Then, at the beginning of 1959, the Chinese and French governments got wind of a plot by Cambodia’s two neighbours to overthrow the monarchy,
proclaim a republic and install Son Ngoc Thanh, who had been in exile in Thailand since the 1955 elections, as Head of State. The French took the affair seriously enough for their Foreign Minister, Louis Joxe, to warn the US Ambassador that in France’s view, such a move would be ‘a huge mistake’ and against Western interests. When Sihanouk was told, he immediately assumed that Sary was implicated. Fearing for his life, on January 20 the ex-Minister fled to Thailand where he joined Son Ngoc Thanh, thereby confirming the Prince in his conviction that Thanh, Sary, the Thais, the South Vietnamese and, at least tacitly, the Americans, were all party to a vast conspiracy which he baptised the ‘Bangkok Plot’. Whether Sary was really involved or fell victim to a machination that was not of his making is another matter. For the next three years he was described as one of the leaders of Thanh’s Khmer Serei movement until, during a visit to Laos, he disappeared. It emerged later that he had been murdered, either by Sihanouk’s agents or by his own associates.
If Sary’s role remains obscure, no such doubt exists about the ‘Bangkok Plot’ itself.
Shortly before Sary’s departure for London, another pillar of the regime, Dap Chhuon, was also removed from the government, in which, as Security Minister, he had been one of Sihanouk’s favoured instruments for terrorising opponents.
Chhuon returned to his old fiefdom of Siem Reap with the title of Royal Legate, which in practice gave him vast powers over most of northern Cambodia. But Sihanouk must have wondered whether such an energetic and unscrupulous man, having experienced national office, would be satisfied indefinitely with a provincial post, no matter how important, and when Chhuon asked to be made Legate of Battambang, which since the days of the Thai occupation had been the most rebellious province in the country, he prudently refused. Over the next twelve months, Chhuon’s disaffection grew. In private, he denounced what he called Sihanouk’s ‘pro-communist policies’ and ostentatiously refused to participate in ‘voluntary’ manual labour, which the Prince, inspired by the example of China’s Great Leap Forward, had made compulsory for all government officials. He toyed with the idea of splitting Siem Reap from the rest of the country and setting up an independent northern Cambodian regime with the support of the Thais (which was exactly what Sihanouk had feared he might do, had he become Legate at Battambang). But before he could make up his mind to act, South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem, infuriated by Cambodia’s tolerance of Viet Minh activities on its territory, approved a proposal by the South Vietnamese Ambassador to Phnom Penh, Ngo Trong Hieu, to ‘organise a coup d’état to get rid of Sihanouk’. In December 1958, they approached Chhuon to carry it out.
This was the plot which the Chinese and French intelligence services had uncovered.
In February, a month after Sam Sary’s defection, the conspirators went into action. Several planeloads of arms arrived in Siem Reap from Thailand, and Ngo Trong Hieu himself flew in from Saigon with 100 kilograms of gold bars to finance the rebellion. A few days later, another Vietnamese plane arrived bringing two powerful transmitters, to be used for propaganda broadcasts by the new regime.
It is possible that by then Chhuon had got cold feet and decided to change sides. In this version of events, he himself tipped off Phnom Penh that the South Vietnamese were trying to suborn him and assured Sihanouk of his loyalty. If so, the Prince was sceptical. He ordered his Chief of Staff, Lon Nol, to nip the rebellion in the bud, recover the gold ingots and kill Chhuon and his closest associates. When Nol’s troops invested Siem Reap on February 22, they encountered no resistance. Chhuon and several of his officers were captured and afterwards killed. Three other Cambodians, including Chhuon’s brother, and two Vietnamese, were sentenced to death by a military tribunal and executed in public by firing squad.
But the story did not end there.
Six months later
, in an attempt to put relations back on a more normal footing, Sihanouk visited Saigon at Ngo Dinh Diem’s invitation. Four weeks after his return, on August 30 1959, two gift boxes were delivered to the palace, one for the royal chamberlain — which, on being opened, was found to contain an elegant set of smoking implements — the other for Queen Kossamak. The chamberlain had no opportunity to give the second box to the Queen until the following evening. On her instructions he began to unpack it, at which point the King, who was also present, remembered that a group of officials was waiting for them in the audience chamber. Moments after they left the room, the box exploded with such force that it blew a hole in the reinforced concrete floor, killing the chamberlain and another official instantly. A third man died later from injuries and two others were seriously hurt. Once again, the finger of suspicion pointed at South Vietnam.
