I can no longer stand by and watch My country drown and My people die . . . Over these last few months we have no longer dared look each other in the face. In our offices and schools, everywhere people are discussing politics — suspecting each other; hatching plots; promoting this person, bringing down that one, pushing the third aside; doing no constructive work — while, in the country at large, killing, banditry and murder hold sway. Chaos reigns, the established order has ceased to exist . . . The military and the police . . . no longer know where their duty lies. The Issaraks are told that they are dying for Cambodia, and so are our soldiers dying in the battle against them . . . Each day threatens [to engulf us in] a veritable civil war . . .
This is how things now stand, gentlemen. The time has come for the Nation to make clear whether it desires to follow [the way of the rebels], or to continue in the path that I have traced.
It was the first time that the young King, then aged thirty, had deliberately gone beyond his constitutional role and entered the political arena. His performance was not yet vintage Sihanouk — that improbable mixture of rage and self-pity, acid and honey, brutality and sarcasm, passion and wit, which would become his trademark — but the demagogic talents he had discovered as a schoolboy studying rhetoric were already evident. For the next half-century, they would be the weapons of choice in his political armoury.
The speech provoked an open crisis. The Democrats’ right-wing adversaries scattered tracts, demanding that the National Assembly be dissolved, the government be dismissed and the King institute direct rule. Dap Chhuon, now commander of the Royal Army in Siem Reap, was
rumoured to be marching on Phnom Penh to drive the Democrats from power. Public meetings were banned and on June 8 police searched the houses of four right-wing party leaders, including Lon Nol, who were accused of plotting against the state. On the King’s orders, three of them were released after a few hours, but the fourth, Yem Sambaur, a former Prime Minister widely believed to have been behind the assassination of leu Koeuss two years earlier, was held overnight. A case of grenades had been found at his home.
The following day, June 9, Sihanouk received the French Commissioner, Jean Risterucci, who called up troop reinforcements from Saigon. They arrived on the 14th. That evening, the King, in the presence of his parents and palace advisers, signed a series of decrees, and Cambodians awoke the following morning, a Sunday, to learn that during the night the government had been dismissed; that Sihanouk had assumed emergency powers and appointed himself Prime Minister; and that he had launched a ‘Royal Crusade’, pledging to obtain full independence for Cambodia within the next three years. The Democratic Party leaders, the King informed the nation, had confused the interests of the state with their own, grabbing the benefits of high office and excluding others from the spoils.
In this, Sihanouk was not wrong. During the five years they had been in power, the Democrats had shown themselves to be corrupt, feudalistic, incompetent and addicted to Byzantine factional squabbling which paralysed political life. A prominent member of their own party acknowledged: ‘They were unworthy. They thought only of themselves . . . All they were interested in was their ministerial career.’ Yet it could scarcely have been otherwise. The only indigenous political models were the palace and the mandarinate, which had waxed fat over the centuries by squeezing the population. Parliamentary democracy was a colonial import utterly alien to Cambodian tradition. Sihanouk’s reaction, which was to conclude that the institutions of the French Fourth Republic had no place in his oriental kingdom, was short-sighted and did nothing to help Cambodia become a modern democratic state. But the US administration, by instinctively preferring an ‘elected government’, whatever its defects, to an unelected monarch, was equally simple-minded. It marked the beginning of a process of mutual incomprehension which would not end until America’s defeat in the Vietnam War, a quarter of a century later, if indeed it ended then.
For some days after Sihanouk’s ‘coup’, Moroccan infantrymen guarded the parliament building and French armoured cars patrolled the streets. All political meetings were banned. In Siem Reap province the Royal Army launched fresh attacks against the Khmer Serei (or Free Khmers), as Son
Ngoc Thanh’s forces now called themselves, and burned down more villages. That triggered fresh protests by secondary-school students and a boycott of year-end exams. The National Assembly was sullenly hostile. But the sharpest criticisms of all came from Paris, where the leaders of the Students’ Association rushed out a
special issue
of
Khemara Nisut,
the centrepiece of which was a vitriolic attack on Sihanouk, penned by Keng Vannsak, bluntly accusing the King of treason and lauding Son Ngoc Thanh and his followers as Cambodia’s ‘true heroes’:
We, Khmer students of the AEK, consider that Your Majesty has acted illegally . . . and that the policy of the Throne . . . will inevitably lead our Khmer Motherland into an abyss of perpetual slavery . . .
