When the War Was Over (4 page)

Cambodia was not stuck off in a forgotten corner of Asia but was dead center in the white-hot fire of the Second Indochina War. South Vietnam and Laos on the eastern and northern boundaries were battlegrounds, Thailand to the west became the American rear guard, home to the jet fighter planes and idling spot for American soldiers on rest and recreation leaves. Sihanouk's pastoral Cambodia was the unlikely neutral spot in the middle.

At first the war seemed to unite Cambodians. Komphot saw little difference between Sihanouk and his most radical teachers on the subject of the Vietnam War. They all opposed American intervention in Vietnam. They all supported a neutralist policy for Cambodia. During the first years of the war all whom Komphot admired supported Sihanouk's foreign policy, even if they continued to object to his stifling control over their lives back home.

By the time war broke out, Sihanouk was known worldwide for his strong belief in neutralism. In 1955 he attended the Bandung Conference, which argued that developing nations should resist ties to either superpower and chart their own courses. The communist world generally applauded Bandung; the United States did not. The next year, in 1956, the United States tested Sihanouk's neutralism and asked Cambodia to join the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, a defense pact of American client states. Sihanouk refused. As punishment, the Saigon regime proclaimed an economic blockage against Cambodia and curtailed shipping up the Mekong River to Phnom Penh, then Cambodia's only port. The episode served to illustrate why Sihanouk was so opposed to military pacts.

The open conflict in Vietnam, however, brought new pressure on Sihanouk to at least modify his neutralism. Both sides wanted Cambodia's valuable logistics lines and use of the country for their base areas. It was the United States that earliest and most firmly pushed Sihanouk, telling him that neutrality was tantamount to supporting the communists. At first Sihanouk listened to the Americans and said he needed American muscle to produce solid security guarantees between Cambodia and its noncommunist neighbors, Thailand and South Vietnam. But the United States refused. And Sihanouk was convinced that the United States had been behind a plot to overthrow him the year before in 1959. (He was correct.) Sihanouk's neutralism was tempered thereafter by a strong and well-earned personal distrust of the Americans.

The turning point came in 1963 for Vietnam, for Cambodia, for Sihanouk, for Komphot, and for the right and left in Cambodia.

It was Komphot's last year in lycée. He and his friends should have been engrossed in deciding where they would attend university, what their courses of study would be. But the war would not allow them to remain innocents. Nor would Sihanouk, who began to fear for himself as well as for Cambodia. First the neutralist foreign minister of Laos, Quinim Pholsena, was gunned down at his home by rightists who destroyed the united front coalition formed that year to stem the tide of war in Laos. Pholsena was a like-minded friend of Sihanouk. If he could be killed and the war expanded in Laos, what would happen in Cambodia?

A month later, in May 1963, a nonviolent Buddhist demonstration in Hue, South Vietnam, was broken up by local military, who opened fire with machine guns and killed nine people, seven of them children. South Vietnam exploded. A seventy-three-year-old Buddhist monk burned himself to death in Saigon in protest. Three more Buddhist monks and a nun committed suicide in August protesting the repressive policies of the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. Nothing touched Buddhist Cambodia like these horrors. Sihanouk publicly said that Diem, a Roman Catholic with little sympathy for Buddhism, could last no more than a few months.

Phnom Penh was riveted to the war. Sihanouk was incensed and announced that the United States and Diem were ruined. He also broke political relations with South Vietnam. “The fate of Vietnam appears to me to be sealed,” he wrote, predicting a communist victory. “That of my country will certainly be so in a little while. But at least we have the meager consolation of having often warned the Western world.”

On November 1, 1963, Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu were assassinated in a coup d'état approved and facilitated by the United States. Sihanouk was among the first world figures to see the American hand in the coup and condemn it as a criminal, cold-blooded betrayal of an ally. He immediately rejected all American aid to Cambodia. Sihanouk wanted to keep the United States out of Cambodian affairs altogether and reduce the possibility that Americans would plot his overthrow or death.

