Cambodia's Curse (6 page)

When Norodom died in 1904, his successor, King Sisowath, worked with the French to at last evict the Thai from western Cambodia. Otherwise, he was a compliant king. Soon after he took office he really did abolish slavery, as Norodom had promised forty years earlier. He realized he had to give up something if he wanted the French to free his state from his hated enemy.

 

Having secured Cambodia’s territorial integrity, through the midtwentieth century the French imposed onerous taxes and fees, but they offered little in return. Only in 1935 did they build the nation’s first high school, in Phnom Penh. Even so, they used it primarily to educate members of the royal family and train mandarin children to work in the French administration.

In midcentury the French began sending a few dozen talented students to Paris to study, hoping they could educate a few of them to do serious work in the colonial government. These were young people, generally in their early twenties, who had no experience with the world outside their villages or perhaps Phnom Penh. They had never seen a
television and perhaps not even a radio. Cambodia had little in the way of newspapers, and so they knew almost nothing of the world outside.

These young students arrived in Paris and found a society they had no idea existed. Most shocking for them were the French people, quite wealthy by Cambodian standards, who were free to do pretty much what they wanted. For many Cambodians this was transformative. Suddenly they questioned every founding principle of the Khmer state. Who said they could not aspire to more—to a life like these Frenchmen lived? Why should they be satisfied with the stunted lives Cambodians were indoctrinated to accept without question?

One of these students made this view plain in an article published in a Khmer student magazine. The author wrote, “The King is absolute. He attempts to destroy the people’s interest when the people are in a position of weakness.” The “absolute king uses nice words, but his heart remains wicked.” The author of these words was a twenty-seven-year-old student named Saloth Sar. The world would know him later by his nom de guerre, Pol Pot.

Communism was fashionable in Europe at the time. Saloth Sar and some of the other Cambodians embraced it and then brought the movement home. After returning to Cambodia they would find common cause with Vietnamese rebels who were fighting the French for their own freedom.

Yet at a young age Saloth Sar was by no means ideologically pure. His older sister, Saloth Roeung, was the favorite concubine of the next king, Sisowath Monivong. As a young boy Saloth Sar liked to visit her at the palace—probably because giggling concubines would gather around him and, with their hands, offer sexual favors.

When King Sisowath Monivong died in 1941, Saloth Roeung sat at his bedside. The French chose Sisowath’s nephew Norodom Sihanouk as the new king. He was nineteen years old, and, once again, the French assumed he would be compliant. But in fact, as king, he would be responsible for winning freedom from the French in 1953, a year before the Vietnamese won their own freedom at Dien Bien Phu.

Sihanouk was a complex man, a clever, vain, and dedicated narcissist who ruled Cambodia for twenty-nine years and wielded great influence for decades longer. He was responsible for significant social change—and also great damage. He talked the talk of limited democracy but was brutal and merciless with his political opponents. Hundreds simply disappeared. In spite of his democratic overtures, he wanted to be the political leader of his country, not just a monarch perched upon a throne. So in 1955 he resigned as king and formed a political party. He ruled as Prince Sihanouk, chief of state, for the next fifteen years.

He built schools and universities—primarily for bragging rights at international meetings—even though he had no educated faculty to staff them. He held Cambodia’s first-ever democratic elections for parliament in 1946. But when he disapproved of the outcome, he and his allies staged a coup.

Prince Sihanouk’s changes aside, Cambodian culture continued as it had for a millennium. Under Sihanouk, as historian Michael Vickery put it, government officials “grew wealthy while the books showed red,” and the economy “was a continuation of the traditional practice of officials extracting a percentage of what they collected for the state; and no one of the elite was ever severely called to account or forced to repay what he had collected from the public till.” After a thousand years, nothing had changed.

For almost a century, the French had served as Cambodia’s patrons. Soon after independence, the United States stepped in to fill that role and began supplying copious quantities of foreign aid—so much money, Sihanouk said, that Cambodia was succumbing to the “dollar god.” His mandarins were ladling vast personal fortunes from the foreign-aid accounts.

