Cambodia's former monarch, Norodom
Sihanouk, was cremated on Monday in a custom-built
crematorium at the Meru field next to the royal
palace in the capital Phnom Penh. Millions of
Cambodians, most of whom have not known life
without the charismatic monarch, are believed to
have witnessed the elaborate cremation in an
outpouring of national mourning.
First
crowned king by French colonialists in 1941,
Sihanouk dominated the country’s politics for over
seven decades, variously as monarch, prince, head
of state, prime minister, head of the Khmer Rouge
government, chairman of the post-civil war
coalition government, head of the Supreme National
Council, and again as constitutional monarch from
1993 until he abdicated for health reasons in
2004.
I first met the flamboyant and
versatile prince in New York in the
1980s. I was fortunate to be
invited to Sihanouk’s much coveted annual song and
dance parties held at the Helmsley Hotel near the
United Nations’ headquarters. While the king’s
parties were colorful and lively, with the monarch
crooning renditions of Tea for Two and
That's What Friends Are For, a note of
gloom hung over the occasions while his country
was still torn by civil war.
After Vietnam
invaded Cambodia, ousted the murderous Khmer Rouge
regime, and installed its own People's Republic of
Kampuchea (PRK) government in 1979, the United
Nations instead recognized the Coalition
Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK). The
coalition operated from refugee camps in
neighboring Thailand and included elements of the
Khmer Rouge and Sihanouk's royalist Funcinpec
movement.
With the Cold War in full swing,
the Soviet Union and its communist allies
predictably recognized the pro-Vietnam PRK
government. This stalemate of two governments
continued until the Paris Peace Accords were
signed in October 1991, establishing the United
Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia
(UNTAC). UNTAC was tasked with holding elections
and paving the way for national
reconciliation.
Sihanouk's annual soirees
in New York were held while he campaigned for the
CGDK against the PRK at the UN's General Assembly.
That included a diplomatic and often revealing
relationship with UNTAC administrators, this
writer included.
"I wish to thank you,
Excellency Mr Yasushi Akashi, for sending another
prince from Java to help bring peace to Cambodia,"
Sihanouk quipped in August 1992 to UNTAC's then
senior most administrator in reference to
myself.
The occasion for the quip was the
inauguration of UNTAC's provincial headquarters,
where I served as a shadow governor. Akashi was
the head of UNTAC while Sihanouk served as head of
the Supreme National Council, a symbolic authority
that represented Cambodian sovereignty during the
UNTAC-led transitional period.
While not a
prince, I did indeed hail from Java, Indonesia.
Sihanouk's learned joke baptizing me as the second
prince of Java had its origins in the year 802,
when Prince Jayavarman II was proclaimed a
universal monarch, or Deva Raja, (God King). To
this day, the peasants who make up the bulk of
Cambodia worship Sihanouk as the last Deva Raja of
Cambodia.
During my UNTAC tenure, I got to
know Sihanouk intimately. At one point, I was
asked by my UNTAC superiors to accompany Sihanouk
by helicopter to the headquarters of the Khmer
Rouge to see how they were preparing for the
upcoming elections. Because he was using UNTAC
helicopters, Sihanouk requested that a senior
UNTAC person accompany him.
Although he was
put under house arrest during most of the Khmer
Rouge's 1975-79 rule - during which an estimated
1.7 million Cambodian's perished - Sihanouk had
earlier made common cause with the group after the
pro-American general Lon Nol overthrew his neutral
government in a 1970 coup. He was thus seen by the
UN as an important interlocutor to the Khmer
Rouge, which had fought an effective guerilla
campaign after being toppled by Vietnamese forces
in 1979.
We boarded a small six-seater
French military helicopter in Siem Reap and landed
at Pailin, the lugubrious Khmer Rouge
headquarters, which was off limits to UNTAC. The
pro-Khmer Rouge population who were trucked in
from surrounding villages gave Sihanouk a
thunderous welcome. They were attired in colorful
new dresses imported from neighboring Thailand and
looked relatively prosperous compared with the
poverty-stricken people in nearby PKR-controlled
areas.
At lunchtime, I was invited to join
a banquet of Khmer Rouge top brass in honor of the
royal couple. Khmer Rouge leaders, including Khieu
Samphan, Ieng Sary, and Son Sen, and I flanked the
prince and princess. Pol Pot, the radical group's
leader, was apparently lurking in a nearby room
watching. Ieng Sary's daughter, who had studied in
London, prepared a sumptuous Khmer nouvelle
cuisine lunch served with Mouton Cadet, Sihanouk's
favorite French wine.
From my vantage point
at the end of the table, I was able to observe
firsthand the bizarre relationship between
Sihanouk and the Khmer Rouge's leadership. Their
strange conversation that day centered on the
concept of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin
Mary and Friday the 13th as a Western
superstition.
