The following morning, students in Phnom Penh demonstrated outside the National Assembly, where they presented a motion demanding that the Viet Cong withdraw from Cambodian territory. Two days later, on the 11th, tens of thousands of people, many of them civil servants who had been given time off for the purpose, marched on the Embassy of the South Vietnamese Provisional Revolutionary Government. While the police stood by, the crowd, egged on by government agents, overturned and set fire to diplomats’ cars, and a squad of soldiers in plain clothes stormed the Embassy buildings, throwing filing cabinets, books and papers out of upper-storey windows and setting fire to whatever was left within. After spending an hour or so looting, the mob moved on to the Embassy of North Vietnam. That, too, was systematically wrecked. By contrast, the Chinese Embassy was guarded by a cordon of Cambodian troops with strict orders to shoot any demonstrator who tried to cross the line. Rioting continued sporadically, and in the course of the next two days two Vietnamese Roman Catholic churches and a number of shops and private homes in the city came under attack.
Whether or not Sihanouk had intended the protests to go as far as the sacking of the embassies is moot. Whether Lon Nol and Sirik Matak saw the rioting simply as a complement to the Prince’s diplomacy; whether they viewed it as a way for the government to take control of a key foreign policy issue, confining Sihanouk to his constitutional role; or whether they hoped that the climate of violence, fuelled by popular anger against the ‘hereditary enemy’, would create the political conditions for more drastic action against him, is also uncertain.
What is clear is that the Prince’s reaction set off alarm bells.
For months, Sirik Matak and Lon Nol had been turning over ideas to restrict Sihanouk’s powers and — at least in Sirik Matak’s mind — if all else failed, to remove him from office. But they had reached no conclusion. On the evening of the nth, however, the Prince issued a statement in Paris deploring the incidents and denouncing unnamed ‘personalities who are aiming at destroying beyond repair Cambodia’s friendship with the socialist camp’. When he returned home, he added menacingly, he would ask Cambodians to choose between himself and these recreants.
In all probability, Sihanouk was merely positioning himself for the coming talks in Moscow and Beijing. If he could demonstrate that he was trying to hold the line, not only against an inflamed public opinion but against his right-wing ministers, his appeal for restraint by the Viet Cong would stand a better chance of being heard.
But Sirik Matak read it differently. To him, the burden of the message was that he and Lon Nol would become scapegoats for actions the Prince himself had approved, a conviction reinforced when his brother, Sisowath Essaro, informed him from Paris that Sihanouk had been talking darkly of having the leaders of the government shot. It was typical hyperbole, as Matak well knew, but the timing was unfortunate.
The sequence of events then accelerated. Next day, Thursday March 12, the CIA Station Chief in Saigon told Washington that Matak had opted for a showdown and the army was ready for a coup ‘if Sihanouk refused to support the current government or exerted pressure upon [it]’. A few hours later, Lon Nol issued a statement apologising for the damage to the two embassies but demanding, with a straight face and total lack of realism, that all Vietnamese communist forces must leave Cambodian territory by dawn on March 15. Neither he nor Matak had a direct channel to the Americans, but both were convinced that a change of regime would have Washington’s blessing. Lon Nol had been talking to Son Ngoc Thanh, the leader of the Khmer Serei, since the previous autumn. Another US client in the region was also in touch with the plotters. At midnight on March 12, the Vice-President of South Vietnam, Nguyen Cao Ky, landed at Phnom Penh’s
Pochentong Airport, in total darkness and with the runway lights extinguished, aboard a DC-4 from Saigon, for the first of two secret, late-night visits. There is no record of what he discussed, or with whom, but he certainly opened the door to the idea of an alliance between Cambodia and South Vietnam.
On Friday March 13, Sihanouk, after much hesitation, left Paris as planned for Moscow. It was an uncharacteristic misjudgement, of the kind that politicians make after too many years in power. Had he returned directly to Phnom Penh, as at one point he intended, the plot would have fizzled out. But Sihanouk had told the Cambodians for so long that the country could not do without him that he had come to believe it himself. In the end, he was the victim not of the CIA, as he claimed, but of his own hubris.