*
These bizarre events had far-reaching repercussions.
Political murder, which until then had been limited to peripheral excesses by low-level officials, mainly during election campaigns, moved
on to the national stage. A taboo had been broken. Cambodian politics had never been for the faint-hearted, but now the risk of violent death became a recognised part of the political game.
Relations with both Cambodia’s neighbours took a nosedive from which they never recovered. Diplomatic ties with Thailand, suspended in October 1958 over a territorial dispute, were finally broken off in 1961 and with South Vietnam in 1963.
But
most serious of all
, Cambodia’s relationship with the United States was damaged beyond repair. Behind Bangkok and Saigon, behind Sam Sary and Dap Chhuon, behind Ngo Dinh Nhu’s parcel bomb and Son Ngoc Thanh’s Khmer Serei, Sihanouk saw the malign hand of Washington. At the time, his claims seemed far-fetched and, to most Americans, downright absurd. But the evidence that emerged later was damning. The low blows to which Cambodia was subjected from the mid-1950s on, in total disregard of the accepted principles of international relations, were almost without exception the result of secret US government directives.
In 1956, when Cambodia became the first non-communist country to be granted Chinese aid, Thailand and South Vietnam, at America’s prompting, imposed an economic blockade. Under pressure from US allies, it was lifted. But the CIA continued to cultivate Son Ngoc Thanh — still viewed in Washington as a possible alternative to Sihanouk — and the US Embassy in Phnom Penh had standing orders to seek out other personalities and political forces to counter the Prince’s ‘left-wing policies’. Sam Sary, acclaimed by the State Department as ‘the staunchest friend of the United States in Cambodia’, had been sent on a three-month study visit to America, as had Dap Chhuon’s brother. Chhuon himself was viewed favourably by the administration as ‘an anti-communist warlord’. Surreptitious support for Sihanouk’s pro-Western opponents ‘to reverse the drift towards pro-Communist neutrality’ was reaffirmed in a National Security Council directive in April 1958. By then, there was serious tension on the border with South Vietnam. But when Sihanouk threatened retaliation, he was told by the US Ambassador that if American-supplied equipment was used against ‘a friendly power’, military aid would be suspended. The contrast with US behaviour towards countries it considered to be allies was flagrant. When Thai troops occupied an ancient Cambodian temple complex on their common border, the Americans remained silent.
To Washington’s extreme displeasure, the Prince then upgraded relations with China, which had previously been at the level of trade missions, by approving an exchange of resident ambassadors. The US began actively seeking ways to bring him down.
After Sam Sary’s efforts came to naught — efforts, the French Foreign
Ministry noted in a secret memorandum, ‘which the United States probably . . . did not initiate, but certainly knew of and did nothing to discourage’ — the Americans switched their attention to Dap Chhuon. Here the US role was more direct. President Eisenhower was informed in January 1959 that preparations for a coup were under way. A CIA agent at the American Embassy in Phnom Penh, Victor Matsui, was detailed to liaise with the rebels and gave Chhuon a transceiver ‘to keep the Embassy informed’.
The third attempt to destroy Sihanouk, by parcel bomb, may have been mounted without American knowledge. But it certainly would not have occurred had South Vietnam believed the US would disapprove, any more than Thailand would have provided hospitality to Sihanouk’s enemies, Sam Sary and Son Ngoc Thanh, without US acquiescence.
