10
GAINING INDEPENDENCE

It is easy to argue that French rule in Indochina effectively came to an end in the summer of 1945. This did not appear to be the case, however, to the new breed of French officials sent out by General de Gaulle’s government to replace the people who had looked after the region up to 1945. During the war, in fact, de Gaulle had made the recovery of the French empire, and Indochina in particular, an important goal of his government in exile.

In Cambodia the French were forced in October 1945 to make conciliatory gestures to the members of the indigenous elite whom they needed to run the kingdom’s day-to-day affairs. These were the people whose awakening the French had celebrated in the 1930s. They had become patriots in the meantime and, from the French point of view, intellectually belligerent. Many of them interpreted the summer of 1945 less as a humiliation of the French that had to be avenged than as a victory for the Cambodians themselves. Cambodia, they argued, needed to regain its independence. A leading convert to the cause, although he was quieter than most, was King Norodom Sihanouk.

Once the modus vivendi had been signed in early 1946, the French began to tidy up their colony. In Phnom Penh they restored the street names honoring French colonial heroes and French events that had been changed to Cambodian ones in 1945.¹ Another step was to abolish the newly instituted national holidays that honored Sihanouk’s declaration of independence in 1945 and the monks demonstration of 1942. A third was to place Son Ngoc Thanh on trial for treason, charging him with collaboration with the Japanese (against whom, incidentally, the French had only belatedly declared war).

THE DEVELOPMENT OF POLITICAL PARTIES

In this atmosphere of business as usual, the electoral act that came into effect in the summer of 1946 opened up deep and unexpected fissures in the Cambodian elite. For the first time in their history, Cambodians were allowed to form political parties, and three sprang rapidly to life. As V.M. Reddi has pointed out, all of these “were led by princes, all of them shared the fear of neighboring countries, and all professed loyalty to the monarchy.”² The first and last of these characteristics should come as no surprise, but the phrase “fear of neighboring countries” needs an explanation.

In 1946–47 Thailand was still governed by the relatively radical civilian regime that had been financing anti-Japanese, and subsequently anti-French, guerrillas along the Cambodian frontier since the fall of the Phibul government in the summer of 1944. In 1945 these groups formed into the Khmer Issarak (“Free Khmer”), and a government in exile was hastily assembled in Bangkok. Throughout this period, moreover, the Thai retained control of the sruk in northwestern Cambodia that they had taken over in 1941. These regions offered sanctuary to four of the twelve persons implicated in the August 1945 coup, as well as to others, such as Bunchhan Muul, who had participated in the monks demonstration and were now unhappy with the return of the French. The new political parties in Phnom Penh were fearful of Thai intrusions into Cambodian politics. They were probably even more frightened, however, by developments inside Vietnam, where Communist guerrillas in the south were threatening French rule and a Communist government in the north enjoyed de facto independence.³

There were, all the same, significant differences between the two leading parties, the Democratic Party (Krom Pracheathipodei), led by Prince Sisowath Yuthevong, and the so-called Liberal Party (Kanaq Sereipheap; literally, “Freedom Group”), led by Prince Norodom Norindeth. The difference between these two princes encapsulated the differences between two wings of Cambodian opinion. Prince Yuthevong (1912–47) had just returned from nearly a decade of higher education in France, his wife was French, and he wanted Cambodia to practice the kind of democracy he had admired in France. His party’s program called for negotiating Cambodia’s independence as quickly as possible. Prince Norindeth, on the other hand, was a conservative. As one of Cambodia’s largest landowners, he believed that Cambodian politics should involve educating the people—slowly—and maintaining a dependent relationship with France. This was a view shared by many other members of the royal family. The Liberals were clandestinely funded by the French, who were fearful of the Democrats’ popularity. The third party, the Progressive Democrats, led by Prince Norodom Montana, was insignificant and quickly faded from the scene, but it was as conservative as the Liberal Party, and it may have enjoyed a measure of support from the king and his advisers.⁴

The Democratic Party attracted people who had been drawn in the early 1940s to Nagara Vatta and the ideas of Pach Chhoeun and Son Ngoc Thanh. Its strength came in large part from the Mahanikay sect of the sangha, from younger members of the bureaucracy, from supporters of the Issarak movement, and from Cambodia’s intellectual class (nak cheh dung in Khmer). Some elements within the party favored violent action, an alliance with Issarak guerrillas and perhaps, at this early stage, with the Communist Viet Minh as well.⁵

The Liberal Party, on the other hand, sought to maintain the status quo. The party drew its strength from elderly members of the government, wealthy landowners, the Cham ethnic minority and the Sino-Cambodian commercial elite. The party had strong provincial roots, it seems, especially among chamkar (riverbank plantation) owners near Kompong Cham. Its strength could be traced in large part to patronage networks in particular regions.

