A look back at Lon Nol’s ill-fated gamble on democracy in Cambodia
Far left: Brigadier General Dien Del (left in photo) watches a military parade in Phnom Penh during Independence Day celebrations, November 9, 1974. phOTO SUPPLIEDAbove: President Lon Nol greets Thomas Anders, the US embassy’s then-deputy head of mission, at the Presidential Palace in Chamkarmon, now the Senate compound, circa 1972. COURTESY DOCUMENTATION CENTRE OF CAMBODIA
Left: A young Chhang Song (top left in photo) sits behind a row of Viet Cong prisoners at a press conference in the early 1970s. The military high command presented the five captured cadres to the press as evidence that Vietnamese communists were encroaching on Cambodian territory as part of their ongoing war against the regime in South Vietnam. COURTESY DOCUMENTATION CENTRE OF CAMBODIA
Chhang Song, the Khmer Republic’s last Minister of Information, discusses the regime during an interview earlier this month. (Photo by: Sebastian Strangio)Thursday, 18 March 2010
Sebastian Strangio
The Phnom Penh Post
Forty years on, former participants reflect on the country’s star-crossed republican experiment
The regime that came into being four decades ago was headed, and later personified, by two men: General Lon Nol, a close ally of Sihanouk who became prime minister in August 1969, and Sihanouk’s cousin Prince Sisowath Sirikmatak. During their five short years in power, which ended with the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge in April 1975, the two men attempted a bold experiment in Khmer democracy. On October 9, with much pomp and ceremony, they presided over the founding of the Khmer Republic, bringing Cambodia’s centuries-old monarchy to an end and installing a US-style presidency.
Caught between the velvet-gloved authoritarianism of Sihanouk’s Sangkum Reastr Niyum regime and the horrors that came after under the Khmer Rouge, the Khmer Republic remains a blind spot in many accounts of Cambodian history. But the event was in its own way a historical watershed, shattering Prince Sihanouk’s royalist consensus and opening up a political rift that led the country into civil war and the more muted political conflicts of the present day.
“One could say that the events of 1970 did polarise the Cambodian population more so than ever before, and transform the system of political accommodation that Sihanouk had practised so well during the late 1950s and early 1960s into one of confrontation,” said Justin Corfield, historian and author of Khmers Stand Up: A History of the Cambodian Government 1970-75.
The final tally of the vote on March 18 – 89 votes for and three against – was a surprising indictment of the Prince, who claimed (and was given) credit for leading Cambodia to independence and uniting the country under his Sangkum regime.
Ros Chantraboth, the author of another history of the republican era, said that Sihanouk’s neutralist Cold War balancing act, performed so successfully since the mid-1950s, took a “suicidal” turn at the end of the following decade. By tacitly allowing Vietnamese communist troops to use Cambodia as a staging ground for their operations inside South Vietnam, Sihanouk inflamed local sentiment, something that was only worsened by the corruption and economic mismanagement that plagued the Sangkum regime.
Ros Chantraboth said that the faults of Sihanouk’s regime continued under the Khmer Republic. “For two years, the corruption and injustice were controlled, but started to reassert themselves in 1973 when old officials came to power,” he said last year. “The March coup just changed the image of the regime.”
Nearly from the moment of its inception, the republic started coming apart at the seams. Sihanouk, informed of his overthrow by Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin on the way to the airport in Moscow, raged against its “traitorous” architects and plotted his revenge. He found a comfortable exile in Beijing, where, on March 23, he broadcast a call to arms against the republican government and formed a broad-based alliance that included the Khmer Rouge, his erstwhile enemies in the maquis.
Meanwhile, the new government struggled with student protests, constitutional legitimacy and the steadily approaching maelstrom of civil war.
Corruption was especially rife in the Khmer National Armed Forces (FANK), which, thanks to US largesse, expanded from a force of 35,000 into a bloated legion of more than 200,000. A common practice among commanders was to overreport the number of troops in their units, siphoning the salaries of these “phantom soldiers” into their own pockets. Others, bent on self-enrichment, sold arms directly to the enemy.