In your message to the nation, [you said that] Cambodia faces ever greater dangers. It seems Your Majesty has only just noticed. The people have known this for a long time, and they know too that their sufferings are the doing of the French imperialists and of the absolute monarchy and its courtiers . . . What should the people think when Your Majesty’s Palace has become a lobby for dishonest dealings which place within your hands the riches of the country and the people? . . . Corruption in our country stems from the Throne and spreads down to the humblest officials. The French oppress the whole country, the King trades on his Crown, the Palace and its parasites suck the people’s blood . . . These are the main causes of our country’s critical situation today. . .
Your Majesty has sought to divide the nation in two: the royalists, and those who struggle for independence. [Your] policy is to set Khmers against Khmers . . . as happened under Sisowath and Norodom, who [also] collaborated with the French . . . Your Majesty is merely following in the footsteps of your ancestors, that is to say, you are selling the blood of your people as the price of your crown. . .
The King considers Cambodia as his chattel . . . His policy . . . is one of destruction — of the people and the life of the Khmer country . . . [But] let Your Majesty be advised that we Khmer students . . . have no intention of judging or condemning you. It will be up to History — the history wrought by Your Majesty and your ancestors — to judge your faults in due time.
Vannsak’s attack was all the more wounding because it contained a number of home truths about the personal corruption of Sihanouks parents. Copies were signed by Hou Yuon, the AEK president; Mey Mann, who had been elected Secretary-General; and by Vannsak and other student luminaries, including Ieng Sary. They were sent to the palace, the National Assembly, the Cabinet Office, the two main Buddhist orders and the newspapers. The King sank into a ‘black rage’, Vannsak was told later, but was sufficiently lucid to recognise that punishing the culprits would only alienate opinion further. Instead, he sent the most senior of the Counsellors to
the Throne, Penn Nouth, to Paris, with instructions first to obtain an apology and then try to smooth things over.
This was easier said than done. Hou Yuon addressed him pointedly as
Monsieur
Penn Nouth, rather than by the royal title,
Monseigneur,
an insult Nouth never forgot. Vannsak refused to see him at all. No apology was forthcoming. Sihanouk was forced to swallow his pride and recall his emissary, leaving behind a warning that the bursaries of those involved were now at risk.
That gave them pause. Vannsak remembered Ieng Sary telling him: ‘This is your fault, brother. You’ve got your degree — you don’t need to study any more. We think you should go back to Phnom Penh and try to raise some money, so that we can stay in France.’ Whether from guilt — Vannsak loathed Sihanouk and had pressured the others into putting their names to his letter — or from simple lassitude after six years in Europe, he agreed. Ieng Sary and his fiancee, Thirith, took over the apartment in the rue de Commerce, and in October 1952 the Vannsaks set off on the three-day plane journey to Phnom Penh, which included an afternoon stopover in Cairo, to see the Pyramids, and another in Rangoon. Vannsak had warned his wife that they might be arrested on arrival, but in the event the worst that befell him was a dressing-down from an elderly aunt, Princess Peangpas, then Minister of Education. ‘Imbecile !’she yelled at him. ‘What did you think you were doing, daring to oppose the King?’ When he denied responsibility, she demanded to see a specimen of his handwriting. He sat up all night trying to perfect a different script. But next morning the old lady had forgotten about it and instructed her
Chef de Cabinet
to find him a teaching post.
Vannsak had not been alone among the students in Paris in protesting against Sihanouk’s actions. Others, with his encouragement, also published articles attacking the King. One, who called himself Khmer Daeum (
Old Khmer
), entitled his contribution ‘
Monarchy or Democracy
?’ Compared with Vannsak’s diatribe, it was a rather juvenile effort, but as Saloth Sâr’s earliest known piece of writing it provides an insight into his thinking at that time. Plainly influenced by his mentor, Sâr argued that the Khmer monarchy reduced the people ‘to the condition of animals which are [treated] like a herd of slaves and forced to work day and night without stopping’, whereas democracy was ‘priceless as a diamond . . . like a torrent cascading down the mountainside which no person can stop’. Monarchy, Sâr wrote, was ‘as foul as a putrefying sore’; ‘the King’s words are good, but his heart remains evil’. Such imagery, which would become the cachet of Pol Pot’s oratorical style, enlivened otherwise pedestrian prose.
