The Royal Blog: The Sihanouk Diary

January 29, 2013, 

The New York Times

By JULIA WALLACE

 

Ou Neakiry/Associated Press King Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia before his weekly audience with people at the royal palace in PhnomPenh in 1994.

Norodom Sihanouk, the former king of Cambodia who died in October and is to be cremated next week after an elaborate four-day ceremony, is invariably remembered as a man of many talents: a political chameleon and a filmmaker, a jazz saxophonist and a ladies man.

He may also have been the first-ever royal blogger. Surely, he was the most prolific.

Between his voluntary abdication in 2004 and his death, the man who secured Cambodia’s independence from France six decades ago kept in touch with his subjects (or the Little People, as he called them) with a steady stream of hand-written notes, annotated press clippings and historical documents, snapshots of beloved dogs, the results of his medical tests, lectures on grammar and meticulously transcribed recipes for crêpes and escargots — all scanned by private secretaries and posted on his Web site, norodomsihanouk.info.

In one post, Sihanouk offers his theory for why the French soccer star Zinedine Zidane head-butted the Italian player Marco Materazzi during the 2006 World Cup final: It must have been in response to “words of very grave, extremely grave insult.” [pdf] In another, he professes his support for homosexuals: “I respect and adore them”.

Sihanouk’s favorite online topic might have been sex. He often reflected on the attractiveness of Cambodian women, musing over whether they had grown more beautiful since the days of his great-grandfather’s harem. Once, he reminisced about a girl, nicknamed Little Cutie, with whom he went to elementary school. Of her getting soaked one rainy day in an all-white outfit, he wrote: “This ‘interested me’ tremendously!! What ‘precocity’!!”

Thanks to his penchant for neologisms — he called the Khmer Rouge, with whom he had once allied himself, “Diabolical K.R. Polpotian Monsters” — and an ebullient use of parentheses and exclamation points, the hundreds of posts on Sihanouk’s Web site reflect his joie de vivre, omnivorous curiosity and impish sense of humor. Perhaps they reveal as well “his bottomless narcissism and his neediness,” says David Chandler, a professor emeritus of history at Monash University in Melbourne whose job as an attaché to the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh in the 1960s was in part to observe Sihanouk.

www.norodomsihanouk.info The hand-written note above the photo translates as “MIKI-MIKÉ DADDY’S BABY knows he has ‘MOMMY’ (my wife, the Queen Mother Monineath). But he ‘knows’ ‘his Mommy’ only when the latter gives him little (artificial) ‘bones’ to crunch.” This photo was appended to a note by Sihanouk explaining the dog’s name: “‘Miki’ was the name of the Maltese poodle that was given to me, as well as to my spouse, by the leader of the historic nation of Laos. ‘Miké’ was the name of a Maltese puppy bought in Beijing who immediately attached himself to me. Miki and Miké had an extremely painful death due to a toxic product on the carpet of our house. It’s in memory of Miki and Miké that I’ve called my present dog Miki-Miké A Touch Papa.’”

The royal blog also provides an unsettling glimpse into Sihanouk’s struggle to make his voice heard as the end of his life drew near. His greatest rival for the affection of the Cambodian people, Hun Sen, a peasant who clawed his way into the premiership in the mid-1980s and held on tight, had finally edged him off center stage.

In the margins of news stories he scanned and posted online, Sihanouk spoke out in favor of ordinary Cambodians on everything from freedom of assembly to deforestation. “Our ‘Democracy’ should stop favoring companies and businessmen to the detriment of the Little People,” he scribbled after reading about a land grab.

Sihanouk also published a series of letters from a mysterious pen pal he called Ruom Ritt, supposedly a best friend from childhood who lived as a hermit deep in the French Pyrenees. Ruom Ritt, whose habits of thought and punctuation strongly resembled Sihanouk’s, was another frequent critic of Hun Sen’s policies.

When Sihanouk abdicated and his son Sihamoni became king, he announced that Ruom Ritt would retire, too. But shortly afterward Sihanouk circulated to journalists a letter from a man called “Ruom Ritt Jr.,” who claimed to be Sihamoni’s own childhood friend-cum-correspondent. Ruom Ritt Jr. vowed to write frequently about “the Powerful who think only of themselves, the Poor who attempt to survive, and Your Family, which is haunted by a past that is no longer.”

But Ruom Ritt Jr. was never heard from again. Sihamoni — a former ballet dancer of whom Sihanouk once blogged that he “has neither spouse, nor mistress nor ‘adventure’ with any lady or damsel whatsoever” — has been tirelessly involved in charity work, but he hasn’t managed to galvanize popular support like his father.

Some say this is because he hasn’t been allowed to and is a virtual prisoner in the palace, his every move carefully watched by Hun Sen and a group of ruling party apparatchiks. Sihamoni’s own Web site is sparse, outlining his royal engagements but none of his royal thoughts.

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Julia Wallace is managing editor of The Cambodia Daily.