US President Richard Nixon, encouraged by the new regime in Phnom Penh, sent US troops over the border from South Vietnam in April 1970 to capture the Vietcong “headquarters” that was assumed to be directing the communist insurgency from inside Cambodia. The battle lines of this new proxy war quickly settled into place: As Lon Nol threw in his lot with the Americans, eating up economic and military aid, the Vietcong and their Cambodian apprentices turned their fire on the new government.
Despite the reported bravery of its rank and file, the army wilted under repeated insurgent attacks during 1971 and 1972. Only a few effective units, and the indiscriminate US bombing of communist base areas, prevented the republic’s premature fall. But even this had its own tragic aspect: Just a week before the US congress ordered a bombing halt in August 1973, an American B-52 bomber accidentally dropped its payload on the Mekong ferry town of Neak Leung, killing some 200 civilians. Journalist Elizabeth Becker writes in her book When the War Was Over that in 1973 alone, the US dropped 257,465 tonnes of explosives on Cambodia – around 50 percent more than the amount dropped on Japan during the Second World War.
A legacy worth defending
But 40 years on, those who took part in Cambodia’s republican experiment have defended the regime’s legacy, arguing that the toppling of Sihanouk was unavoidable despite the failures that followed. For General Dien Del, as for other future republicans, the winds of change began blowing through Sihanouk’s Cambodia as early as 1968, when the Prince started turning a blind eye to Vietnamese incursions.
Two days before the coup, Dien Del, then a major in the army, was recalled from the front in Ratanakkiri province to a meeting with Lon Nol, in which he was briefed on the plan to seize power. Dien Del said the prime minister, who enjoyed close relations with both Sihanouk and his mother, Queen Kossamak, appeared nervous at what might eventuate. “Lon Nol was eager, but seemed worried about the consequences, worried about the country and the monarchy,” he said.
Now 79, the laconic Dien Del – whom British journalist Jon Swain described as the army’s “best general, a man with a merry sparkle in his eyes” – said he still admires Lon Nol for standing up to the Vietnamese, as did many Cambodians at the time. “He was very popular as a civilian official and a military commander,” he said.
Chhang Song, who served as Lon Nol’s minister of information during 1974-75, said the events of March 18 were inevitable due to the Prince’s tacit support for the “silent invasion” of the Vietnamese, who treated eastern Cambodia virtually as “conquered territory”. Chhang Song, then one of Sihanouk’s personal advisers, said he was unsurprised when the coup was announced on national radio.
“We didn’t want to lose Sihanouk; but at the same time, if we didn’t lose him we were going to lose the country,” he said during a recent interview in Phnom Penh. “If we didn’t do it, we would have been blamed by our children, because we would’ve lost territory without fighting a battle. The coup was a decision – right or wrong – for Cambodians to stand up to defend our territory. We didn’t just let [the invasion] happen and then go and complain in Long Beach.”
Chhang Song said the republican regime, for all its failings, also heralded the “spread of liberal ideas and principles” into Cambodia for the first time. “Cambodian society was previously very closed – nobody outside knew what was happening – but it was republican ideals that opened it up. These things were possible.”
In its early years, the regime drew on a “spontaneous” outpouring of patriotic support from students and progressive intellectuals, the latter of whom depicted the republic in terms redolent of revolutionary France, said Son Soubert, the son of Son Sann, who served as prime minister under Sihanouk’s Sangkum regime. The National Assembly’s famous 1792 declaration “La patrie en danger!” – originally made in response to Prussia’s alliance with Austria against France – was resurrected by the regime to depict the impending threat of communism.
“There was a lot of evidence of communist involvement in our internal affairs, so students and progressives – even before the coup – came to offer their services to defend the country,” Son Soubert said. “When the regime overthrew Prince Sihanouk, they based their support on these young students.” Indeed, an enduring image of the immediate post-coup period is of overladen Coca-Cola lorries filled with dozens of teenage youths in baggy army fatigues – later dubbed “24-hour soldiers” for the perfunctory training they were offered – trundling off to the east to fight the communists.
A republic for the Khmers
The Khmer Republic’s dark flipside – its demonisation of Cambodia’s half-million-strong Vietnamese population – also quickly asserted itself.
“Lon Nol was an echo before he was a voice,” William Harben, a US political officer, wrote in a cable from Phnom Penh in 1972. “The deep inferiority feelings of the Khmer towards their Vietnamese neighbours and the Chinese commercial caste calls for a myth of their descent from the imperial temple builders of the past.”