Sihanouk in his memoirs related that he was drawn to neither of these groups, and that neither sought him out. Many Democrats, indeed, seem to have seen Sihanouk as a puppet of the French, and much of his conduct in the 1946–49 period appears to bear this out. At the very least, Sihanouk seems to have felt that the only way to regain his country’s independence was by negotiating with the French in a friendly, diplomatic way. The king’s distrust of the Democrats probably sprang from his generalized suspicion of ideology, his traumatic experiences in the summer of 1945, and perhaps the feeling that he was being disrespectfully upstaged.

In September 1946, soon after the parties had been formed, elections for the Consultative Assembly were held to form a group to advise the king about a constitution for the country. More than 60 percent of the newly enfranchised voters went to the polls (a far higher percentage than voted in elections in Thailand). The Democrats won fifty of the sixty-seven seats; the Liberals, fourteen; independent candidates, three.

These results revealed the popularity of the Democratic Party among Cambodian authority figures who were in a position to “deliver the vote.” In this election, as in others over the next twenty years or so, many peasants voted as they were told by people whom they habitually obeyed.⁶ As in the 1916 Affair, moreover, Cambodians—in this case, the Democrats—showed a disconcerting ability to organize and inspire their followers. In the case of the Democrats, these patrons would be local officials, teachers, and members of the sangha while those who voted for Liberal candidates were often endorsing their traditional economic patrons. At the same time, the sub rosa connections between some Democrats and the Issarak, and the connections that others made between the party and earlier Cambodian patriots, such as Hem Chieu, probably appealed to many voters more strongly than the Liberals’ program of supporting the landowning elite. Indeed, the effects in the countryside of the disappearance of French control between March and October 1945 have never been examined. It would seem likely that bandit gangs, the principal target of the French-controlled Cambodian police in the colonial era, grew in number and importance. Many of these by early 1946 were referring to themselves as Issarak, and many peasants, especially at a distance, probably thought of the bands as patriotic.⁷

Sihanouk was distressed by the Democrats’ victory, which he interpreted as a rebuff. In his memoirs he is scathing about the party and particularly about Prince Yuthevong, suggesting that his own unformed political ideas were preferable, even in 1946, to Yuthevong’s. After more than thirty years, he was still unable to respect Yuthevong, referring to him and his followers dismissively as “demos.”

Because the Democrats now assumed that they had a mandate to impose a constitution on the kingdom, rather than merely to advise the king about one, and because the constitution they drafted in 1946–47 reduced the powers of the king, Sihanouk soon became even more estranged from the constitutional process. Indeed, the 1947 Constitution was modeled closely on the Constitution of the Fourth Republic in France. In this document, real power devolved to the National Assembly and thus to the Democrats, who held the majority of assembly seats.

But what did power amount to? The Democrats, like everyone else in the kingdom, were handicapped because independence could no longer be declared, as it had been in the summer of 1945. It had to be granted by the French. Before the middle of 1949, however, the French made few concessions to anyone in Indochina. Unable to deliver independence, the Democrats began to squabble among themselves. This trend was exacerbated by the death of Prince Yuthevong from tuberculosis in July 1947, the arrest of several high-ranking Democrats on spurious charges later in the year (the so-called Black Star affair), and the assassination of Yuthevong’s successor, Ieu Koeuss, in 1950.⁸ Even after the so-called treaty of 1949 (discussed below) French police arrested a dozen leaders of the party on charges, later dropped, that they were conspiring with Issarak forces. The Democrats could do nothing about it; Cambodia’s independence, as many of them had maintained since 1946, was a façade.

The Issarak armed struggle against the French, which had caused serious disruptions to the Cambodian economy in 1946–47, slowed down after Battambang and Siem Reap were returned to Cambodian control in 1947, and a regime unsympathetic to Issarak aspirations soon afterward came to power in Bangkok. In 1949, moreover, several thousand Issarak, particularly those opposed to the Viet Minh, took advantage of an amnesty offered them by Prime Minister Yem Sambaur. As non-Communist resistance to the French decreased, moreover, the Democrats were in less of a position to reply to spurious French charges that they supported the Viet Minh.

Another factor that handicapped the Democrats was that the people who held economic power in the kingdom—the French, members of the royal family, Chinese, and Sino-Cambodians—opposed the kinds of disorder that a real struggle for independence would have entailed. Most of them were doing well. If they were involved in politics at all, they supported the Liberal Party, as did the French administration. This meant that the Democrats were short of funds with which to influence officials, win elections, or finance an armed insurrection. The Democrats, forming the majority of the National Assembly (and thus theoretically enjoying political power), were in fact powerless to impose their will on the elite, the French, or their electorate—whose views, in fact, were rarely sought.

