OBITUARY Norodom Sihanouk
dies By Sebastian Strangio
PHNOM PENH - Cambodia's former king
Norodom Sihanouk, the charismatic monarch whose
name was synonymous with the struggles and
upheavals of his country for more than six
decades, died in Beijing on Monday at the age of
89. Sihanouk, who abdicated the throne in 2004,
had been dogged by poor health for years and had
suffered a variety of illnesses, including cancer,
diabetes and hypertension.
Prince Sisowath
Thomico, a royal family member and advisor to the
current king, said Sihanouk died of a heart attack
early Monday morning. "He had been very weak since
the beginning of the year," he said. The present
monarch, King Norodom Sihamoni, has flown to
Beijing to retrieve Sihanouk's body, accompanied
by Prime Minister Hun Sen and other senior
officials. Thomico said
the body is expected to return to Cambodia for a
traditional royal funeral within a few days.
During a storied career stretching across
more than 60 years, Sihanouk saw his country
transformed from French colony to a nascent modern
state before it was consumed in the fires of civil
war and the cruel communist dictatorship of the
Khmer Rouge. He served as king, prime minister,
communist figurehead, leader in exile, and then as
"constitutional king" until his retirement in
2004.
"The whole Cambodian people will
mourn his death," Thomico said. "Most of all, he
will be remembered as the father of Cambodian
independence."
Throughout his life,
Sihanouk's chameleon-like changes masked an
unwavering conviction that he had a unique ability
to foster national reconciliation during an era of
great upheaval for Cambodia. In his biography of
the monarch, Milton Osborne described Sihanouk as
a "politician much more concerned with achieving a
limited number of practical goals than with
developing a coherent political philosophy" -
something that confused and frustrated Western
observers.
Norodom Sihanouk was born in
Phnom Penh on October 31, 1922, and grew up in
ornate surroundings in French colonial Indochina.
In 1941, after the death of king Sisowath
Monivong, the French authorities placed Sihanouk
on the throne, expecting the chubby 19-year-old
prince to be malleable.
After his first
uncertain years, however, Sihanouk grew into a
powerful political figure, outmaneuvering the
French authorities and helping to win Cambodia's
independence from France in 1953. In 1955,
constrained by what he later termed the "terrible
servitude and crushing responsibilities" of
kingship, Sihanouk abdicated the throne in favor
of his father to take a more active role in
politics.
His political movement, the
Sangkum Reastr Niyum, leveraged his popularity
among Cambodia's predominantly rural population
and set Cambodia on its first steps as a modern
nation, building up the education system and
expanding the country's agrarian economy.
As the Cold War deepened and neighboring
Vietnam slipped into the maelstrom of civil war,
Sihanouk attempted to keep his country neutral,
dancing delicately between the United States and
the communist bloc. Sihanouk was a founding member
of the non-aligned movement - through which he
struck up his life-long friendship with North
Korea's reclusive leader Kim Il-sung - but he
accepted US aid and maintained relations with
communist China. Premier Zhou Enlai was a close
personal friend.
The country's "golden
age" - as many Cambodians would later remember the
1950s and 1960s - was dominated by the personality
of Sihanouk, who combined bravura statesmanship
with stints as a film-maker, jazz musician,
socialite and playboy. (Like many of his royal
forbears, Sihanouk had dozens of concubines and
fathered a total of 14 children).
To
outside observers, Sihanouk's rapid political
shifts and well-cultivated dilettantism made for
an often bewildering mix - the descriptor
"mercurial" quickly became compulsory in
journalistic copy - but Sihanouk maintained that
he was motivated throughout by a single consistent
aim: "the defence of the independence, the
territorial integrity and the dignity of my
country and my people."
Though often
depicted in foreign news reports as a fairytale
kingdom steeped in timeless tradition, rule under
Sihanouk's modernized form of feudalism left
little room for dissent. He outmaneuvered his
parliamentary opponents, convincing (or forcing)
many to abandon their parties and join his own.
Those who held out were ruthlessly pursued
by the prince's security forces. Chief among these
was Cambodia's nascent communist movement, which
Sihanouk famously dubbed the "Khmers Rouges", led
by Saloth Sar, later to emerge from obscurity
under the nom de guerre Pol Pot.
Fluid loyalties By the
mid-1960s, Sihanouk's diplomatic high-wire act,
designed to keep Cambodia out of the Vietnam War,
had started to backfire. Domestic opposition
mounted. Convinced that the Vietnamese communists
would eventually prevail over the US-backed South
Vietnamese regime, Sihanouk unwillingly acquiesced
to the transport of communist supplies along the
"Ho Chi Minh trail" through eastern Cambodia and
up from the port of Sihanoukville.