Becker describes how the focus on countering Vietnamese communism took the form of a quasi-mystic campaign of racist violence against Vietnamese civilians. In April 1970, Cambodian troops rounded up some 800 Vietnamese Catholic labourers living on the Chroy Changvar peninsula, shot them and then dumped the bodies into the Tonle Bassac. The bloated corpses that floated past on the current in the days afterward, she wrote, were “an open, hideous warning” to all Vietnamese living in Cambodia.
In any case, the initial flood of euphoria was quickly stemmed by events. Despite the use of French revolutionary slogans to buoy up morale, Son Soubert said, the republic – as venal and corrupt as its predecessor – could not maintain the momentum of these initial enthusiasms. “The leadership was not up to the task. They were corrupt – they benefited from this kind of regime, and they did not sustain the enthusiasm of the young people,” he said.
Even the abolition of the monarchy in October, Chhang Song said, was motivated less by ideology than by the need to solve a glaring problem of state legitimacy. With Sihanouk still the nominal head of state, but an irreconcilable enemy (the Prince repeatedly threatened to hang the “traitors” who overthrew him), it was necessary to proclaim the republic as a way of, as he put it, putting the regime’s “papers in order”.
Decision-making started to take on a vague, improvisatory quality. General Sak Sutsakhan, the last republican head of state, wrote in 1980 that the regime’s main leaders, especially Lon Nol, operated “in what can best be described as a dream world”, forging plans “based on unreality, or interpretations of history”. Lon Nol’s health also started to take its toll on the republic. After suffering a stroke in 1971, he became increasingly isolated from the outside world, prey to the predictions of astrologers, his information filtered through a small coterie of advisers.
“He knew nothing,” Dien Del said. “He didn’t know how much a packet of cigarettes cost.… His knowledge and the reality were very different.” He added that plans were in the offing for a second coup to topple the ailing president, but that they foundered upon the apparent lack of US interest in overthrowing a leader who still, despite (or because of) his mystical reveries, enjoyed considerable support among the rank and file.
By 1972, with the US seeking an “honourable” disengagement from Indochina, the other pillar of the regime’s support had also started to crumble. “I’m sorry that they miscalculated the timing,” Son Soubert said of the regime’s leaders. “They had good intentions, but the timing was not appropriate.”
One former FANK army captain agreed that the republic’s promising start was compromised by its proxy role in the Cold War. “I blame the Americans,” he said, referring to the US invasion of April 1970. “They came to make Cambodia pregnant – if we can say that – and did not take care of the infants.”
The collapse of the republic
The end, when it came, was swift and unrelenting. Unhindered by US bombing sorties, the Khmer Rouge made rapid gains during the 1974-75 dry season, encircling the capital by March. On April 1, with FANK units mounting a last-ditch defence of the capital, Chhang Song accompanied the president as he was evacuated by air to Thailand, and thence to the US Pacific Command Headquarters in Oahu, Hawaii. He said Lon Nol was surprisingly composed during the weeks following the fall. Even when informed that his brother, intelligence chief Lon Non, was killed by the Khmer Rouge and dragged through the streets in Phnom Penh, he remained impassive. “He didn’t say much of anything,” Chhang Song said.
“He was very stoic – there was no sign of tears, nothing.”
David Chandler, historian and author of The Tragedy of Cambodian History, said that in hindsight, the regime – at least in its early years – appears better than it is sometimes depicted. “It’s hard to talk sensibly of a regime that lost control of so much territory so quickly, and was so swamped by US military aid,” he said. “When I visited Cambodia in 1970 and 1971, however, I was impressed by the vigour and optimism of many people in Phnom Penh, after the smothering closing years of the Sihanouk era.”
Even after 1975, the former FANK captain said, the republican spirit lived on, migrating up to the Thai border where many former republicans, including Dien Del and Sak Sutsakhan, took up arms against the Vietnam-backed government. “Many people carried on that spirit to liberate the country from the Vietnamese, the Khmer Rouge and corruption. That spirit has continued from the Lon Nol times,” he said.
