exceed 20 million
dollars a year, [and allow the Cambodians] to gain both a good reputation and profits’.
It is never simple to support both sides in a war. Yet that was the logic of the Prince’s position. It was a policy which required constant ambiguity. Inevitably his margin for manoeuvre became more and more restricted.
In March 1969, President Nixon ordered the US air force to begin secretly bombing the Cambodian sanctuaries. Over the next twelve months, B-52S would fly more than 3,000 sorties over the eastern part of the country in an operation codenamed ‘Menu’. Sihanouk chose not to protest, not because he agreed with the bombings but because, at a time when his priority was to mend relations with America, all the alternatives were worse. In April, with beguiling cynicism, the United States finally accorded its long-delayed recognition of Cambodia’s borders. Diplomatic ties were restored soon after, offset, in Sihanouk’s mind, by simultaneous Cambodian recognition of the Viet Cong Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam. But the Prince reaped little direct benefit. Instead the Americans’ return boosted the morale of the Right, which started to behave more and more like a full-fledged opposition. All those in the army and in middle-class circles in Phnom Penh who had opposed the rupture in the first place took it as an admission of error. Under more normal circumstances, Sihanouk could have roused the left wing of the Sangkum to counter such criticisms. But the Khmer Rouge rebellion had made that impossible. The parliamentary Left had ceased to exist. Its chief spokesmen, Khieu Samphân, Hou Yuon and Hu Nim, had fled, and moderates like Chau Seng were in disgrace.
Sihanouk had backed himself into a corner. The rebellion was not dying down, the communist underground was growing ever bolder, and Lon Nol’s security forces were the only weapon he could use against them.
In Phnom Penh in the summer of 1968, the Prince had been outraged
to learn that communist agents had distributed Khmer Rouge tracts to delegates at his own Sangkum congress.
Lon Nol, now back
as Defence Minister, organised a series of police raids which produced alarming evidence of the scope of the communist network in the capital. During the drag-net, a young man named Kac Sim was killed in a shoot-out with Special Branch agents.
Forty suspects
— most of them student drop-outs who had taken jobs as labourers or cyclo-pousse drivers, but also ‘officials at the Public Works Department, the Posts and Telegraphs, the National Bank, the Railways and even the Justice Department’ — were arrested and subsequently executed.
*
They included, the government newspaper,
Réalités Cambodgiennes,
reported breathlessly, ‘a woman courier who was carrying secret messages in her bra and panties’, a revelation judged sufficiently titillating to be placed in italics. More importantly, the police found complete sets of field surgery instruments, waiting to be sent to the maquis; arms and ammunition; duplicating machines and rebel tracts; and several powerful radio transmitters, including one that operated on the same frequencies as the security service at Sihanouk’s official residence.
The raids gave the authorities their first insight into the systems for ‘secret work’ that Nuon Chea had devised. ‘The organisation is highly compartmentalised,’ a police report stated. ‘The members know only those in their own cell and communicate with other echelons by secret messages, transmitted via several successive intermediaries. Thus, if “No. 25” wishes to write to “No. 1”, he gives the letter to “T” who gives it to “No. 26” who has a meeting with yet another person that was fixed some time before . . . It is a real Chinese puzzle.’
But while the Special Branch men were able to seize a Jeep and an Opel saloon, used by the head of the clandestine network, the mysterious ‘No. 1’, and even to learn that he was named Pen Thuok, the man himself slipped through their hands. In fact, they had got much closer to him than they realised. Pen Thuok was Vorn Vet, and he had been at Kac Sim’s house the night it was raided. The shoot-out had been a diversion to allow him to escape.
Another important figure had also been in Phnom Penh that day: Sâr’s wife, Khieu Ponnary, was staying in another safe house in the city, on her
way from Ratanakiri to Mok’s headquarters at Mount Aural, when the raids occurred. She, too, evaded capture.
The crackdown that autumn did not wipe out the city network. Vorn Vet patiently rebuilt his smashed ‘strings’. Nuon Chea, the opaque master of the underground, undetected by the authorities, continued to devote himself to what was now his main task — using his cover as a commercial traveller to send rifles, grenades and ammunition to the rebels in the bush.