Ensconced in the National Assembly and hampered by a constitution that encouraged factional splits, the Democrats were cut off intellectually, economically, and physically from most of Cambodia’s ordinary people. The only weapon available to them was to impede the orderly procedures of government by refusing to pass bills or to ratify agreements. As cabinet followed cabinet through a series of revolving doors—for, unlike in the British system, no elections followed these parliamentary crises—Cambodia’s government ironically came more and more to resemble the government of the Fourth Republic from which its members were so eager to liberate themselves. Moreover, governments in Paris often held power so tenuously and for such short periods that Cambodians of any political persuasion, as Sihanouk was to discover in 1953, seldom encountered coherent French policies to oppose or experienced ministers who were qualified to negotiate. In fact, for reasons that are not entirely clear (although financial motives were important), no French governments before 1953–54 showed any willingness to take France out of Indochina.

By the end of 1949, all the same, the French appeared to have partially caved in, creating fictive independent regimes in Indochina. The move enabled the United States to grant financial aid to these “governments” and indirectly to the French, who were bogged down in the First Indochina War. The treaty signed with Cambodia at that time granted what Sihanouk would later call “50 percent independence.”⁹ The treaty allowed Cambodia some freedom of maneuver in foreign affairs as well as an autonomous military zone embracing Battambang and Siem Reap. Control over finance, defense, customs, and political resistance remained in French hands, but as Sihanouk has asserted, a process had begun that would be difficult to reverse. The Democrats opposed the treaty as inadequate, but it came into force all the same.

Cambodian classical dancer, Phnom Penh, 2003. Photo by Douglas Niven.

The French had several reasons for compromising at this point with Cambodia. The war throughout Indochina had intensified, and the Communist victory in China now provided the Viet Minh with an arsenal, a sanctuary, and an ally. The Soviet acquisition of nuclear arms in 1949 was to be followed in early 1950 by the conclusion of a thirty-year pact with the People’s Republic of China. Beginning in 1948–49, the French sought increased military aid from the United States on the grounds that they were no longer engaged in a colonial war but were fighting a crusade against Communism. To many in the United States and France, the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 confirmed this line of argument, and U.S. aid flowed into Indochina in ever-increasing amounts.

THE GROWTH OF THE LEFT

The history of the next four years is crucial to an understanding of what has happened in Cambodia ever since. Three trends need to be discussed. The first is the waning of the Democratic Party and the eclipse of the National Assembly. The second, related to this, is the flowering of comparatively right-wing political groupings and anti-Communist military leaders, who often enjoyed the favor of the king. In fact, officials concerned with these groupings, including Nhek Tioulong and Lon Nol, reappeared in several of Sihanouk’s cabinets in the independence period. More important, perhaps, the consolidation of left-wing resistance to the French inside Cambodia, a process that began in 1950 and concluded in 1951 with the foundation of a recognizably Cambodian Communist Party, also dates from this period. In a sense, these three pieces remained on the board throughout Sihanouk’s rule.

The fading of the Democrats can be traced to French reluctance to negotiate with them, the king’s perennial hostility, and a shift by some opportunistic members of the party to a more royalist stance in order to gain preferment. Moreover, even their traditional disruptive role in the assembly was curtailed for much of the period because Sihanouk saw to it that the assembly was almost never in session.

Nonetheless, in 1951 he yielded to pressure to elect a new assembly in accordance with the constitution. The Democrats, perhaps sensing a trap, said that they were unwilling to go to the polls because of increasing insecurity in the countryside. When the Liberals and several hastily formed right-wing parties (one led by a middle-echelon bureaucrat, Lon Nol) threatened to contest the elections with them, the Democrats changed their minds.

The results resembled those of 1947, at least on the surface, for the Democrats captured fifty-five of the seventy-eight contested seats. Ominously, from the Democrats’ point of view, some 498 different candidates had presented themselves for these seats, with little hope of winning, and had siphoned off tens of thousands of votes. For this reason, as well as the persistent strength of Liberal candidates, the Democrats attracted less than half the total vote, polling 148,000 while the Liberals attracted 82,000 voters and the various new parties attracted nearly 100,000. It was clear, as Michael Vickery has pointed out, that “any movement which could unify the right could immediately cut the ground from under the Democrats.”¹⁰

Soon after the victory, Sihanouk persuaded the French to permit Son Ngoc Thanh to return from exile in France. In his memoirs, Sihanouk explains the action by referring to Thanh’s friendship with his father, Prince Suramarit, but he may have thought, along with his French advisers, that bringing Thanh back might divide the Democrats while neutralizing Thanh himself as political threat. In any case, Thanh’s return to Cambodia on October 29, 1951, was melodramatic. Thousands of people greeted him when he arrived at Phnom Penh airport, and thousands more lined the route into the city. It took the 300-car cortege almost an hour to cover the ten kilometers (six miles) involved. French intelligence officials estimated the crowds at more than half a million—an almost incredible indication of the organizational capacities of the Democrats and of the extent of popular support, partly for Son Ngoc Thanh himself and partly for an early solution to the problem of continuing dependence.

On the very day of Thanh’s return, the French commissioner, Jean de Raymond, was murdered by his Vietnamese houseboy. The two events have never been publicly linked by scholars of the period, although the coincidence is remarkable. A clandestine Communist broadcast, two weeks later, managed to touch all the bases by asserting:

For the French, the death of Raymond means the loss of a precious collaborator. For the puppets, it means the loss of a generous master. For the Cambodian people, Raymond’s death means the end of a great enemy. For Buddhism, his death means that a devil, which can no longer harm religion, has been killed.¹¹

Thanh was politically inactive for the remainder of 1951, refusing several cabinet posts. In January and February 1952, however, he tested the water by touring the provinces with his old friend, Pach Chhoeun, recently named minister of information by the Democrats. This tour, which played down Sihanouk’s importance, infuriated the king and convinced the French that Thanh was being encouraged by the Americans, who had provided public address systems for Pach Chhoeun. Soon after returning to Phnom Penh, Thanh founded a newspaper called Khmer Krok (“Cambodians Awake”), explaining the title in his first issue: “We know that the Cambodian people, who have been anaesthetized for a long time, are now awake. . . . No obstacle can now stop this awakening from moving ahead.”¹²

Soon afterward, on March 9, 1952, the seventh anniversary of the Japanese coup de force, Son Ngoc Thanh fled the capital with a radio transmitter and a handful of followers, the most eminent being a leftist intellectual named Ea Sichau. Within a month, Thanh had set up his headquarters along the Thai border in the northern part of Siem Reap, joining forces with an Issarak band under the leadership of Kao Tak. Between 1952 and the Geneva Conference in 1954, Thanh and his supporters were aided to an extent by Thai intelligence agencies. Within his own zone, he experimented with a loosely regimented ideology that he labeled national socialism, traceable in part to his admiration for the Japanese political institutions he had observed in exile during World War II.¹³ It is unclear whether he believed that by going into exile in the Cambodian mountains he could remain in command of the independence movement, as he had seemed to be on his triumphal return to Phnom Penh, but his efforts to win over pro-Communist guerrillas were unsuccessful, and only a few hundred people—most of them idealistic high school students—followed him into the maquis. After independence Thanh’s importance faded, and his following decreased. In the late 1950s and 1960s he eked out a shadowy existence working for the Thai and the Vietnamese in their efforts to destabilize Sihanouk’s regime. His nationalistic fervor through 1957 or so is difficult to question, but his motives for abandoning Phnom Penh in 1952 are difficult to figure out. Perhaps he overestimated the extent of his support among the non-Communist Issarak (or, conversely, underestimated Communist support among the guerrillas). French intelligence reports assert that he still enjoyed the support of some of the older Democrats in Phnom Penh and perhaps he hoped for international support as well. After his exile, however, he was no longer a force to be reckoned with, either by Sihanouk or by the French.¹⁴

By the time of Thanh’s defection in 1952, Communist-controlled guerrilla bands, operating in cooperation with the Viet Minh, occupied perhaps a sixth of Cambodia’s territory and tied down several thousand French troops. Two years later, at the time of the Geneva Conference, some estimates suggested that Communist forces controlled more than half the kingdom.

Where had they come from? When the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) was founded in Hong Kong in 1930, it included no Cambodian members, and indeed only a handful of ethnic Khmer had joined the party before the end of World War II.¹⁵ In 1945–47, however, Viet Minh forces made an effort to support “liberation struggles” in Laos and Cambodia. At the same time, as we have seen, the Thai government had a policy of aiding all anti-French guerrillas in Indochina, and the Khmer Issarak, operating along the Thai frontier and in the Thai-controlled sruk of Battambang and Siem Reap, included men who later formed right-wing and left-wing factions. Left-wingers included the pseudonymous Son Ngoc Minh (in fact a former monk, Achar Mean), Sieu Heng, and Tou Samouth. On April 17, 1950, twenty-five years to the day before the Communist “liberation” of Phnom Penh, the First National Congress of the Khmer Resistance was held in the southwestern part of the kingdom under the leadership of Son Ngoc Minh. The congress, in turn, established the Unified Issarak Front, dominated by ethnic Cambodian members of the ICP. According to a history of the Cambodian Communist Party prepared in 1973, there were only forty of these at the time. As Ben Kiernan has pointed out, however, hundreds more had already been trained in Communist political schools set up under Vietnamese auspices as early as 1947. The most famous of these, founded in 1950, was named after the dissident monk Hem Chieu.¹⁶

The ICP claimed to have dissolved itself in early 1951, and separate Communist parties were soon formed in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. The Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party (KPRP) was founded in September 1951. Its statutes, translated from Vietnamese into Khmer, were drawn from those of the “newly constituted” party in Vietnam. According to party records, the KPRP at this stage had perhaps a thousand members; French intelligence in 1952 estimated Communist-controlled Issarak forces as numbering about five thousand.¹⁷ This latter figure is probably an underestimate, because the French appear to have been unable to infiltrate the party and because it was in their interests, and in those of their client, King Sihanouk, to play down estimates of Communist popularity, especially in public statements. As impatience with French control increased among many segments of the population and as Vietnamese guerrillas elsewhere in Indochina moved from strength to strength, these pro-Vietnamese forces in Cambodia grew in numbers, efficiency, and cohesion. So did the KPRP. By July 1954, eight months after independence, the party had an estimated two thousand members, many of whom were to seek refuge in Vietnam following the Geneva accords. Another index of the party’s growth was the fact that French authorities in 1952 believed that taxes and contributions levied by revolutionaries among the population amounted to the equivalent of half the national budget.

Although the Vietnamese cadres in these guerrilla units gradually relinquished their positions to ethnic Khmer, who were always in control of the KPRP, it is clear that these leaders in the anti-French resistance differed in several ways from their counterparts in the Democratic Party and elsewhere along the political spectrum. For one thing they had come to see their struggle as part of an international movement, connected with Marxist-Leninist laws of history. At another level the liberation of Cambodia from the French did not mean, for them, the continuation of the status quo among Cambodians or the intensification of a supposedly traditional animosity between Cambodians and Vietnamese. They saw liberation from the French, in other words, as a stage in the Cambodian revolution rather than a goal. Moreover, without being puppets of the Vietnamese, the KPRP’s leaders in the early 1950s accepted Vietnam’s leadership in the struggle to liberate Indochina from the French and in the formation of socialist parties throughout the region. In terms of relative power, such a policy made sense. Seen from another perspective, both the French and Sihanouk tried hard to equate anti-French resistance (as opposed to a policy of negotiated independence) with a pro-Vietnamese, pro-Communist, and therefore un-Cambodian betrayal. What was being betrayed, of course, were the hierarchical social arrangements that had characterized Cambodia throughout its history. In 1952–53, in fact, Sihanouk and his entourage frequently and absurdly labeled Son Ngoc Thanh a Communist. A decade later, he reached for the fascist label to describe his former prime minister, then allegedly on the payroll of the United States.

The interplay between nationalism and internationalism inside the Cambodian Communist movement, as in many others elsewhere in the world, plagued the party throughout its history. Should Cambodian interests (whatever they were) come first? What was Cambodian socialism? And how did this, in turn, fit into the history and the alignments of the Vietnamese? By denying any socialist or internationalist component in Cambodian nationalism, one could proclaim Cambodia’s intrinsic greatness, refer repeatedly to Angkor, and make racist slurs against the Vietnamese. This was the route that Sihanouk chose to follow in the late 1960s, and it was also followed by Lon Nol and at several points by the Pol Pot regime. Radicals also employed it occasionally in the early 1950s to gain support. In a speech delivered in November 1951, for example, a Communist spokesman asserted that

the Cambodian race is of noble origin. It is not afraid of death, when it is a question of fighting the enemy, of saving its religion, and of liberating its fatherland. The entire race follows the Buddhist doctrine [sic] which places death above slavery and religious persecution. King Yasovarman is a remarkable example.¹⁸

By seeking legitimacy in the Cambodian past, in antimonarchic heroes, and in aspects of the Buddhist religion, these radicals cast a wider net than the people around King Sihanouk were able or willing to do. They saw independence as a goal in itself, having little effect on the structure of Cambodian society or on their own place inside it. They saw little value in mobilizing the Cambodian people or in destabilizing the regime. For these reasons, heroes like Siwotha, Hem Chieu, and Pou Kombo—favored by the Issaraks, by some of the Democrats and by Communist propaganda at this early stage—quickly disappeared from textbooks and ideology. The fate of these heroes under successive regimes forms an interesting leitmotif in Cambodian history. After years of neglect they reemerged under the Khmer Republic, alongside many former Democrats, only to vanish again under Pol Pot, whose official ideology, while retaining a pro-Angkorean slant, also stressed the impersonality of the regime’s organization. Heroes were ephemeral; the revolutionary organization (angkar padevat) endured. To complete the cycle, some of the discredited heroes reemerged in 1979 under the PRK, providing new names for Phnom Penh streets—names that were altered yet again when Sihanouk became king in 1993.¹⁹ It was also in 1979 that a five-towered depiction of Angkor Wat on the Cambodian flag, favored by the Issarak in the 1950s, replaced the three-towered one favored by previous regimes and reinstated in 1993.

Cambodian university students in France were another source of recruits for Cambodia’s Communist movement. Between 1945 and 1960, several hundred of these young men and women were exposed to an intoxicating mixture of radical politics, personal freedom, and anticolonial solidarity. Some were recruited into the French Communist Party; many more perceived a wide gap between French ideals, life in France and French colonial performance. Others, going further, saw clear connections between prerevolutionary France, prerevolutionary Russia, and twentieth-century Cambodia, ruled by what they saw as a feudal, reactionary elite. Sihanouk’s suppression of the Democratic Party (discussed below) accelerated the radicalization of many young Khmers—including such future leaders of DK as Saloth Sar (Pol Pot), Ieng Sary, Son Sen, and Khieu Samphan.

SIHANOUK AND THE ACHIEVEMENT OF INDEPENDENCE

Throughout the first few months of 1952, the Democrats in the National Assembly continued as best they could to thwart Sihanouk’s policies. Son Ngoc Thanh remained a distant threat. French intelligence sources estimated that almost two-thirds of the kingdom was no longer under the day-to-day control of the Phnom Penh government. To Sihanouk and his conservative advisers, the time had come for a dramatic series of gestures to gain the country’s independence forcibly from France and to maintain themselves in power.

In a scathing speech to the assembly in early June 1952, Sihanouk declared, “All is in disorder. Hierarchy no longer exists. There is no rational employment of talent. . . . If it is right to be dissident, this means that all the best patriots will seek refuge in the forest.”²⁰ Soon afterward, with the connivance of the French, Sihanouk staged a coup against his own government. Moroccan troops secretly brought up from Saigon for the purpose surrounded the National Assembly, and the king dismissed the Democrats from the cabinet. No shots were fired. Sihanouk assumed power as prime minister, appointing his own cabinet and leaving the Democratic-controlled assembly to wither on the vine. At this point, he demanded a mandate from his people, promising to deliver complete independence within three years, i.e., before June 1955. Although no referendum was carried out at this time, Sihanouk acted as if his mandate had been granted and began what he was later to call his crusade for independence.

Although the coup had been peaceful, demonstrations against it broke out in Cambodia’s lycées, where antimonarchic, pro-Democrat sentiment was strong. Radical Cambodian students in France referred to Sihanouk as a traitor to the nation. In a vituperative manifesto issued to the king on July 6, 1952, the students called on him to abdicate, blaming him for recent French military attacks, for dissolving the assembly, and for negotiating with the French instead of fighting them.²¹ The manifesto went on to accuse Sihanouk’s ancestors Sisowath and Norodom of collaborating with the French against what they called national heroes. The remainder of 1952, it seems, was a trying time for Sihanouk, as the French in effect decided to call his bluff.

He was aided by the Democrats’ intransigence. The assembly refused to approve his government’s budget in January 1953. Declaring the nation to be in danger, Sihanouk dissolved the assembly, promulgated martial law, and ordered the arrest of several Democratic assemblymen, who were now deprived of parliamentary immunity. As V.M. Reddi asserted, Sihanouk was acting out a well-planned scenario. He justified it informally by telling a French correspondent, “I am the natural ruler of the country . . . and my authority has never been questioned.”²² He was appealing to the people over the heads of the elected officials, just as he now planned (without saying so at the time) to appeal directly to the French.

The king’s newly acquired political energy and his insistence upon independence shocked many French and members of the royal family. Some journalists came to terms with the king’s awakening by labeling him insane, perhaps because he had been what they called comical and exotic (i.e., cooperative) for so long.

In February 1953 Sihanouk announced that he was traveling to France for his health—a tactic he was often to employ during the remaining years of his reign. In fact, as he revealed in his memoirs, he departed with meticulously prepared dossiers listing outstanding matters to be discussed and negotiated with the French. His illness was political but the stakes were high. When he arrived in France, he wrote immediately to the aged and constitutionally powerless French president, Vincent Auriol, warning him that “I have based my future as king and that of my dynasty on the policy of adhesion to the French Union and collaboration with France, to which I am and shall be loyal.”²³ He added that if the Communists invaded Cambodia, he could not guarantee that his subjects would act to defend French interests.

Auriol’s advisers apparently thought that Sihanouk’s long letter and another that arrived soon afterward were alarmist, and Auriol waited two weeks to answer them. When he did he said only that he had studied the letters with care and asked Sihanouk to lunch. At that point, officials in the French government concerned with Indochina respectfully told the king to return to Cambodia, hinting that he might even be replaced as king.²⁴

For the next month or so, Sihanouk traveled slowly homeward, pausing to give press and radio interviews in Canada, the United States, and Japan in which he publicized Cambodia’s plight and the intransigence of the French. He used this tactic of publicizing supposedly confidential discussions for the remainder of his life. In 1953, however, it was a bold course to follow, for he was gambling not only with the French and potential foreign allies but also with the opposition at home, with the Vietnamese, and with the KPRP.

He arrived back in Phnom Penh in May and dramatically offered his life in exchange for Cambodia’s independence. Negotiations in Paris proceeded slowly, so in June the king went into voluntary exile, first to Thailand, where he was not made welcome, and then to the autonomous military region of Siem Reap, where he took up residence at his villa near Angkor Wat and refused to speak with French officials in Phnom Penh. In Vietnam the war was going badly for the French, and it had become increasingly unpopular at home. Sihanouk’s increasing resistance to the French and the prospect of increased fighting in Cambodia caused them to consider his demands more seriously than they had planned.

In October 1953 the French caved in and granted the king authority over Cambodia’s armed forces, judiciary, and foreign affairs. Their economic hold on the kingdom, however—particularly in the import-export sphere and in the highly profitable rubber plantations—remained intact. Despite these remnants of colonial rule, Sihanouk is correct, on balance, in interpreting the French collapse at this point as a personal victory. Using the same communications network that in 1916 and again in 1951 had frightened French authorities, Sihanouk now ordered officials in the sruk between Siem Reap and Phnom Penh to organize demonstrations in his favor. As he drove back to his capital on the second anniversary of Son Ngoc Thanh’s return from exile, hundreds of thousands of people lined the road, uncertain perhaps what independence would mean but at this stage happy enough to applaud their king and what they hoped would be an end to fighting. Soon afterward, Sihanouk was officially proclaimed a national hero.²⁵

In the short term, France’s departure from the scene had three effects. In the first place, Cambodia’s independence and the relatively low level of fighting in the kingdom between November 1953 and the middle of 1954 strengthened the hand of Sihanouk’s delegation to the Geneva Conference in the summer of 1954. The delegation, led by Nhek Tioulong, took a stubborn view of indigenous Communists, who were allowed no part in the deliberations and were also frozen out by Vietnamese Communist delegates eager to earn concessions for Vietnam and, to a lesser degree, for pro-Vietnamese Pathet Lao forces in Laos.²⁶ Surprisingly, perhaps, many Cambodian radicals continued to accept leadership from Vietnam throughout the 1950s and 1960s. For over a thousand of them, 1954 marked the beginning of a long march that would take them to exile in Hanoi, not to return to Cambodia until the early 1970s when most of them were killed by U.S. bombing, by Lon Nol’s army, or by internal Communist purges at the instigation of Pol Pot, who by then was the leader of the Cambodian Communist Party. A few hardy survivors of this group were given cabinet positions in the post-1979 government of Cambodia, established by the Vietnamese in the wake of their invasion.²⁷

Another consequence of Sihanouk’s so-called crusade was that the Democratic Party and Son Ngoc Thanh, who had failed to deliver independence, lost much of their appeal. At the same time, figures further to the right who had remained loyal to the king, such as Lt. Col. Lon Nol, Nhek Tioulong, and Penn Nouth, now gained in stature and were favored for government posts.

Perhaps the most lasting consequence of independence in 1953 was that Sihanouk felt he had obtained a mandate to govern Cambodia as he saw fit. The subsequent decimation of the KPRP and the eclipse of the Democrats gave him the impression (encouraged by many foreign visitors and by his entourage) that his crusade had been not only successful but also astute and that the suffusion of Cambodia the state by Sihanouk the man was a salutary political development. A consequence of this, especially evident in the 1960s, was that Sihanouk felt no obligation to be at peace with Thailand and South Vietnam or to grant freedom of action to people he disliked. Just as he had gone it alone in 1953 and won, so Cambodia could be independent from its perennially hostile neighbors by courting the friendship of such faraway powers as China, France, and Yugoslavia.

While this was going on, the forces that had been unleashed in the summer of 1945 fell into disrepute. Sihanouk and his advisers, never partial to social change, correctly saw that these forces endangered the stability of the country. And, as we have seen, the inherent stability of Cambodia, often the subject of absurd romanticism among colonial writers, has rested throughout nearly all of Cambodian history on the acceptance of the status quo as defined by those in power.

What, then, did independence mean? The removal of the French probably meant little to most Cambodians, who continued to pay taxes to finance an unresponsive government in Phnom Penh (or Udong or Angkor) whose so-called royal work, almost by definition, removed it from contact with the people and made officials, for the most part, self-centered, concerned with status, and ill at ease with anyone else’s aspirations. It was certainly just, in other words, to remove the Cambodian elite and the comparatively small intellectual class from French control. That removal left these people free not to govern themselves so much as to govern others without vigorously seeking their consent. Because the people in the countryside had never been asked to play a part in any government, they saw few short-term rewards in resisting those in power, who were now at least Cambodians rather than French or Vietnamese.²⁸ Although Cambodia celebrated its independence at the end of 1953 and gained military autonomy after the Geneva Conference in 1954 when Viet Minh troops and their Cambodian sympathizers took refuge in North Vietnam, it can be argued that the elections of 1955, and the emergence of Sihanouk as Cambodia’s major political actor, marked a sharper turning point in Cambodia’s political history.