But for Lon Nol himself – the man whose name will probably be eternally linked with the doomed regime – exile would be a reminder of lost opportunities. Chhang Song, who read Lon Nol’s eulogy at his funeral in California in 1985, said that he had never felt much sympathy for the revolutionary ideas that captivated Sirikmatak and other intellectual supporters of the Khmer Republic. “Lon Nol was a Cambodian nationalist,” he said. “He wanted this country to be unified, he wanted the people to be independent from the Vietnamese.”
He recalled an incident shortly after fleeing the country, when he and Lon Nol visited a fast-food restaurant in Hawaii, Lon Nol’s teenage son Rith in tow. As they walked into the restaurant, tears suddenly welled up in the ex-president’s eyes. The two men sat down, and Lon Nol gestured around at the diners. “‘Look at the American people – they are so equal. Everybody eats with everybody else, they are happy, and they continue to build their country,’” Chhang Song recalled him saying. “‘I wanted Cambodia to be like that, and I missed my chance.’”
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY MAY TITTHARA AND NETH PHEAKTRA
IF WE DIDN’T DO IT, WE WOULD HAVE BEEN BLAMED BY OUR CHILDREN, BECAUSE WE WOULD'VE LOST TERRITORY WITHOUT FIGHTING A BATTLEFORTY years ago today, the National Assembly convened in Phnom Penh and voted to replace then-Prince Norodom Sihanouk as head of state. The “coup” of March 18, 1970, though it involved no immediate shedding of blood, paved the way for the country’s first experiment with republican government.
The regime that came into being four decades ago was headed, and later personified, by two men: General Lon Nol, a close ally of Sihanouk who became prime minister in August 1969, and Sihanouk’s cousin Prince Sisowath Sirikmatak. During their five short years in power, which ended with the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge in April 1975, the two men attempted a bold experiment in Khmer democracy. On October 9, with much pomp and ceremony, they presided over the founding of the Khmer Republic, bringing Cambodia’s centuries-old monarchy to an end and installing a US-style presidency.
Caught between the velvet-gloved authoritarianism of Sihanouk’s Sangkum Reastr Niyum regime and the horrors that came after under the Khmer Rouge, the Khmer Republic remains a blind spot in many accounts of Cambodian history. But the event was in its own way a historical watershed, shattering Prince Sihanouk’s royalist consensus and opening up a political rift that led the country into civil war and the more muted political conflicts of the present day.
“One could say that the events of 1970 did polarise the Cambodian population more so than ever before, and transform the system of political accommodation that Sihanouk had practised so well during the late 1950s and early 1960s into one of confrontation,” said Justin Corfield, historian and author of Khmers Stand Up: A History of the Cambodian Government 1970-75.
The final tally of the vote on March 18 – 89 votes for and three against – was a surprising indictment of the Prince, who claimed (and was given) credit for leading Cambodia to independence and uniting the country under his Sangkum regime.
Ros Chantraboth, the author of another history of the republican era, said that Sihanouk’s neutralist Cold War balancing act, performed so successfully since the mid-1950s, took a “suicidal” turn at the end of the following decade. By tacitly allowing Vietnamese communist troops to use Cambodia as a staging ground for their operations inside South Vietnam, Sihanouk inflamed local sentiment, something that was only worsened by the corruption and economic mismanagement that plagued the Sangkum regime.
Ros Chantraboth said that the faults of Sihanouk’s regime continued under the Khmer Republic. “For two years, the corruption and injustice were controlled, but started to reassert themselves in 1973 when old officials came to power,” he said last year. “The March coup just changed the image of the regime.”
Nearly from the moment of its inception, the republic started coming apart at the seams. Sihanouk, informed of his overthrow by Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin on the way to the airport in Moscow, raged against its “traitorous” architects and plotted his revenge. He found a comfortable exile in Beijing, where, on March 23, he broadcast a call to arms against the republican government and formed a broad-based alliance that included the Khmer Rouge, his erstwhile enemies in the maquis.
Meanwhile, the new government struggled with student protests, constitutional legitimacy and the steadily approaching maelstrom of civil war.