At home, Sihanouk's response to the Vietnam War was not so straightforward. In 1963 he instituted drastic changes that fed deep anger and dissent in both the left and the right, and that ultimately brought about his own downfall.

Despite his sympathy for the communists abroad, Sihanouk was wary of leftists in Cambodia. In 1963, with the war exploding in neighboring Vietnam,
he moved openly and dramatically against the left. The troubles at home began with student strikes in a northwestern province that spread to Phnom Penh. The initial protests involved accusations of local police brutality. They developed into an attack on all authority and particularly Prince Sihanouk.

Sihanouk blamed the left for the problems and forced the leading leftists to flee Phnom Penh. Among them were the top central committee members of the Khmer Rouge, who had reconstituted the country's communist movement in 1960, shortly after communists in neighboring South Vietnam had officially launched their armed insurgency against Diem in 1959. Most of these Khmer Rouge fled to a Vietnamese communist base along the border, to the jungle maquis, hoping to lead their own insurgency against Sihanouk one day. A few others fled to France. Their exodus sent a chill through the student and intellectual community of the city. Komphot remembers confusion about the war and the treatment of leftists in Phnom Penh. Sihanouk called himself a socialist, yet he punished the people who called themselves socialists and said they were dedicated to modernizing and rationalizing Cambodia's society and economy.

Sihanouk's attack on the left was direct. His move against the right was not meant as such. It was an attempt to straighten out the Cambodian economy after Sihanouk dropped American aid. Cambodia's army was supported by that aid, and so was Cambodia's balance of payments. Without that money, Cambodia's army deteriorated as the armies of neighboring countries were growing. Sihanouk's military commanders despaired of defending Cambodia should either Vietnam or Thailand attack. The military became the center of what grew to be a right-wing rebellion against Sihanouk and produced the 1970 coup d'état.

Furthermore, Sihanouk launched a program to further nationalize the economy and solve the problems created by the loss of U.S. aid. The prince nationalized some businesses, the banks, and the import-export trade. He set fixed prices to chase away foreign competition and restrict foreign investment. As Thailand boomed with business and U.S. war-related aid, Cambodia was growing at less than 5 percent each year. To the country's small-business community, the elite and the middle class of Phnom Penh, this was considered a travesty. They, too, were key players in the 1970 coup.

Nothing seemed to make sense. Komphot and his friends were at a loss to understand the turmoil. Their parents, their student leaders, the politicians, and Sihanouk himself were saying contradictory things about the war and Cambodia's future. The country was dividing, at least in Phnom Penh.
Komphot saw his own future threatened, not only by the Vietnam War but by the limited choices presented to him in Sihanouk's Cambodia.

At this juncture, in 1963, Komphot left for studies abroad. He felt he was escaping the narrow, increasingly tense life of Phnom Penh. And he decided to go far away, not to France, like most of his fellows, but to Canada, where he studied first at Laval University, then McGill University. He kept up correspondence with his family and friends in Cambodia. He was in Canada when the United States sent its forces into battle in Vietnam in 1965, and he was frightened. From his vantage point he understood the power of the United States better than he might have in France, and he understood the fervor of the Americans' anticommunist crusade. But instead of plunging into debates about the war, Komphot discovered he was losing his appetite for politics. He thought this the result of the “Anglo-Saxon” temperament he believed he acquired in Canada.

In Canada, Komphot discovered he most wanted to study economics. He studied the theory of socialism and capitalism, and appreciated the primitive level of debate in his own country. He turned to the practical side and studied finance and business. He finished his schooling and returned to Cambodia in 1968. He left Canada as the American anti-war protest movement surged and the number of American deaths in Vietnam mounted. He left North America convinced he could best help his country by concentrating on building up the economy, not by joining the endless political debates.

But on his arrival home, Komphot learned his new ideas were of little use in Sihanouk's Cambodia. By 1968, Sihanouk's nationalization program had been in effect for five years and had disappointed everyone. Sihanouk was taking businesses from businessmen and turning them over to underpaid and unqualified bureaucrats. Sihanouk tried to create a government-controlled welfare state without the money or the political support required. By 1967 the prince had purged all the leading leftists. He had turned to the rightists to administer his socialist agenda. No one wanted to listen to Komphot and his ideas for creating new joint private and state ventures. The Vietnam War and the exploding political situation in Cambodia were the only topics under consideration.