American policy in the 1950s was founded on a Manichean vision in which — decades before President Reagan coined the phrase — the US led the forces of good in an apocalyptic struggle against the empire of evil. In this polarised mental universe, there was no place for a middle road. ‘All those who are not with us are against us’ became the intellectual underpinning that led America to its calvary in Vietnam. In fairness to policy-makers in Washington, it must be added that, in the 1950s and ‘60s, not to speak of half a century later, such attitudes were consistent with the beliefs of the majority of Americans. Korea had barely dented America’s confidence in its self-ordained role as leader of the Free World. It would take the Vietnam War to make Americans question established certitudes, and then not for very long. In the meantime, Washington insisted on viewing the world through a deforming prism that blinded it to the realities of the countries with which it had to deal. In Cambodia’s case, as in many others, this produced results exactly opposite to those America desired. Sihanouk sought closer ties with China, and eventually with North Vietnam. The US dream of an anti-communist alliance stretching ‘from the 17th parallel to the border of Burma’ was definitively shattered, largely by its own maladress.
The same instinctive wariness that had caused Sihanouk in 1957 to distance himself from right-wing leaders like Sam Sary and Dap Chhuon — the
‘Bleus’
, as he took to calling them, in contradistinction to the ‘Rouges’ — led him to restructure his own political power base. In one sense he had no choice. The Sangkum members of the National Assembly elected in 1955 had shown themselves to be corrupt, fractious, undisciplined and, worst of all, incompetent. Having gone through ten different governments in less than two and a half years, destroyed the Democrats and intimidated the Pracheachon, the Prince decided that the time had come to broaden his political base. That meant bringing the Left, or what remained of it, back
into Cambodian politics, not as opponents but as part of the national union the Sangkum was supposed to represent.
Already, two years earlier, he had made tentative moves in this direction. Keng Vannsak was given a senior post in the Education Ministry. Ea Sichau returned to work at the Treasury. Thiounn Thioeunn, Mumm’s eldest brother, was invited to join the government but declined.
In the 1958 elections, the opening to the Left became a priority. While Keo Meas and his Pracheachon colleagues were being flayed by Sihanouk’s propaganda machine, the victorious Sangkum candidates, selected by the Prince in person and allowed to stand unopposed, included two former members of the Cercle Marxiste, Hou Yuon and Uch Ven, and three other young leftists, all but one in their late twenties and all far better educated than the outgoing members they replaced. Hou Yuon was the most controversial of the new intake. Before joining the Sangkum, he, too, had been a Pracheachon member. Shortly after his election, it was discovered, to the government’s embarrassment, that there was a court case pending against him for fomenting an illegal strike. The charges were hurriedly dropped. Uch Ven, who had travelled to France with Sâr aboard the SS
Jamaique,
was a teacher, as was the third of the new recruits, So Nem. The last two — Hu Nim, a brilliant student from a poor peasant background, who had become, at the age of twenty-six, Director of the Treasury; and Chau Seng, the most ambitious of the group, who had married the daughter of a PCF mayor in the South of France — were not Party members but espoused radical ideas. On his return to Cambodia, Chau Seng had become Sihanouk’s private secretary. After the elections, he and Hou Yuon were appointed junior ministers. The other three would hold ministerial posts intermittently over the next few years in accordance with the Prince’s pleasure and the political vagaries of the moment.
Sihanouk’s motives were mixed. The leftists were never more than a token force in the Sangkum. But they were young, dynamic and intelligent — qualities Cambodian politics sorely lacked — and their presence served as a safety valve for frustrations which might otherwise have sought more dangerous outlets. He also hoped that the temptations of power would erode the young men’s idealism. Above all they provided a counterweight to the Right, which enabled him to assume the political role he liked best — that of supreme arbiter, playing off one side against the other.
The 1958 elections set a pattern that lasted for the next eight years. Within the Sangkum, the radicals were afforded certain freedoms provided they accepted the rules that Sihanouk laid down. Beyond that limit they were ruthlessly repressed.
The new climate of political violence that followed the parcel-bomb
attack at the palace in August 1959 quickly made itself felt. On the evening of October 9, the editor of the Pracheachon’s weekly paper, Nop Bophann, was shot as he left his office. He died two days later. Unsurprisingly his killers were never caught: they were members of the security police. His death was probably intended as a gesture of reassurance to the Right that, notwithstanding Cambodia’s difficulties with America, the communists would be held in check. But, deep down, Sihanouk’s feelings were much more ambivalent. In an article suffused with despair, published the same week, he wrote for the first time of communism’s ‘irresistible global advance’ and the West’s seeming inability to counter it: