Cambodia's Chameleon King (October 15, 2012)
The death was announced by Deputy Prime Minister Nhiek Bunchhay, quoted
by news services. The former king had been dogged by ill health for
years and regularly traveled to China for treatment.
King Sihanouk was crowned in 1941, when Franklin D. Roosevelt was
president, and held on to some form of power for the next 60-plus years.
He served as monarch, prime minister, figurehead of the Communist
revolution, leader in exile, and once again as monarch until he
abdicated in 2004. He handed the crown to one of his sons, Norodom
Sihamoni, after which he was known as the retired king, or the
king-father.
He survived colonial wars, the Khmer Rouge and the intrigues of the cold
war, but his last years were marked by expressions of melancholy, and
he complained often about the poverty and abuses of what he called “my
poor nation.”
Alternately charming and ruthless, he dazzled world leaders with his
political wit and, in the process, raised the stature of his small
Southeast Asian nation. He won independence for Cambodia
from the French colonial rulers in 1953, using diplomacy and repression
to outmaneuver his domestic rivals but without resorting to war, as his
neighbors in Vietnam had done.
He put his nation on a modern footing in the 1960s, especially
bolstering the education system, but his Buddhist socialist agenda did
poorly and produced economic stagnation.
When the Vietnam War threatened to engulf the region, he tried to carve
out a neutral role for Cambodia, siding neither with the Communists nor
the United States. But when the Vietnamese Communists began using the
port of Sihanoukville and Cambodia’s eastern border to ship military
supplies on what was known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail, he took steps to
repair relations with the United States. He turned a blind eye when the
Nixon administration undertook a secret bombing campaign in 1969 against
the border area of Cambodia. But this only further unsettled his
country and led to a coup that ousted him the next year.
Convinced that the United States had been behind the overthrow, King
Sihanouk allied himself with the Khmer Rouge at the urging of his
Chinese patrons, giving the Cambodian Communists his prestige and
enormous popularity. Their victory in 1975 brought the ruthless Pol Pot
to power, with King Sihanouk serving, for the first year, as the
figurehead president until he was placed under house arrest and fell
into a deep depression. Over the next four years, the Khmer Rouge regime
led to the death of 1.7 million people and nearly destroyed the
country.
Criticized throughout his life for these dramatic shifts in allegiances,
King Sihanouk said he followed only one course in politics: “the
defense of the independence, the territorial integrity and the dignity
of my country and my people.”
In fact, he skillfully manipulated the great powers, usually with the
support of China, to ensure his survival as well as his country’s
independence. His worst nightmare, he said in an interview, was to be
pushed out of his country’s political life into a quiet retirement, like
Vietnam’s last emperor, Bao Dai, who died in obscurity in Paris in
1997.
Instead, King Sihanouk returned in 1993 as monarch and head of state
after an accord brokered by the United Nations ended nearly 14 years of
war in Cambodia.
Even in his darkest moments, the king never lost his flair for
flamboyance or his taste for the finer things. As a young ruler and the
scion of one of Asia’s oldest royal houses, he gained a well-deserved
reputation as a playboy, a gourmand and an amateur filmmaker.
In his years in exile with his wife, Queen Monique, he kept his
Cambodian movement alive by lavishly entertaining diplomats and foreign
officials with Champagne breakfasts and elaborate French meals.
Denied any active role in government, he contented himself with the
ceremonial position of king, still revered by many peasants.
Occasionally he interfered in politics. He undermined Prince Norodom
Ranariddh, another son, by forcing him to accept a position as co-prime
minister after winning the first postwar democratic election in 1993.
Prince Ranariddh was ousted from that position in a coup by the other
co-prime minister, Hun Sen, who became the country’s dominant power
during King Sihanouk’s final years.
Norodom Sihanouk was born in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, on Oct.
31, 1922. A prince of the Norodom branch of the royal family, he was
never considered a serious candidate to gain the throne. Instead, he was
seen as a sensitive, if lonely, prince with a serious gift for music
and, later, a passion for film.