The elections had been stipulated by the Geneva Conference as part of a healing process for the non-Communist segments of Indochina. The Democrats were weakened by factional quarrels and by nearly three years away from power, but they were still the best-organized political party, and their leaders looked forward to winning the elections. Many younger Democrats opposed the apparently pro-American policies Sihanouk had been following since Geneva and argued that Cambodia should be neutral in its alignments. They shared this line with a pro-Communist Party that had just taken shape in Cambodia, known as the Krom Pracheachon, or People’s Group. Cambodia’s hard-core Communist Party, founded in 1951, remained concealed from view. Younger Democrats moved their own party to the left in late 1954, pushing such stalwarts as Sims Var and Son Sann aside and replacing them with antimonarchic neutralists like Keng Vannsak and Svay So and with even more radical figures including Thiounn Mumm, then a member of the French Communist Party. Mumm cooperated with Saloth Sar, who had spent some months in the Vietnamese maquis in 1953–54, to coordinate the Democrats’ tactics with those of the Pracheachon. Many observers in Cambodia at the beginning of 1955 expected the two parties to win a majority of seats in the assembly.

The revival of the Democrats and the popularity of the Pracheachon distressed conservative politicians in Phnom Penh and enraged the king who, as the self-proclaimed “father of Cambodian independence,” had hoped to call the country’s political shots. Outside the capital and intellectual circles his own popularity remained high. A referendum in February 1955 asked voters to choose between a white ballot with his picture on it and a black one inscribed with the Cambodian word for no. The vote was enhanced by the fact that discarding the king’s picture was seen as disrespectful and grounds for arrest. Then and later, Sihanouk was adept at reinforcing his genuine popularity with bullying tactics so as to gain almost 100 percent approval.

Gambling that he was now more popular than the political parties, Sihanouk abdicated the throne in early March without warning and entered political life as a private citizen after designating his father, Prince Suramarit, as the new king. Soon afterward, Sihanouk founded a national political movement, the Sangkum Reastr Niyum, usually translated as People’s Socialist Community. To be a member of the movement, one had to abjure membership in any other political group, as Sihanouk’s intention was to smash the existing political parties. Several of these folded in the course of 1955, and their leaders rallied to the Sangkum. This left the Liberals, the Democrats, and the Pracheachon to contest the elections. The leader of the Liberals, Prince Norodom Norindeth, was offered a diplomatic post in Paris, which he accepted, leaving his party in disarray.

Shortly after founding the Sangkum, Prince Sihanouk, as he was now called, went to Bandung in Indonesia to attend a conference of African and Asian political leaders. Before he left he declared that he had abdicated so as to defeat the “politicians, the rich, and the educated, who are accustomed to using . . . their knowledge to deceive others and to place innumerable obstacles in the path over which I must lead the people.”²⁹ In his absence civil servants were bullied into joining the Sangkum in large numbers, a move which deprived the Democrats of several hundred registered members.

Sihanouk’s tactics took the Democrats and Pracheachon by surprise, as did his decision at Bandung to co-opt their neutralist foreign policy while holding onto U.S. military and economic aid. At the conference, Sihanouk was lionized by many anti-Western heads of state, including Indonesia’s Sukarno and China’s Zhou Enlai. When he returned to Cambodia, he hastened to garnish his new importance with electoral approval.

The 1955 elections, the last before the 1990s to be freely contested by a range of political parties, also marked the first attempt of many to mobilize the security apparatus of the state in favor of one particular group. Between May and September 1955, several opposition newspapers were shut down and their editors were imprisoned without trial. Democrat and Pracheachon candidates were harassed, and some campaign workers were killed in a rough-and-tumble campaign waged against vaguely defined special interests on behalf of Cambodia’s so-called little people. Voters were intimidated on polling day as well, and several ballot boxes thought to contain Democrat ballots conveniently disappeared. When the votes were counted, Sangkum candidates had won all the seats in the assembly and over three-quarters of the vote. The understaffed International Control Commission, set up by the Geneva Conference to oversee the elections, was unable or unwilling to sort out campaign offenses, perhaps because the generally pro-Western Indian and Canadian representatives outvoted the pro-Communist Poles on the commission.³⁰

A new kind of politics had overtaken and replaced the less robust constitutional variety that had endured by fits and starts since 1947. Politics in Cambodia between 1955 and 1970 were characterized by Sihanouk’s monopoly of political power and the emergence of Cambodia onto the international stage. Sihanouk’s style was widely popular and the kingdom prospered. As in the past, however, this prosperity was to a large extent dependent on the behavior of Cambodia’s neighbors and on the policies of larger, more distant powers. Cambodia was neutral and at peace, in other words, for as long as its neutrality served the interests of other states. Sihanouk’s formidable political skills may have postponed the apocalypse that overtook his country in the 1970s, but they did not prevent it. In terms of what happened then and later, many Cambodians in recent years have seen his time in power as constituting a golden age. Others have come to perceive his ruling style as domineering and absurd, closing off any possibility of pluralism, political maturity, sound planning, or rational debate. By treating Cambodia as a personal fief, his subjects as children, and his opponents as traitors, Sihanouk did much to set the agenda, unwittingly, for the lackadaisical chaos of the Khmer Republic, the horrors of Democratic Kampuchea, and the single-party politics of the postrevolutionary era.