Sihanouk liked to inveigh against corruption but then lived a lifestyle of almost unimaginable extravagance. His wealth’s source remained obscure. Years later, in the early 1990s, Secretary of State James Baker visited Sihanouk in Paris at the Cambodian ambassador’s residence. With Baker was John Bolton, then an assistant secretary of state. “It was 10 a.m., and he was serving champagne,” Bolton remembered
with obvious disgust. “He reached down and poured a glass for his dog. It was like Louis XIV.”

In 1963 Sihanouk told the United States he wanted no more aid money. Until that point the United States had supplied millions upon millions. The money, he complained, was “a corrupting influence,” but he was also straining to keep Cambodia out of the Vietnam War. Distancing himself from Washington, be believed, would help ensure that. Still, this act, more than anything else, proved to be his undoing. Where would all his mandarins purloin their incomes now?

In 1965 Sihanouk cut off diplomatic relations with the United States altogether and threw his lot in with China, whose leaders courted and flattered him. That set his aides to plotting. After all, the Chinese were not nearly as generous as the Americans had been.

All of this occurred as several of those Cambodian students who had studied in France began building an underground Communist Party based in Phnom Penh. Party members tried to remain covert, but they couldn’t hide from Sihanouk. He regarded the growth of the communist movement with great alarm and warned in 1961, during a tour of the provinces, that a Communist regime in Cambodia would “deprive the individual of all that is dear to him—basic freedoms and the joys of family life—and turn him into a producing machine which over time has all the human values sucked out of it.” Over the next decade he arrested anyone he caught who appeared to be associated with the movement and generally treated its members with ruthless repression.

In the mid-1960s, the movement’s leaders fled Phnom Penh, set up headquarters in the countryside, and, in 1967, began a national military uprising. The four Communist Party standing committee members who made that decision were Saloth Sar, who later changed his name to Pol Pot; Ieng Sary, who became the Khmer Rouge foreign minister; Nuon Chea, known as “Brother Number Two”; and So Phim, who was commander of the Communist Party’s Eastern Zone.

By the beginning of 1970 the Khmer Communists controlled not quite 20 percent of Cambodia’s territory—principally the rural areas around their headquarters. Their future appeared uncertain at best.

In March 1970, however, everything changed. A military coup forced Sihanouk out of office while he was on vacation in Paris. The new head of government was Lon Nol, the nation’s richly corrupt prime minister. Before leaving for Paris, Sihanouk often remarked that Lon Nol and his compatriots were “more patriots of the dollar than patriots of Cambodia.”

Phnom Penh officialdom cheered the news. Lon Nol was close to the United States. Restored relations with Washington would allow the mandarins to dip back into the till. Car dealers and building contractors jubilated. But these people, the economic elite of Phnom Penh, represented but a minuscule portion of Cambodian society. At least 90 percent of the population lived in the provinces, and these people were stunned and ashamed. They adored Sihanouk. To them he was just short of a god. How could anyone overthrow the God-king?

All over the country people demonstrated against the coup. Hundreds of villagers marched on Phnom Penh. In 1970 Lon Nol ordered his troops to open fire on them. They scattered, ran back into the jungle. Later, several of them told reporters they were so angry about that episode that they rushed to join the Khmer Rouge.

Fury, of course, consumed Sihanouk. He flew to Beijing to seek advice. And when he heard that the new regime was vilifying him on Cambodian radio, he declared that he wanted “justice”—in other words, revenge. While this poisonous state of mind consumed him, his friend Pham Van Dong, the premier of North Vietnam, asked him if now he was willing to work with the Khmer Rouge to overthrow Lon Nol, journalist Philip Short wrote in his biography,
Pol Pot
. Sihanouk said yes, and the North Vietnamese passed word along to Zhou Enlai, the Chinese premier.

A few days later, just a few weeks after the coup, Sihanouk announced that he had formed the National United Front of Kampuchea. He was now allied with the Khmer Rouge. The prince, on the radio, urged his subjects to join the Khmer Rouge. Thousands upon
thousands heard him and complied. Then and only then did the Khmer Rouge movement begin to take off.

