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| Then-princess Monique, then-prince Sihanouk and Ieng Sary in 1973. |
By MARK MCDONALD
International Herald Tribune (Paris, France)
“By allying himself with the Khmer Rouge and urging his countrymen to join, Sihanouk condemned his people to damnation”
HONG KONG — He was a libertine and a francophile, a filmmaker and a painter, a serial husband and father and philanderer, a cherubic but ruthless god-king who liked to putter about in the garden. He played the sax in his own jazz band. He loved to eat. He once served Champagne to a visiting U.S. secretary of state. At 10 a.m.
Most of all, of course, King Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia was the consummate political flip-flopper, a shape-shifting monarch and realpolitik chameleon who helped to lead the global nonaligned movement but also, at one time or another, tethered his nation to the world’s major powers to preserve its independence.
The diplomatic chronology of King Sihanouk, who died Monday in Beijing at age 89, is mind-boggling in its complexity and contradictions. But his legacy might well be forever sealed and tarnished by his alliance with the hyper-communist Khmer Rouge movement that ravaged Cambodia from 1975 to 1979.
The regime, which came to power through his direct participation, would kill an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians through murder, torture, overwork and starvation — a rampage of such horror and psychosis that it targeted anyone with an education, anyone who spoke a foreign language, anyone who wore eyeglasses or played the piano.
“By allying himself with the Khmer Rouge and urging his countrymen to join, Sihanouk condemned his people to damnation,” said the historian Joel Brinkley in his book, “Cambodia’s Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land.”
Elizabeth Becker and Seth Mydans, in their obituary of King Sihanouk in The Times, write, “In the end, King Sihanouk helped bring Pol Pot to power.”
King Sihanouk had initially persecuted Pol Pot, his Khmer Rouge compatriots and other leftists in the early and mid-1960s — as the Vietnam War was heating up and Southeast Asian communists were mounting insurgencies. The Khmer Rouge politburo fled the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, and many sought refuge in the country’s northwestern forests and in France.
5 comments:
Thanks Soch! That's a good one.
Now he’s gone. Who’s going to defend his name and past doings? When he was alive he strenuously defended his flip-flop policies.
This is a lesson to all Khmer leaders. Be good to your people and country. Protect the sovereignty and national integrity of the nation. Only this can your name be of any good once you leave this world.
A passer by
What are the differences between King Norodom Sihanouk and PM Hun Sen?
Can anyone out there explain the diffrences between King Norodom Sihanouk and PM Hun Sen in detail? as we khmer young generation are so mess up very badly.
The real pictures show so many million words of our KHMER History to the old and the young generations to come.
You could change the STORY but NOT the HISTORY
GO TO HELL AH SDECH PEAL
Burn his body over there (China). Don't bring back to Cambodia. He was a Traitor to Khmer people. The Khmer people have suffered enough by him. He did not respect even his own mother. He was an evil king . He should be alive until he can serve his punishement in the Khmer Rouge trail. Please don't forget he was the person who killed Lok Protean Sam Rainsy's father.
Pang Sokheoun, Secretary-General of SRP in Sweden.កុលបុត្រមហានគរខ្មែរ
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