Corruption was especially rife in the Khmer National Armed Forces (FANK), which, thanks to US largesse, expanded from a force of 35,000 into a bloated legion of more than 200,000. A common practice among commanders was to overreport the number of troops in their units, siphoning the salaries of these “phantom soldiers” into their own pockets. Others, bent on self-enrichment, sold arms directly to the enemy.
US President Richard Nixon, encouraged by the new regime in Phnom Penh, sent US troops over the border from South Vietnam in April 1970 to capture the Vietcong “headquarters” that was assumed to be directing the communist insurgency from inside Cambodia. The battle lines of this new proxy war quickly settled into place: As Lon Nol threw in his lot with the Americans, eating up economic and military aid, the Vietcong and their Cambodian apprentices turned their fire on the new government.
Despite the reported bravery of its rank and file, the army wilted under repeated insurgent attacks during 1971 and 1972. Only a few effective units, and the indiscriminate US bombing of communist base areas, prevented the republic’s premature fall. But even this had its own tragic aspect: Just a week before the US congress ordered a bombing halt in August 1973, an American B-52 bomber accidentally dropped its payload on the Mekong ferry town of Neak Leung, killing some 200 civilians. Journalist Elizabeth Becker writes in her book When the War Was Over that in 1973 alone, the US dropped 257,465 tonnes of explosives on Cambodia – around 50 percent more than the amount dropped on Japan during the Second World War.
A legacy worth defending
But 40 years on, those who took part in Cambodia’s republican experiment have defended the regime’s legacy, arguing that the toppling of Sihanouk was unavoidable despite the failures that followed. For General Dien Del, as for other future republicans, the winds of change began blowing through Sihanouk’s Cambodia as early as 1968, when the Prince started turning a blind eye to Vietnamese incursions.
Two days before the coup, Dien Del, then a major in the army, was recalled from the front in Ratanakkiri province to a meeting with Lon Nol, in which he was briefed on the plan to seize power. Dien Del said the prime minister, who enjoyed close relations with both Sihanouk and his mother, Queen Kossamak, appeared nervous at what might eventuate. “Lon Nol was eager, but seemed worried about the consequences, worried about the country and the monarchy,” he said.
Now 79, the laconic Dien Del – whom British journalist Jon Swain described as the army’s “best general, a man with a merry sparkle in his eyes” – said he still admires Lon Nol for standing up to the Vietnamese, as did many Cambodians at the time. “He was very popular as a civilian official and a military commander,” he said.
Chhang Song, who served as Lon Nol’s minister of information during 1974-75, said the events of March 18 were inevitable due to the Prince’s tacit support for the “silent invasion” of the Vietnamese, who treated eastern Cambodia virtually as “conquered territory”. Chhang Song, then one of Sihanouk’s personal advisers, said he was unsurprised when the coup was announced on national radio.
“We didn’t want to lose Sihanouk; but at the same time, if we didn’t lose him we were going to lose the country,” he said during a recent interview in Phnom Penh. “If we didn’t do it, we would have been blamed by our children, because we would’ve lost territory without fighting a battle. The coup was a decision – right or wrong – for Cambodians to stand up to defend our territory. We didn’t just let [the invasion] happen and then go and complain in Long Beach.”
Chhang Song said the republican regime, for all its failings, also heralded the “spread of liberal ideas and principles” into Cambodia for the first time. “Cambodian society was previously very closed – nobody outside knew what was happening – but it was republican ideals that opened it up. These things were possible.”
In its early years, the regime drew on a “spontaneous” outpouring of patriotic support from students and progressive intellectuals, the latter of whom depicted the republic in terms redolent of revolutionary France, said Son Soubert, the son of Son Sann, who served as prime minister under Sihanouk’s Sangkum regime. The National Assembly’s famous 1792 declaration “La patrie en danger!” – originally made in response to Prussia’s alliance with Austria against France – was resurrected by the regime to depict the impending threat of communism.
“There was a lot of evidence of communist involvement in our internal affairs, so students and progressives – even before the coup – came to offer their services to defend the country,” Son Soubert said. “When the regime overthrew Prince Sihanouk, they based their support on these young students.” Indeed, an enduring image of the immediate post-coup period is of overladen Coca-Cola lorries filled with dozens of teenage youths in baggy army fatigues – later dubbed “24-hour soldiers” for the perfunctory training they were offered – trundling off to the east to fight the communists.
