When the War Was Over (Elizabeth Becker)

When the War is Over

by Elizabeth Becker

also available in Khmer

(Lon Nol)

The new republic was headed by a triumvirate--Lon Nol, Sirik Matak, and Cheng Heng, the president of the national assembly...

At this stage Lon Nol moved ahead of the other coup architects and took control over the sources of power in Phnom Penh. Sirik Matak, who had been America's original hope in Cambodia, and who had Phnom Penh's bourgeoisie on his side, was incapable of stopping Lon Nol...

Unlike [Sirik] Matak, Lon Nol seemed to relish the idea of finally confronting the North Vietnamese, whom he blamed for all the indignities Cambodia had ever suffered at the hands of Vietnam over the centuries. He was the least modernist member of the triumvirate, the most obvious source of the crocodile rumors that preceded the coup, and an enigma in the world of Phnom Penh politics. He was a man with peasant sensibilities and not much apparent talent, a man who had climbed to power through the military as Sihanouk's loyal hatchet man...

In this regard, and many others, Lon Nol had much in common with the man who would become his nemesis--Saloth Sar. He was just as plodding in his youth and just as ambitious. Born in 1913, Lon Nol possessed the same exaggerated pride in being a "true Khmer"...

Sihanouk had promoted Lon Nol for his political loyalty rather than his military skills, a fact that became obvious after the coup...

Lon Nol made no secret of his dream of purifying the Khmer race, the Khmer culture, and Khmer Buddhism of the foreign pollutants he thought had sapped the country's energy and eaten away at its identity and territory. In the sophisticated circles of elite Phnom Penh, Lon Nol's ideas were treated as a curiosity, perhaps an embarrassment, but nothing serious. He was a religious reactionary, a firm devotee of the occult and a practicing mystic who carried around the battered talismans given him in his youth by his village wiseman. He surrounded himself with astrologers and holy men...

...[T]hree months before the coup, Lon Nol had opened the Khmer-Mon Institute to propagate his ideas...

In this and other respects, Lon Nol was mining the same vein of crippled national pride that his ideological rival Saloth Sar had mined. But whereas Sar looked forward to what he considered a modern solution--communist revolution--Lon Nol saw salvation in the past, in reasserting Cambodia's Buddhist heritage...

As the country began to weaken and shatter, these two men, who represented opposite and extreme ends of the political spectrum, were heading toward the same goal of turning Cambodia into a fascist state. Their goals were fascist in the strict definition of the phenomenon: a regime that exalts nation and race, stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, imposes severe economic and social regimentation, and forcibly suppresses the opposition...

The American allies of Lon Nol were embarrassed by his Buddhist "mumbo-jumbo" but failed to take it seriously. An exception was a U.S. political officer in Phnom Penh named William Harben... wrote a confidential cable to Washington entitled "The Anthropological Lon Nol" that described the deep chord Lon Nol struck in the Khmer people and accurately predicted the problems it would create:

"Lon Nol was an echo before he was a voice--the deep inferiority feelings of the Khmer toward their Vietnamese neighbors and the Chinese commercial caste calls for a myth of their descent from the imperial temple builders of the past. Divest of its sorcery [the call for the rebirth of Angkor glory] could add a sense of national pride to the already strong feeling of ethnic identity in the soul of this people..."

What Harben could not know was that the Cambodian on the other side of the developing civil war was Lon Nol without sorcery. Saloth Sar was as preoccupied with returning Cambodia to its rightful place as the descendant of the Angkor Empire, and purging the country of foreigners and foreign influence. They were both products of Cambodia's recent history.

Excerpts from Chapter 4 "The White Crocodile"
When the War Was Over
Elizabeth Becker