Komphot entered the world of banking, in Phnom Penh the world of nationalized banks. Inexorably, Komphot was drawn back to political discussions, and for the next two years his life was that of the majority of the elite in Phnom Penh. He heard and passed on rumors that spoke of war. Sihanouk now openly screamed against the Khmer Rouge. Before he had dismissed the leftists. By 1968 he was warning that the Khmer Rouge
wanted to drag Cambodia into the Vietnam War. He said the leftists were taking orders from the Vietnamese communists.

Komphot and his friends did not believe Sihanouk's charges against the leftists. Some of his friends actually fled the capital to join the Khmer Rouge. Others stayed behind and waited, fearing any fighting would draw the United States or Vietnam, or both, into Cambodia. Komphot was among this group, a majority. Despite his pent-up anger against Sihanouk, Komphot still approved of the prince's promise to remain aloof from the Vietnam War.

New rumors circulated around the city. By 1970 the elite were being told that Sihanouk had sided with the Vietnamese communists and had allowed the communists sanctuary rights inside Cambodia. In the countryside, the Khmer Rouge grew more bold in their attempts to mount a peasant rebellion against Phnom Penh. The city was braced for a showdown.

On March 18, 1970, the rightists mounted a coup against Sihanouk. To Komphot and his friends it seemed a blessing. They likened the coup to the founding of the French Republic. The coup leaders promised to instate a Khmer Republic that would be modern, democratic, and truly neutral. The city was buoyant with enthusiasm. There were promises to end the corrupt, freewheeling politics of Sihanouk with efficient, clean, modern government. It seemed too good to be true—a republic without a revolution, without being drawn into the Vietnam War.

The illusions of a republic did not last the year. The coup seemed headed by two figures—Prince Sirik Matak and General Lon Nol. Matak was the scion of the Sisowath branch of the Cambodian royal family, which had been passed over in 1941 by the French who then awarded the crown to Sihanouk. Matak was Sihanouk's rival and his opposite. He was a friend of business and a friend of the United States. He was so tied to the United States that many Cambodians assumed he must have received its approval for the coup and its promises of support. Matak represented modernity, elegance, and ties to American aid that Sihanouk had rejected. He was also the man who most appealed to men like Komphot. Phnom Penh's professional classes saw Matak as their country's savior.

Lon Nol was a more distant figure. He had been Sihanouk's police chief and military leader for years; he was considered a perfect number two for Matak. He brought the military against Sihanouk. He seemed a flexible man, capable previously of leading delegations to Beijing for Sihanouk to develop close ties with the Chinese communists and now eager to work for Matak.

Komphot and his friends proved to be quite gullible. The coup brought war, not peace, to Cambodia. Matak was not in charge; Lon Nol became the head man, a dictator.

Within days the new Khmer Republic was embroiled in border disputes ignited by the Vietnamese communists. The inadequate Cambodian army was pressed into service. In May the United States invaded Cambodia, presumably as an ally but without informing Cambodia beforehand, to chase down the Vietnamese communists. Peasants demonstrated in various provinces asking for the return of Sihanouk. Sihanouk, in Beijing, agreed to become head of a front to fight the new Khmer Republic. The front was a cover for the Khmer Rouge.

It took some months for Komphot to grasp his own innocence. He accepted a short assignment to travel abroad and promote the new republic and squash rumors that the coup had been led by military leaders who were in the pocket of the Americans and itched to pull Cambodia into the Vietnam War. He was chosen because he was one of the few Khmers who spoke English.

When he returned a few months later, Komphot felt a fool. Lon Nol had already usurped most of the power. He had changed the climate of the capital, as promised—but it was now more corrupt than under Sihanouk and the business of the day was not modernization but war. Lon Nol was demanding military aid from the United States and, in exchange, putting the fate of Cambodia in the hands of the Americans and their “Vietnamization” policy