The Khmer Rouge top brass
continuously teased Sihanouk that he had stopped
his amorous escapades after marrying Princess
Monique, his sixth official wife. Sihanouk turned
to me and confirmed with his inimitable cackle
that Princess Monique kept him in chains and would
never again allow him to look at other
women.
Perpetual crisis After
UNTAC left Cambodia, I was appointed as the United
Nations secretary-general's representative to
Cambodia. It was then that I truly got to know
Sihanouk. I arrived in April 1994 in time to watch
yet another tumultuous welcome for Sihanouk, who
then arrived from Beijing as king and nominal head
of the Royal Government of Cambodia, the
post-election coalition that was recognized by all
global countries.
Underscoring unresolved
tensions, the government was headed by two prime
ministers, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, Sihanouk's
son, and Hun Sen, the PRK's prime minister since
1985. The Khmer Rouge, however, maintained their
arms and continued to challenge the new coalition
government's authority in the territories it
controlled.
On May 1, 1994, I was granted
an audience with the king. After exchanging
formalities, we were led to a smaller room with a
huge map of Cambodia. Here, Sihanouk went into
great detail in outlining the crisis caused by the
Khmer Rouge's then ongoing counter-offensive,
which dominated our conversation that
day.
In highly animated fashion, Sihanouk
predicted that the Khmer Rouge, buoyed by its
recent military successes, would try to proclaim a
separate state in an outer northern crescent of
territory bordering on Thailand. The prince
cackled and told me that behind the room's huge
curtains many spies were lurking with secret
microphones linked variously to the Khmer Rouge,
Ranariddh and Hun Sen.
That day, he was
thinking aloud about what to do to save Cambodia
from yet another crisis. He complained that the
coalition government did not take him seriously,
while expressing a striking lack of confidence in
the co-premiers. It was quite evident from our
conversation that Sihanouk was unhappy with his
position as a king who reigned but did not
rule.
"They wanted me to be somewhere up in
the sky above Cambodia," he said at a private
dinner where he lamented agreeing to the
co-premiers' push to creation a constitutional
monarchy.
In June 1994, Sihanouk unveiled
yet another plan to retake the reins of power.
From self-exile in Beijing, where he would spend
much of the rest of his life, he summoned veteran
Far Eastern Economic Review journalist Nate Thayer
for a long interview, during which he accused the
coalition government of being incapable of halting
the deterioration of the country's
politics.
"How can I avoid intervening in a
few months' time or one year's time if the
situation continues to deteriorate?" he asked
during the bombshell interview.
To be sure,
Sihanouk was never fully marginalized. He
published his writings regularly in his Bulletin
Mensual de Documentation (Monthly Bulletin), which
can now be read online. He often handwrote biting
letters, commentaries and annotations to newspaper
and magazine articles on Cambodia in English and
French, lavishly decorated by multiple exclamation
marks and under linings.
The bulletin
provided an outlet to criticize the governance of
the co-premiers and wield influence. When the
coalition government became more internally
strained, the writings of a man known as Ruom Rith
suddenly appeared in his
bulletin.
Ostensibly, Ruom Rith was an old
friend of the king; he was his exact age and
supposedly lived somewhere in the French Pyrenees.
They shared identical writing styles, alive with
exclamation points and multiple - up to four or
five in a row - question marks. Whereas the king
was restrained in criticizing Hun Sen, Ruom Rith
was quite outspoken.
It was commonly
believed in Phnom Penh that Ruom Rith was a pen
name for the king himself - although the monarch
vigorously denied it. Later, during tense periods
leading up to the bloody 1997 confrontation that
saw Hun Sen oust Ranariddh, other alter egos of
the king appeared. In some instances, they even
began to argue with each other in the bulletin.
The king appeared to enjoy this role play,
choreographing with obvious amusement his own
private puppet show.
Due to poor health,
Sihanouk abdicated the throne for a second time in
2004. He handed down the crown to his unmarried
and childless youngest son Norodom Sihamoni, who
presided over today's elaborate cremation
ceremonies. After Sihanouk stepped down, the
National Assembly bestowed the title of "the Great
King Hero, Father of Independence, of Territorial
Integrity and National Unity" on the former
monarch and politician.
At today's
cremation ceremony, most Cambodians will indeed
remember Sihanouk as the father of Cambodia, the
man who gave them independence, strove for peace
and reconciliation, and ultimately saved their
small but distinct country from disappearing off
the map.
Benny Widyono is a
retired United Nations civil servant from
Indonesia. His last position was the UN
secretary-general's representative in Cambodia,
1994-97. He is the author of Dancing in
Shadows: Sihanouk (Rowman and
Littlefield).
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