None the less, it showed how far the rebellion had extended its tentacles into the capital itself and offered fresh proof, if proof were needed, of how indispensable Lon Nol had become. In December 1968 he was named acting Prime Minister, standing in for the ailing Penn Nouth. Seven months later he was still serving in that post while concurrently Defence Minister and Chief of the General Staff. It was the first time the Prince had allowed anyone to combine the top military and civil offices. He had no choice.
Sihanouk was also forced to retreat over economic policy. That same December he announced that the programme of nationalisations and state control of foreign trade, launched five years earlier, would be modified to give more scope to private enterprise and that the government would accept foreign aid ‘no matter where it comes from’. The rationale was the same as had led him to restore diplomatic relations with the US. To arm itself against a potentially unified, communist-ruled Vietnam, Cambodia needed to strengthen its ties with the West. That meant reorientating its economy along capitalist lines and joining the International Monetary Fund and other Western-run aid institutions.
To Cambodian right-wingers, here was yet another case of the Prince reversing himself after belatedly discovering that his earlier policies had been wrong.
Once more, Sihanouk was disarmed.
With no left wing to fall back on, he had to confront his critics himself. The following spring, for the first time, parliament defied his authority by refusing to bury a corruption inquiry involving one of his cronies. The resulting row lasted three months and ended only after the Prince had been forced into an unprecedented public climb-down, an episode which left him smarting. By then another crisis was brewing. To try to balance the budget, Sihanouk had granted, for an annual fee of 80 million francs — a huge sum at that time, equivalent to a third of all Cambodia’s foreign aid — licences for two casinos. Financially they were an immense success. Socially they were a disaster. Phnom Penh was soon alive with stories of people committing suicide after losing their life-savings. Business activity slumped as factory owners, government officials, shopkeepers and labourers spent their days and nights courting ruin at the betting tables. To right
wing MPs like Sim Var and Douc Rasy, it was the perfect symbol of the bankruptcy of Sihanouk’s regime.
In July 1969, the Prince decided that Lon Nol’s confirmation as Premier could no longer be delayed. The US chargé d’affaires, Mike Rives, was due to arrive the following month. If Cambodia wanted the Americans to take it seriously, it could not continue indefinitely under a caretaker government. Lon Nol, Sihanouk believed, was personally loyal to him — which men like Sim Var were not — and he commanded the support of the Right. In any case, there was no alternative. The Khmer Rouge threat showed no sign of receding, and the Vietnamese were finally beginning to give their Khmer allies small quantities of arms. Moreover, their own forces in Cambodia had undergone a massive expansion, growing from 6,000 in mid-1968 to an estimated 30,000 a year later.
*
Nor were they now confined to the sanctuaries. The secret ‘Menu’ bombings had not only failed in their primary mission — neither COSVN headquarters nor the Viet Cong bases had been destroyed — but had driven the Vietnamese communists further and further into the Cambodian interior.
One may legitimately wonder whether, behind the rhetoric, Nixon’s objective all along was not to spread the war to Cambodia in order to divert attention from the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam. Certainly it worked out that way. One senior American general said later that the US aim in Cambodia was to mount ‘a holding action. You know . . . the troika’s going down the road and the wolves are closing in, and so you throw them something off and let them chew it.’ By mid-1969 Cambodia was being sucked into a conflict it had done everything to avoid, and which, until Nixon’s election, Sihanouk’s see-saw diplomacy had managed to keep at arm’s length.
Nowhere were these developments watched more closely than in Beijing and at Sâr’s headquarters at K-5.
That spring Zhou Enlai told the North Vietnamese Premier, Pham Van Dong, that China was ‘
not [too] optimistic
’ about the situation in Cambodia. The parallel with Sukarno had not escaped the Chinese leaders,
any more than it had Sihanouk himself. They did not rule out the possibility of an American-backed military coup.