He received a first-rate French education, initially at a primary school
in Phnom Penh and then at the Lycee Chasseloup-Laubat in Saigon, the
best in colonial Indochina. He was only 18 when King Monivong died in
1941 and the French colonial powers tapped him as the unlikely
successor.
France had surrendered to Nazi Germany and was under Vichy control,
worried that it would also lose its Indochinese colonies to Japan. The
prince seemed the most malleable candidate, the one who would obey the
dictates of French colonial officials.
For the first three years, King Sihanouk, a true Francophile, met all their expectations. As World War II
engulfed Asia, he was a loyal partner of the French colonial
administrators, who collaborated with Japan and hoped to fend off a
nascent Cambodian independence movement.
In those early years, King Sihanouk seemed uninterested in government.
He filled his days pursuing women and, in the tradition of his
forebears, had several consorts who eventually bore him at least 13
children.
But in March 1945, as they were losing the war, the Japanese sought to
oust the French in Cambodia. King Sihanouk stepped forward on the side
of Japan and declared Cambodia the new independent state of Kampuchea.
With Japan’s defeat, King Sihanouk welcomed back the French, largely
ignoring the growing number of Cambodians who thought their country
should remain independent.
By his own account, the king did not pick up the banner of independence
again until 1951, using it to fend off challenges from democratic and
Communist movements demanding an end to French colonialism.
Taking advantage of the increasing French weakness from Communist
victories in neighboring Vietnam, King Sihanouk persuaded the French to
make Cambodia independent in November 1953 in advance of the 1954 Geneva
peace conference that led to a divided Vietnam.
Then in a cunning move, King Sihanouk announced he would give up the
throne to run in his country’s first independent elections. Through a
combination of repression, rigging and reliance on the votes of peasants
who still considered him a god-king, his party swept the elections, and
he set about creating Cambodia anew.
His brand of politics evolved into a one-party rule with some dissidents
and rival parties pulled into his umbrella political party, the
People’s Socialist Community. The towers of Angkor decorated the
country’s new flag, one of the many ways that King Sihanouk used the
massive temple complex at Angkor as a visible reminder that Cambodia was
once the premier state and culture of the region.
He maintained strong ties to France, hiring French experts to help run
his government and French teachers for his schools. In Phnom Penh, he
nurtured a cafe society of intellectuals while he left the countryside
in what he considered a more or less bucolic state but that was, in
fact, a backward region of grinding poverty.
In contrast to its neighbors — Vietnam to the east, with its war, and
Thailand to the west, with its disfiguring modern development and
militarism — Cambodia appeared to be a welcome oasis throughout the
1960s, with now Prince Sihanouk presiding as charming, benevolent
despot, treating his citizens like devoted children.
At the same time, he was imprisoning and sometimes executing opponents
or driving others — notably the Communist leader Solath Sar, who would
become Pol Pot — into exile and fueling discontent that fed growing
political opposition and eventually armed insurrection.
Stories about King Sihanouk’s extravagance became a staple of the
diplomatic circuit, especially as he turned his hand to his first loves —
music and film. He entertained guests at his exclusive parties on his
saxophone and embarked on a film career, eventually producing 19 movies
for which he was director, producer, scriptwriter, composer and often
leading man.
All the while he was head of state of a country increasingly squeezed by
the Vietnam War. He took his place as one of the leaders of the
nonaligned movement of newly independent nations — Egypt and India among
them — hoping to emerge from poverty and avoid taking sides in the cold
war. Yet he also accepted the outstretched hand of China, which was
convinced that the United States posed a military threat to its borders.
Crystallizing Cambodia’s hopes for avoiding entanglement was a speech in
1966 by the French president, Charles de Gaulle, in Phnom Penh calling
for the end of the Vietnam War and the neutrality of Indochina. He paid
King Sihanouk the ultimate compliment by saying Cambodia and France were
alike, with “a history laden with glory and sorrow, an exemplary
culture and art, and a fertile land with vulnerable frontiers.” But the
war would spill across Cambodia’s border.
With King Sihanouk’s acquiescence, the Vietnamese Communists used
Cambodia for its logistics. When the Vietnamese sanctuaries expanded, he
only mildly objected to the United States’s secret bombing of them.
That bombing campaign was later cited in the articles of impeachment
drawn up but never used against President Richard M. Nixon.
Despite the growing unrest in Cambodia, King Sihanouk was unprepared for
his overthrow in 1970 by Prince Sirik Matak, a cousin, and Gen. Lon
Nol. Supported by the United States, the new government immediately
allowed American troops to invade Cambodia from Vietnam.
The invasion ignited protests around the world, including those at Kent
State University in Ohio, where national guardsmen killed four students.
After his ouster, King Sihanouk fled to Beijing, where Chinese leaders
persuaded him to join forces with Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, the group of
Cambodian Communists that had been seeking to overthrow him since the
’60s.
Although King Sihanouk had aggressively pursued the Khmer Rouge,
arresting and often torturing them, he was so stung by the betrayal of
the coup plotters that he agreed to head their resistance. His name and
appearance in propaganda films and booklets helped the Communists
recruit peasants in Cambodia and gave respectability to their cause in
diplomatic circles. In the end, King Sihanouk helped bring Pol Pot to
power.
The Khmer Rouge won in 1975 and immediately began a reign of terror.
Cambodians were ordered out of the towns and cities and sent to grueling
work camps and farms in the countryside. Cambodia was cut off from the
rest of the world. Society was destroyed, with all religion and
professions outlawed.
Intellectuals, monks and anyone deemed a political enemy were murdered.
Tens of thousands of people died of treatable diseases, overwork or
starvation.
King Sihanouk was the titular president during the first year of the
Khmer Rouge rule. He said he had resigned a year later and was put under
house arrest with his consort, Princess Monique, in one of the palaces.
There he listened to world news on a radio and, he said, at times
wanted to commit suicide.
He was rescued when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia and overthrew the
Khmer Rouge in 1979. But rather than turn against Pol Pot, King Sihanouk
went to the United Nations and defended him, saying the country’s enemy
was Vietnam.
For the next 12 years, King Sihanouk provided a fig leaf of
respectability for the Khmer Rouge as they and several non-Communist
groups tried to evict Vietnam from Cambodia in the name of national
liberation. The United States, China and the Association of Southeast
Asian Nations supported King Sihanouk, who maneuvered himself into a
pivotal role in the final negotiations. Lined up against him, the Khmer
Rouge and the rest of the resistance were Vietnam, the Soviet Union and
Mr. Sen, who was then the head of the Cambodian government established
under the Vietnamese occupation.
With the end of the cold war, Cambodia was no longer hostage to great
power politics. The United Nations negotiated a settlement to the war in
1991, and national elections were held two years later. King Sihanouk
returned to Phnom Penh to a thunderous welcome, encouraging him to
believe he could become a powerful chief of state once again. But other
Cambodian politicians, including his own children, did not want him back
in control.
A party led by Prince Norodom Ranariddh won the elections. Mr. Sen’s
party came in second; the Khmer Rouge boycotted the elections. Furious
that he had lost, Mr. Sen and his surrogates threatened to reignite the
war. King Sihanouk stepped in and persuaded the United Nations to create
the position of co-prime minister for Mr. Sen, effectively nullifying
his son’s victory. However, King Sihanouk was returned to the throne and
became king-father for the rest of his life.
Chastened, he maintained that he had been above the fray throughout,
attempting to duplicate the role of national unifier played by King
Bhumibol Adulyadej in neighboring Thailand.
But for the most part, King Sihanouk sided with Mr. Sen, his political
son. Toward the end of his life, the king reduced his once hectic travel
schedule and rarely ventured outside Asia. Beijing, where the Chinese
government maintained a villa for him, was his most frequent
destination.
Michael Leifer, the Southeast Asia expert and professor at the London
School of Economics who died in 2001, wrote that “the powerful myth of
Sihanouk contributed to the people of Cambodia and the international
community” repeatedly turning to him “as the font of national unity.”
He added: “The record of the man, however, would suggest a greater
facility for reigning than for ruling. He has been more at home with the
pomp and circumstance of government than with its good practice.”
No comments:
Post a Comment