A republic for the Khmers
The Khmer Republic’s dark flipside – its demonisation of Cambodia’s half-million-strong Vietnamese population – also quickly asserted itself.
“Lon Nol was an echo before he was a voice,” William Harben, a US political officer, wrote in a cable from Phnom Penh in 1972. “The deep inferiority feelings of the Khmer towards their Vietnamese neighbours and the Chinese commercial caste calls for a myth of their descent from the imperial temple builders of the past.”
Becker describes how the focus on countering Vietnamese communism took the form of a quasi-mystic campaign of racist violence against Vietnamese civilians. In April 1970, Cambodian troops rounded up some 800 Vietnamese Catholic labourers living on the Chroy Changvar peninsula, shot them and then dumped the bodies into the Tonle Bassac. The bloated corpses that floated past on the current in the days afterward, she wrote, were “an open, hideous warning” to all Vietnamese living in Cambodia.
In any case, the initial flood of euphoria was quickly stemmed by events. Despite the use of French revolutionary slogans to buoy up morale, Son Soubert said, the republic – as venal and corrupt as its predecessor – could not maintain the momentum of these initial enthusiasms. “The leadership was not up to the task. They were corrupt – they benefited from this kind of regime, and they did not sustain the enthusiasm of the young people,” he said.
Even the abolition of the monarchy in October, Chhang Song said, was motivated less by ideology than by the need to solve a glaring problem of state legitimacy. With Sihanouk still the nominal head of state, but an irreconcilable enemy (the Prince repeatedly threatened to hang the “traitors” who overthrew him), it was necessary to proclaim the republic as a way of, as he put it, putting the regime’s “papers in order”.
Decision-making started to take on a vague, improvisatory quality. General Sak Sutsakhan, the last republican head of state, wrote in 1980 that the regime’s main leaders, especially Lon Nol, operated “in what can best be described as a dream world”, forging plans “based on unreality, or interpretations of history”. Lon Nol’s health also started to take its toll on the republic. After suffering a stroke in 1971, he became increasingly isolated from the outside world, prey to the predictions of astrologers, his information filtered through a small coterie of advisers.
“He knew nothing,” Dien Del said. “He didn’t know how much a packet of cigarettes cost.… His knowledge and the reality were very different.” He added that plans were in the offing for a second coup to topple the ailing president, but that they foundered upon the apparent lack of US interest in overthrowing a leader who still, despite (or because of) his mystical reveries, enjoyed considerable support among the rank and file.
By 1972, with the US seeking an “honourable” disengagement from Indochina, the other pillar of the regime’s support had also started to crumble. “I’m sorry that they miscalculated the timing,” Son Soubert said of the regime’s leaders. “They had good intentions, but the timing was not appropriate.”
One former FANK army captain agreed that the republic’s promising start was compromised by its proxy role in the Cold War. “I blame the Americans,” he said, referring to the US invasion of April 1970. “They came to make Cambodia pregnant – if we can say that – and did not take care of the infants.”
The collapse of the republic
The end, when it came, was swift and unrelenting. Unhindered by US bombing sorties, the Khmer Rouge made rapid gains during the 1974-75 dry season, encircling the capital by March. On April 1, with FANK units mounting a last-ditch defence of the capital, Chhang Song accompanied the president as he was evacuated by air to Thailand, and thence to the US Pacific Command Headquarters in Oahu, Hawaii. He said Lon Nol was surprisingly composed during the weeks following the fall. Even when informed that his brother, intelligence chief Lon Non, was killed by the Khmer Rouge and dragged through the streets in Phnom Penh, he remained impassive. “He didn’t say much of anything,” Chhang Song said.
“He was very stoic – there was no sign of tears, nothing.”
David Chandler, historian and author of The Tragedy of Cambodian History, said that in hindsight, the regime – at least in its early years – appears better than it is sometimes depicted. “It’s hard to talk sensibly of a regime that lost control of so much territory so quickly, and was so swamped by US military aid,” he said. “When I visited Cambodia in 1970 and 1971, however, I was impressed by the vigour and optimism of many people in Phnom Penh, after the smothering closing years of the Sihanouk era.”