This
inflamed the anti-communist and anti-Vietnamese
opposition and added to the discontent around the
regime's widespread corruption and growing
economic mismanagement. In 1969, the US unleashed
a bombing campaign against the communist supply
lines in Cambodia, by 1973 devastating large
swathes of eastern Cambodia and killed tens of
thousands of rural Cambodians.
Eventually,
in March 1970, a small clique of military officers
- led by General Lon Nol and a royal rival, Prince
Sisowath Sirikmatak - overthrew Sihanouk while he
was abroad, threw their lot in with the US, and
proclaimed a republic. From his new exile in
Beijing, where he was given a residence and
comfortable stipend, Sihanouk raged against the
coup plotters and controversially threw his
support behind his former enemies in the Cambodian
communist movement.
With the prince at
their head, the Red Khmers attracted a wave of
rural support and, supported by the Vietnamese
communist forces, eventually defeated Lon Nol's
corrupt and incompetent government. The Khmer
Rouge, led by Pol Pot, marched into Phnom Penh on
April 17, 1975. They immediately emptied the
cities and embarked on a radical communist
experiment that led to the deaths of an estimated
1.7 million people from execution, starvation and
overwork. As he feared, Sihanouk, the formal head
of state of "Democratic Kampuchea" until 1976,
"was spat out like a cherry pit" by the Khmer
Rouge. He became a prisoner, confined to an empty
palace in an empty city, and fell into a deep
depression.
But instead of turning against
Pol Pot when the regime was overthrown by the
Vietnamese military in early 1979, Sihanouk flew
to the UN General Assembly in New York to denounce
Hanoi's intervention. In 1982, he became head of
an awkward coalition of nationalist, republican
and Khmer Rouge elements that opposed the new
Vietnam-backed regime in Phnom Penh. Throughout
the 1980s, the Prince travelled the world and held
lavish soirees at New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel
in an attempt to rally diplomatic support for the
resistance.
But Sihanouk was to play a key
role in the eventual solution to the Cambodian
conflict through the brokering of the Paris Peace
Agreements, which were eventually signed in
October 1991. A month after the signing of the
accord, he returned triumphantly to Phnom Penh as
the head of a UN-backed interim authority that
presided over elections held in May 1993. Sihanouk
had little respect for the UN mission that
descended on Cambodia during 1992-93, proffering
and withholding his support via a string of
petulant faxes dispatched from his residences in
Beijing and Pyongyang.
The 1993 election
was won convincingly by Sihanouk's son, Prince
Norodom Ranariddh, largely by appealing to the
deep reservoir of support for Sihanouk and the
memories of pre-revolutionary peace and stability.
However, Sihanouk forced his son to accept a
power-sharing relationship with Hun Sen, the
pre-existing prime minister, whose Cambodian
People's Party (CPP) still controlled the
Cambodian administration. Sihanouk was re-crowned
king and, after several attempts to form a new
government under his own presidency, settled
grudgingly into his role of monarch who, according
to the constitution adopted in 1993, "reigns but
does not rule".
From the mid-1990s,
Sihanouk remained aloof from Cambodian politics,
spending most of his time in Beijing or Pyongyang.
Cut off from day-to-day politics, Sihanouk
nonetheless retained great moral authority,
sparring with Hun Sen (who ousted his co-prime
minister and rival Ranariddh in a bloody coup de
force in July 1997), and continuing to play an
important, though oft-times distant, role in
Cambodian public life.
In the role of
mediator, Sihanouk helped broker power-sharing
deals after both the 1998 and 2003 elections which
marginalized his son Ranariddh and strengthened
the position of Hun Sen. King Sihanouk was also an
avid blogger avant la lettre. Before his
retirement and after, he posted on his website
regular missives, written out in beautiful cursive
French, which communicated his acerbic thoughts
and opinions about Cambodian politics and its
personalities. He also kept up his range of
non-political enthusiasms, including film and
music.
In October 2004, frustrated by the
aftermath of a year-long political deadlock that
paralyzed Cambodia's government, Sihanouk again
abdicated the throne in favor of his son Norodom
Sihamoni. In retirement, Sihanouk spent little
time in his country, remaining in Beijing for
medical treatment but his portrait continued to
hang from public buildings alongside those of king
Sihamoni and his wife, queen Monineath.
Sihanouk also increasingly came to support
his former rival Hun Sen, describing his
CPP-dominated government in 2009 as "the younger
sibling" of his own pre-revolutionary regime. It
may be the wily Hun Sen, prime minister now for
nearly three decades, who will in time be seen as
Sihanouk's true successor.
Sebastian Strangio is a journalist based in Phnom Penh who covers the Asia-Pacific and is currently working on a book about modern Cambodia. He may be reached at sebastian.strangio@gmail.com.
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