The last days were a blur. Both the Russians and the Chinese wanted the Prince to return home without delay. He would not listen. In Phnom Penh, Sirik Matak had the Police Minister, Oum Mannorine, Sihanouk’s brother-in-law, placed under house arrest. Violent demonstrations against the Vietnamese continued in the provinces. The capital was alive with rumours of strange portents, spread by those with a vested interest in such tales. A white crocodile was said to have been sighted; for three days, the moon was encircled with a halo the colour of blood; a peasant soothsayer had arrived at the palace with a message from a long dead king that Sihanouk was about to fall.
Finally, in the early hours of March 18, Sirik Matak and two army officers confronted Prime Minister Lon Nol. Matak was a haughty, sophisticated man, born to palace intrigue, who greeted callers wearing a silk dressing gown and lived in a princely mansion full of sumptuous furniture and marble statuary. Lon Nol was a commoner and rejoiced in the common touch. In true Khmer style, his home, a rambling estate on the road to the airport, was always full of relatives and hangers-on. He encouraged his troops to call him ‘Black Papa’, to underline that he was a dark-skinned Khmer, without foreign blood. Sihanouk’s French advisers remembered him as ‘a rock-like figure . . . silent as a carp’. He did not impress by his intellect. Charles Meyer, who dealt with Lon Nol frequently, wrote later that by using him as ‘a fascist scarecrow to frighten the left-wing opposition’, Sihanouk had convinced him that he was a strongman with a national destiny. ‘In fact he was none of that. He was withdrawn and full of confused ideas, expressing himself in obscure parables whose significance only he could see . . . [and] capable of following his pet projects with all the subtlety of a bulldozer in the jungle.’ Nol and Sirik Matak were an improbable pair. Yet they had been friends since their schooldays and had
worked together in the right-wing Renovation Party during the struggle against the French in the late 1940s.
Lon Nol prevaricated. Everything he had achieved in his life had been due to Sihanouk’s patronage. He knew the Prince trusted him. But he was ambitious and profoundly influenced by esoteric Buddhism. The mystics and seers he frequented had persuaded him that his fate was to restore the glories of the ancient Khmer-Mon empire by waging war against the
thmil,
the hated ‘unbelievers’ from communist Vietnam. Now was the moment, if ever, to assume that destiny.
Matak presented him with a draft decree approving the Prince’s overthrow. According to one of those present, when he continued to tergiversate, Matak cried: ‘Nol, my friend, if you don’t sign this paper, we’ll shoot you!’ Weeping, the Prime Minister signed. A few hours later, armoured cars surrounded the radio station, three tanks took up position in front of the parliament building, international telephone and telegraph lines were cut and the country’s airports closed.
At 9 a.m., the National Assembly and the Council of the Kingdom, a consultative upper chamber, met in joint session. For two hours, MPs poured out, with rare unanimity, their accumulated bile at all the humiliations Sihanouk had made them endure over the previous three years. Not one voice was raised to defend him. For the first time in his life, the Prince was subjected,
in absentia,
to the same lynch-mob instincts that he himself had used so often to crush his opponents at Sangkum congresses. When the vote was called, one MP walked out. The other ninety-one approved a motion ‘to withdraw confidence in Prince Norodom Sihanouk [who], as from one o’clock on March 18 1970 . . . shall relinquish his office as Chief of State’. In accordance with the constitution, the President of the National Assembly, Cheng Heng, was to act in his place pending new elections.
Sâr heard the news in China. Sihanouk was told in Moscow by Premier Alexei Kosygin as they were driving to the airport for his departure to Beijing.
It was not the first time the Russians had played host to a third-world potentate who suddenly found himself dispossessed of his country and Kosygin politely made clear that there was not a lot the Soviet Union could do.
The Chinese reacted very differently. Since 1965, China had viewed its relationship with Vietnam through the prism of the Sino-Soviet dispute. Beijing was still Hanoi’s biggest source of military aid. But Mao had reacted sharply against Le Duan’s decision, apparently taken without Ho Chi Minh’s knowledge, to open peace talks in Paris, seeing it as a step towards a US-Soviet global condominium. Vietnam already dominated Laos. In Zhou Enlai’s judgement, a pro-American regime in Phnom Penh
especially one led by Lon Nol, whom he had met and instinctively distrusted — would sooner or later collapse, opening the way for Vietnamese, and in a worst case, Soviet, hegemony over the whole of Indochina.