Most intriguing was his emphasis on Buddhism. Enlightened monks, he claimed, had ‘always understood very well the nature of monarchy’ and had written folk-tales like the
Thmenh Chey
(whose hero, one of the best-loved rogues in Khmer literature, famously outwitted the king), in order to show the people that they should not believe in royalty. The Buddha — ‘our Great Master’ — had abandoned princely life, he went on, in order to become ‘a friend of the people’; he had been the first to preach the virtues of democracy and it was the democratic system alone that could defend Buddhism’s ‘profound values’. As a member of the Cercle Marxiste, Sâr would not have been expected to write in such terms. Ieng Sary or Thiounn Mumm certainly would not have done so. Like his choice of the pseudonym Khmer Daeum, it suggested a conscious desire to identify himself with an authentically Cambodian viewpoint rather than imported, Western ideas.
Sâr’s other main historical reference was, unsurprisingly, the French Revolution, which ‘dissolved the monarchy and executed the King’. The Russian and Chinese revolutions received passing mention, but for ending monarchical rule, not for their ideological content. There were other allusions which, in the light of later events, assume a significance that was not apparent at the time. Sihanouk, Sâr wrote, had undermined the Buddhist faith by introducing ranks into the monkhood; and he had mortgaged the country’s independence. ‘History has shown,’ he explained, ‘that the King who seeks aid from Siam has to pay tribute to Siam; the King who seeks aid from France will have to pay tribute to France.’
*
To Sâr and his companions, the King’s action was ‘a royal coup d’état’. A page had been turned. The French felt it too. ‘Democracy had no hope [here],’wrote the French military commander, General Pierre de Langlade. ‘The parliamentary experiment has failed . . . The Sovereign remains the only person capable of giving Cambodia political direction . . . [He is] heir to the . . . mystique of the God-Kings, who for thousands of years have guided the destinies of the land . . . Everything in this country has to be done by the King.’
The political instability of the first half of 1952 had allowed the Viet Minh and their Khmer allies to strengthen their grip on the countryside. Son Ngoc Minh’s partisans claimed to hold a third of Cambodia with a population of one million. That was an exaggeration. But it was certainly true that large areas in almost every province were now officially declared insecure, and along the Vietnamese border upwards of 200,000 Cambodians were living under communist rule. The French army itself acknowledged
that — in sharp contrast to the situation three years earlier — the Viet Minh ‘have acquired prestige in the eyes of the [Khmer] population’. The one bright spot for the authorities was that Son Ngoc Thanh’s efforts to unite the different rebel groups into a single force had fallen flat. In the weeks following his entry into rebellion, individual Issarak leaders, including Chantarainsey and Savangs Vong (an opium-addicted army deserter who led a band of four hundred men in Kompong Speu), had sent him congratulatory messages. But none was willing to give up his autonomy to form a national alliance. Exchanges with the Viet Minh came to nothing when Thanh insisted that any joint force must be under his command.
After Sihanouk’s ‘coup’ in June, the French stepped up what they called their ‘pacification efforts’ and began to stabilise, then to reduce, the level of Viet Minh penetration. More than 100,000 villagers were gathered into fortified hamlets, protected by watchtowers manned by armed militia. Issaraks who rallied to the government were granted a royal pardon. None the less, it was a delicate game, in which neither side was duped. The French military command knew that if it were to win back the population from Viet Minh and Issarak control, it could only be in Sihanouk’s name. The King knew that to win independence, continued insurgency was necessary until the French accepted his ‘Royal Crusade’ as the only realistic outcome. De Langlade complained that Sihanouk was ‘playing into Son Ngoc Thanh’s hands’by his ‘extreme moderation’.