Even after 1975, the former FANK captain said, the republican spirit lived on, migrating up to the Thai border where many former republicans, including Dien Del and Sak Sutsakhan, took up arms against the Vietnam-backed government. “Many people carried on that spirit to liberate the country from the Vietnamese, the Khmer Rouge and corruption. That spirit has continued from the Lon Nol times,” he said.
But for Lon Nol himself – the man whose name will probably be eternally linked with the doomed regime – exile would be a reminder of lost opportunities. Chhang Song, who read Lon Nol’s eulogy at his funeral in California in 1985, said that he had never felt much sympathy for the revolutionary ideas that captivated Sirikmatak and other intellectual supporters of the Khmer Republic. “Lon Nol was a Cambodian nationalist,” he said. “He wanted this country to be unified, he wanted the people to be independent from the Vietnamese.”
He recalled an incident shortly after fleeing the country, when he and Lon Nol visited a fast-food restaurant in Hawaii, Lon Nol’s teenage son Rith in tow. As they walked into the restaurant, tears suddenly welled up in the ex-president’s eyes. The two men sat down, and Lon Nol gestured around at the diners. “‘Look at the American people – they are so equal. Everybody eats with everybody else, they are happy, and they continue to build their country,’” Chhang Song recalled him saying. “‘I wanted Cambodia to be like that, and I missed my chance.’”
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY MAY TITTHARA AND NETH PHEAKTRA
21 comments:
Dien Del still alive but is a heavy drunk man. Chhang Song keep enóying girls and dance but completely out of date and useless.
LON NOL THE BEST MAN
SIHANOUK AND HIS FAMILY ARE DEVILS
THEY MUST BE ASSASINATED
OLD MAN IN L.A
it's good to understand history. yes, it was history for that regime a long time ago. good to learn something about it all, really!
LIBERTY to exercise political rights under the constitution but Sihanouk took revenge on those who sacrificed themselves for Khmer identity.
It appears may be gone but not dead.18 March Spirit still lives among the conscionable ones.
Happy Anniversary 18 March 1970!
they all are old and useless now. cambodia needs a younger, more worldly educated people to help our country in future. we don't need old, outdated people anymore. let them all retired for a change now! cambodia is more advanced than during their time. god bless cambodia.
10:35pm DO AH KWACK GIVERMENT PROVIDE YOU REAL EDUCATION OR MOTHERFUCKER JUST HAVE HANOI PRINT THE SHIT PH.d. FOR YOU?
ALL OF YOU WILL HAVE Ph.D! NEED NOT TO GO TOS CHOOL MOTHER FUCKER ADVANCE! JUST GROW A ROBER TREE, YOU NEED YOUR MASTER TO DO IT FOR YOU?
Cambodian people live in small peaceful country with only seven millions population in 1970. Why in the world the Lon Nol government were so daring to get killed? Prince Serimatak too was probably saw his chance of becoming a great man replacing Sihanouk and that's why they all agreed to do the stupid thing. Who would have known that the great American would change their mind like changing clothing? Oh i'm small , but I got big giant friend who can help me out. Wrong. 2 Millions lives had paid for this great miscaculation of the Cambodian Lon Nol government. Let Sihanouk running the country, the worse you would see probably Communist mixed up with a good life of French or European. Sihamoni was perhaps crowned King in 1979 or in 1993 or got marry with grown up children by now. You know what it means when prince gets crowned to be King or prince gets marry. We would be all dancing. Only fool would give a shit about war. Fact or fiction. You decide.
MARCH 18, 1970 IT'S A HISTORY OF CAMBODIA WHOSE SIHANOUK's INTRIGUE, BETRAYAL , AND INVITE ENEMIES "YUON" VIETCONG AND NORTH VIETNAMESE TO COME INTO CAMBODIA TO KILL AND KILL AT WILL THE INNOCENT KHMER PEOPLE WITH IMPUNITY.
No one among Khmer leader, who I trust and admire since I know how to count the number.
trust but verify, you know!
10:35 said he doesn't need his parent either because he came from the log hole, what a pathetic person +khmer rouge brain ,they will kill all the old people and keep the young but at the end they are fucked up with youn Hun SEn.