By the middle of 1969, the latent conflict between Sihanouk and the Sangkum right wing was also exercising Sâr. But where the Chinese leaders saw a threat to the flow of arms to the Viet Cong, Sâr saw an opportunity the Khmer communists could exploit. In July, Nuon Chea travelled secretly to Ratanakiri for an enlarged meeting of the CPK Standing Committee, which approved a major change of political line. For the previous three years, the CPK had targeted Sihanouk as the chief symbol of the ‘reactionary, monarchical system’ it wanted to overthrow. Henceforth, the Standing Committee resolved, the Party’s main line of attack should be directed against Lon Nol and the pro-American right. This did not necessarily mean, as Sâr and other communist leaders later claimed, that they had ‘foreseen’ that a coup was imminent. But certainly they understood sooner than most that a new and fundamental fault-line had developed in Khmer politics. The Party’s prime task, Sâr now argued, was to isolate the rightists and mobilise ‘all forces capable of being mobilised’ into a united front against them. Consequently, anti-Sihanouk propaganda was to cease.
To underline the importance of the change, the Standing Committee censured Khieu Samphân, Hou Yuon and Hu Nim, who had recently written a tract denouncing the Prince, for acting ‘counter to the Party’s line on the National United Front’. Theoretically this was justified because the 1960 Party Programme mentioned the need for front work ‘to win over intermediate forces’. But until then the stress had been on ‘quality not quantity’, on revolutionary purity rather than gaining dubious allies. After mid-1969, the Party itself remained as secretive and puritan as ever, but its tactics changed.
The resolution called for renewed stress on political struggle in areas such as the North-East, the Cardamoms and Mount Aural, where the movement enjoyed the protection of a substantial Vietnamese presence and had the possibility of establishing ‘revolutionary bases’. The prime task of the guerrilla forces in those regions, it said, was to protect the bases and the civilian population which lived there. They were to serve as a springboard for resistance in the event of a coup, and as prototypal liberated zones, a pole of attraction for urban sympathisers repelled by the rise of the Right.
Efforts were also made to win over the former Khmer Viet Minh who had settled in North Vietnam after the Geneva accords. In August, Sâr despatched Keo Meas, who had spent the spring in Beijing undergoing medical treatment, to act as the CPK’s unofficial representative in Hanoi. His brief was to work with Son Ngoc Minh, and ‘to try, step by step, to
take over the political education of the regroupees . . . [but] to do so secretly, not openly’. It was an all but impossible task. Minh was out of touch with events at home and deeply suspicious of the younger men who had supplanted him. With Vietnamese support, he used his rank as a Central Committee member and Secretary of the Hanoi branch of the Party to ensure that Meas’s contacts with the exiles were kept to a minimum.
That same month, as Nuon Chea was making his way back from K-5 to inform the Zone committees of the new strategy, Lon Nol was sworn in as Prime Minister of a ‘Government of Rescue and National Salvation’, more openly pro-American and more right-wing than any administration Cambodia had known before. Sihanouk announced that the new Prime Minister had
carte blanche
to take whatever measures he thought necessary to revive the flagging economy and end the Khmer Rouge rebellion, the only proviso being that the policies of neutralism and non-alignment must remain intact. In fact, their relations were marked from the start by a climate of mistrust, which Lon Nol did nothing to diminish by appointing the Prince’s arch-enemy, Sirik Matak, as his deputy.
Nol might be loyal to the Throne, but he had been burned by Sihanouk’s duplicity during his previous stint as Prime Minister in 1966. Sirik Matak, a man of sterner stuff than his Prime Minister, was determined to prevent a repetition. This time the government insisted on governing. Within weeks, diplomats were reporting open conflict between the two sides. The Prince was increasingly restricted to his constitutional role. He found it intolerable.
‘Formerly everything came down from Sihanouk,’ commented the French chargé d’affaires, Robert Mazeyrac. ‘Today, Cambodia’s domestic policy is almost entirely out of his hands.’ In October the Prince branded the National Assembly ‘a gang of evildoers, traitors and criminals’, refused to attend the state opening of parliament and issued a decree banning MPs from attending all official ceremonies he presided over ‘from now until the end of my life’. The bluster had no effect. Nor did his jibes, a few days later, at ‘the headless government’ of Lon Nol (who had left for medical treatment in Switzerland), which was not ‘a government of rescue’ but ‘a government of drowning’. By the end of the year, there was a perfect stalemate. Government and parliament stood together. Sihanouk’s relations with both were execrable. No one, neither Lon Nol, nor Sirik Matak, nor even the Prince himself, could see how it would end.