 

Much of the scholarship on the Khmer Rouge was written in the first few years after their reign. And most of that was colored by the general disdain, endemic among journalists and authors, for Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and America’s misadventure in Vietnam. It’s hard to overstate the contempt so many people felt, especially Europeans. The more recent broad, scornful view of George W. Bush seems mild in comparison.

In this climate William Shawcross, a British journalist, wrote his seminal book,
Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia
. It concluded that the American bombing of Cambodia, intended to destroy Vietcong sanctuaries there, drove the peasantry to the Khmer Rouge and ensured their victory. The liberal media (and I was a card-carrying member; I read and admired his book while flying to Cambodia in 1979) heaped adulation on Shawcross.

Now, thirty years later, with passions cooled, it is quite clear that his conclusion was wrong. The American bombing began a year before the Lon Nol coup. Sihanouk had quietly acquiesced, saying he wanted to be sure the Vietnam War did not spread into his own country. And in 1970 the Khmer Rouge was still a negligible force.

At the same time, since the late 1950s Sihanouk had spent a decade cultivating the Chinese leadership, Mao Tse-tung and Zhou Enlai. They grew to be Sihanouk admirers and friends—at a time when China had very few friends. Mao gave Sihanouk a magnificent mansion on Anti-Imperialist Street in Beijing and feted him every time he came to town—which was often. The Chinese also happened to be the Khmer Rouge’s primary patrons and advisers. Would Mao and Zhou have authorized Pol Pot to overthrow their very good friend, Prince Norodom Sihanouk?

Lon Nol was, of course, a different animal with different motivations. He gave the Americans carte blanche to bomb wherever they
pleased. In 1970, shortly after Sihanouk was thrown from office, he told an American television interviewer why he thought Lon Nol was so eager to give the United States whatever it wanted: “Some officers in our army and many deputies and many members of government want to be your allies because they want your dollars. They don’t think about the destiny or the fate of our homeland.” Even angry and embittered, his words rang true. As before, he called them “more patriots for dollars than for Cambodia.”

When Lon Nol took power, the Khmer Rouge controlled little more than the areas around their jungle redoubts. More recent scholarship has suggested that the American bombing, for all its wanton, deadly results, so disrupted the nation that it delayed the Khmer Rouge’s ultimate victory until after the B-52 campaign had ended, in August 1973.

If Lon Nol had not staged his mercenary coup, most likely the Khmer Rouge would never have come to power. That is, of course, Sihanouk’s view, but other Cambodians hold it, too. Hem Heng, the Cambodian ambassador to Washington, said, “If not for the Lon Nol coup, there would be no Khmer Rouge.” But in his view, that did not let the United States off the hook. “They supported the coup,” he said. “They supported Lon Nol.” The available evidence suggests but does not necessarily prove that theory.

Years later Sihanouk told James Garrand, an Australian television documentary maker: “We cannot remake history,” but “I don’t think I made serious mistakes. You should see Mr. Lon Nol because if we have to go back to the starting point, would he still like to destroy his country by a coup d’état against Sihanouk? Or would he like to restore Sihanouk as head of state? I think your question should be put to Mr. Lon Nol.”

Sihanouk is partially correct: Lon Nol does share responsibility for what was to come. But it is beyond question that after the prince was thrown from office, by allying himself with the Khmer Rouge and urging his countrymen to join, Sihanouk condemned his people to damnation.

V
ietnamese called Nui Sam a mountain, but really it is not much larger than a hill, part of a range called the Seven Mountains, just outside Chau Doc City in southern Vietnam. Each year villagers hold a festival at a beautiful Buddhist temple at Nui Sam’s base. Another Buddhist shrine sits amid the brush on the hill’s peak. But for Kenneth Quinn and other Americans serving in Vietnam during the war, the incline offered something far more interesting: a magnificent view of southeastern Cambodia, from the Vietnam border all the way up the meandering Mekong River.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Quinn was a young State Department officer serving as vice consul in Chau Doc, a four- or five-hour drive south of Saigon—and a long way from Dubuque, Iowa, where he grew up. His job: to win the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese and prevent Vietcong from making inroads among the population. Toward that end Quinn and his colleagues were building roads and irrigation canals while offering hybrid seeds and advice to rice farmers. At the same time, in the North, the U.S. military was gradually losing the war.