Smart people don't say that,all citizen are the fruits of their country country they are residing.
it's all about being smart and gaining trust or winning trust in the people. people don't like to see failure like in the past, that's all, really!
I was with you Chhang, in that time, I fought against communists, I regret a lot because that was not ours.
That was the war between China and USA.
We killed eachother for them.
I don't ever mean to be rude or disrespectful to any members or supporters of the Lon Nol regime. However, if anyone of you ever have time to look up the history book about that regime, the Cambodian elites of the Lon Nol regime were considered to be the most dumb people on earth. It was all recorded by the Americans and the South Vietnamese and Thais. Lon Nol himself was described as the most incompetent fool on earth. In the end, non of them Lon Nol people ever gotten to be amount to anything. Look at Chhang Song for exampe. He ended up serving Hun Sen instead and then got spitted out and replaced. Lol. I bet Chhang Song now is simply a homeless beggar on SSI. Look at all of Lon Nol's officers, they were well known border thieves who raped and beat up Cambodian refugees for gold and food. I am sorry to say but Lon Nol regime produced some of the most despicable people on earth. There was no code of honor among them. They only f*cked and stole from the poor. Even Hun Sen said the the same thing. He said that Lon Nol's relatives got harrassed and killed because when they were the elites of Cambodia, they were all dickheads acting tough and abusive towards the Cambodians. Even Lon Nol's children who were raised in the United States all turn out to be complete useless f*ckers whose sole purpose in life is to eat animal penises and then brag about it.
6:21 am motherfucker son of the bitch hun sen sperms low scum hunman be. Ah Choy Marai 6:21am is Kau Me Sophoeurng Yuon phsa kilo6 i know you very well .you 're khmer kbal yuon Ah Choy marai.
7:04
Very good shot, please drop by most often Cambodia need people like you.
Buddha bless
Not all Cambodian under any regime is bad. Why? because for example: among the 2 millions Cambodian that were dead or killed during the Khmer Rouge Era were Khmer best and most prescious resourse and they were working under the Lon Nol's regime. They just happened to be at the wrong place and at the wrong time or got pulled into the black hole by mistake. Right now few that remain are just giving up doing the thing they one loved to do. They are after all Khmer most educated and talented people.
They are just now like people of shatter dream. We all should pray for their recovery everyday. Lok Chhang Song may thought that by working for Hun Sen, he is also contributing to Khmer society in a good way, because we are all Khmer, but it probably did not work out. So he pulled himself away or Mr. Hun Sen did not see anything good in him, took his job back, because he is so different. Like many who refuse to have anything to do with Cambodia today, thinking by doing so, they are working for the Communist Vietcong or Chinese. That is their reason and they should have every right to think so. We should be thankful that at least, there is few people like Lok Chhang Song who is spared from the great darkness and able to put the pieces of Khmer's history together. Good or bad, without someone like him, this great piece of history will be lost forever. General. Aer Chhong? or one great Khmer's aviator died silently in the United States and took everything with him. He must have gottten beat up so badly that he chose to completely withdrawing. It's very sad. We like to hear from the former governor Sek Sam Eit of Battambang very much. He too is probably feeling shatter by the lost of so many great friends and previlliges that he used to have. Life can be very sad in the end. People made mistake. We all do. No one is perfect. We should take time to see better thing in everyone and encourage them to quit bad thing, because life can also be like a butterfly and it's everyone's right to choose and obtain one.
Ordinary Khmer
it's not right to say that everybody during that time was incompetent. there were some good people, however, the morale was bad, plus, they were losing support from both khmer people and america at that time.
When Sihanouk fights, you'd better move! Lon Nol lost his support from majority of Cambodian and foreigner, because of his majesty's charming voice cursing him and his followers from radio of Peking in Khmer every f* day. Lon Nol's government is like a child got cursing by his father. In Cambodia who cares for you when your father treats you like shit? far beyond that it translated into English from the Sihanouk's point of view. So no matter what the Lon Nol does, he is still wrong. Damm you do and dam you don't.
the country has to be ruled with reality, not dream or astrology. it is a big mistake of khmer leaders who dream too much, but they are lack of situation analysis.
no we see again..... most of army commanders are very corrupt. phantom soldiers are still a practice to siphon state money.
Post a Comment