The following morning, when Sihanouk’s plane landed in Beijing, he found the entire diplomatic corps, ambassadors and heads of mission representing forty-one states, including Britain and France, lined up on the tarmac to greet him. Zhou Enlai himself was there. As they drove into Beijing, the Chinese Premier enquired about his intentions. ‘
I am going to return
home and fight,’ Sihanouk replied. Zhou was not taken in. He warned that a war would be ‘
long, hard
, dangerous and sometimes discouraging’, and suggested that Sihanouk give himself a day to reflect. That evening, the Chinese Politburo met and agreed to allow the Prince to remain in Beijing if he so wished and to make statements to the press.
In fact Sihanouk was anything but certain of what he wanted to do. In the plane he had talked with his wife, Monique, of retiring to their villa at Mougins on the Cote d’Azur. One of his first actions after arriving was to sound out the French Ambassador to China, Etienne Manac’h, on the possibility of France granting him asylum. There was a precedent for such a step: the Vietnamese Emperor, Bao Dai, had ended his days on the Riviera; so had Egypt’s King Farouk. But these were not men Sihanouk admired. To accept exile would be an act of cowardice. His resolve was bolstered by the vilification to which he was subjected by the new regime. François Ponchaud was then a young Roman Catholic missionary in Phnom Penh:
I think Sihanouk
would have accepted being overthrown. But the Khmers . . . don’t understand the difference between criticism and calumny. I used to read the Khmer newspapers. There were pictures of a naked man with Sihanouk’s head and a naked woman with the face of Monique. When I saw that, I said to myself: ‘Sihanouk can never accept that.’ That was my immediate reaction.
Next day, the Prince told Zhou his mind was made up. In a message to the Cambodian people, broadcast by Radio Beijing, he denounced the coup-makers and promised to fight for ‘justice’, by which he meant revenge.
On March 21
, the North Vietnamese Premier, Pham Van Dong, flew to Beijing. He asked Sihanouk whether he was willing to co-operate with the Khmers Rouges, adding that if the answer were yes, there would have to be contacts both at leadership level and among the rank and file. ‘He said nothing beyond giving general consent’, Dong told Zhou Enlai afterwards. ‘He did not say what he wanted us to do.’ Even with those caveats, the fact that Sihanouk consented at all was an extraordinary step. He had said often enough that if communism triumphed in Cambodia, its people would be enslaved. Since the mid-1960s he had ordered, or at least
approved, policies of pitiless repression. But he had also given warning, ten years earlier, of what would happen if the United States forced Cambodia to abandon its neutralist course: ‘There will be a
monarchical-communist
revolution . . . [and it will be] a catastrophe for the Free World.’ The prophecy had come to pass and, from a mixture of motives — betrayal; a desire for vengeance; and an ancestral obligation to try to preserve the monarchy — Sihanouk decided that it was his fate to put it into execution.
The North Vietnamese leader also met Sâr, who found him in a very different mood from their last encounter two months earlier. Now it was all ‘friendship and solidarity [and] friendly words and embraces . . . It was a change of 180 degrees.’ To Hanoi, if Cambodia entered the war, the whole of Indochina would once again, as in the 1950s, become ‘a single battlefield’. An alliance between Sihanouk and the Khmer communists would then be in all their interests.
The problem
was that neither Sâr nor Pham Van Dong nor Zhou was yet sure that Sihanouk could be relied on. ‘
We should
support [him] for the time being and see how he will act,’ the Chinese Premier said. ‘We will see whether he really wants to establish a united front against the US . . . Because of the circumstances he may change his position.’ All three, therefore, kept their options open. China and Vietnam maintained contact with the new authorities in Phnom Penh in the faint hope of preserving the Viet Cong supply line through Kompong Som. And Pham Van Dong gave the Prince a formal assurance, ‘
on oath
’, as he put it, in Zhou Enlai’s presence, that Vietnam would respect the ‘independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity’ of Cambodia ‘within its present borders’.
Two days later
, on March 23, Sihanouk announced that he was forming a political movement to be called the National United Front of Kampuchea, known by its French acronym, FUNK, and appealed to his compatriots to launch a campaign of guerrilla attacks and civil disobedience against the Lon Nol government. Those with ‘the necessary courage and patriotic spirit’ would receive arms and military training — the former (although he did not say so) to be provided by China, the latter by North Vietnam — and as soon as practicable a National Liberation Army would be formed, which would fight under the orders of a Cambodian Royal Government of National Union (GRUNC).