Samphan's 'integrity' illuminated at Khmer Rouge court

Former Khmer Rouge head of state Khieu Samphan (C) attends a hearing at the ECCC on the outskirts of Phnom Penh last year. Photograph: ECCC/POOL

Wednesday, 25 July 2012
Bridget Di Certo
The Phnom Penh Post

Cambodian history scholar David Chandler yesterday echoed what has become a serial sentiment during testimony at the Khmer Rouge tribunal.

“[Khieu Samphan] was well known as a man of extreme and rather bewildering integrity,” Chandler testified in response to questions by the Case 002 co-acccused’s lawyers.

Chandler described Khieu Samphan as a shockingly incorruptible parliamentarian in the 1960s under then-King Norodom Sihanouk’s rule, a factor that inspired fear and anxiety in the monarch.

“He was just the kind of person Sihanouk didn’t know how to deal with,” Chandler said. “He [Sihanouk] had no experience with people that he couldn’t dominate, manipulate, purchase, rent.”

Amongst Sihanouk’s “crony circle”, Khieu Samphan’s honesty was “very rare indeed”, Chandler added.

Deceptive - Op-Ed by Anonymous

http://www.box.com/s/767c422d5b523271c7c6

Yuon aggression on Cambodia between 1963 and 1970 - By Som Sek Komar

http://www.box.com/s/d90e6d1fc9340797e7ef

A glimpse at the past: Sihanouk's National Congress (from Nokorthom newspaper)

Revisiting Lon Nol’s Cambodia

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 SUPPLIED

Above: 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

IF WE DIDN’T DO IT, WE WOULD HAVE BEEN BLAMED BY OUR CHILDREN, BECAUSE WE WOULD'VE LOST TERRITORY WITHOUT FIGHTING A BATTLE

FORTY 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

Heading Down the Same Road

Monday, 23 March 2009
Hakim Joe
Malaysia Today

Cambodia has had a turbulent history even before the Khmer Rouges took over and started those “killing fields”. What and why it happened are all chronicled in history books but it was trifling as compared to the Pol Pot regime that killed a fifth of its populace within three years of its reign.

However insignificant it may be during the years when Norodom Sihanouk ruled the nation with an iron fist, his actions and deeds are the purveyor of widespread dissatisfaction that ultimately caused the Cambodian Civil War and later led the Prime Minister to depose of him.

So what exactly happened in Cambodia between Independence from the French in 1953 to the 1970 bloodless coup by his Prime Minister? What made the people of Cambodia support the revolution in 1975 that forced its monarch into exile?

One: Sihanouk intimidated all political opponents with overt threats of incarceration, bodily harm or death. This is achieved by utilising Sam Sary, a magistrate close to Sihanouk, the Security Minister Kou Roun, and the entire police force to do all his dirty work. The Opposition party, the Democrats ceased to exist after official sanctions were directed against them. All their party leaders were jailed on the night before the first democratic elections after independence in 1953 and were only released after the election results were announced. No formal charges were ever laid. Keng Vannsak and Thiounn Mumm, the Opposition leaders were amongst those arrested for murder but the courts retracted after finding nothing to implicate them. Pro-republican candidate Son Ngoc Thanh (at that time the most popular Democratic politician in Cambodia) was not even allowed to be a candidate as he was exiled by Sihanouk.

Two: Sihanouk closed down all pro-Opposition newspapers. This is done by citing lèse-majesté and any articles not in support of himself or his political party is deemed seditious. Since his abdication a year ago to form the royalist political party, how this charge was ever applied remains a mystery. L’Observateur, Pracheachon and Réalités Cambodgiennes were all ordered to cease operations when they pointed out that corruption is widespread. The editor of L’Observateur was beaten up by a group of unknown assailants a few meters from a police station, sacked and later jailed. The entire 12 staff of the Pracheachon were arrested. Even the openly pro-monarchy newspapers were not spared. Armed soldiers were stationed outside the editor’s office “for their own protection”.

Three: Sihanouk ordered a Military Tribunal set up to deal with state security offences with its selected officials enjoying full indemnity and its judgments non-questionable, non-appealable and not subjected to the course of law. Within two months of operations, this tribunal handed out death sentences to 22 so called “treasonous” offenders and another 9 within the year. No evidence was forwarded. The verdicts were decided by Sihanouk without the least concern to maintain even the sham appearance of judicial independence.

Four: Any person even hinting that this was unconstitutional and illegal was incarcerated immediately under the Cambodian Sedition Act. Sihanouk, using the Cambodian Police Force forcibly detained almost 2,000 such “suspects” in holding camps outside Phnom Penh without trial or appeal. Nothing was ever heard from this group again. Large mass graves later found near the site of this holding camp were attributed to the Khmer Rouge’s “intellectual” cleansing efforts.

Five: Political assassinations were rife. Political activists went “missing” day in and day out. Opposition politicians were spared bodily harm but were ridiculed daily in the state sanctioned newspapers. When Sihanouk felt that this was insufficient, he would demand these opposition politicians to be present at his palace for a full-scale condemnation session that was broadcasted out by loud speakers to the public.

Six: Sihanouk altered the Constitution so that he can remain head-of-state for life. He was the King before he abdicated and now he is the head-of-state with all the perks and benefits accorded a King. The ultimate reason for this is that he can lead his political party as a “commoner-prince” when he was unable to do so as the reigning monarch. He installed his ageing father as the puppet king and when he died, his mother took the throne.

Seven: Sihanouk became the ogre that strengthened and legitimised the Khmer Rouges. When Lon Nol deposed him in 1970, he fled to Communist China and resided in Beijing, and proceeded to give his full support to the Khmer Rouges (which he made illegal in 1954 and was fighting before his downfall), which was then only a small time outfit. With his royal patronage, the Khmer Rouges army grew from 6,000 to 50,000 armed fighters within the year. Many of the new recruits for the Khmer Rouge were apolitical peasants who fought in support of the King, not for communism, of which they had little understanding. No points for guessing who was arming these peasants.

Eight: Sihanouk promoted “Khmer Rights” which discriminated against anyone not of pure Cambodian birth. Ethnic Chinese, Vietnamese and indigenous hill tribes were considered “non-persons” even if they were born in Cambodia or have been in the country for the past few generations. These people do not possess the full citizen rights as accorded any person born within a country who happens to have pure Khmer parents. Some indigenous hill tribes cannot even get government papers identifying them as Cambodians.

Find any similarities?

Because of what Sihanouk did and the manner in which he controlled the lives of all Cambodians, the Khmer Rouge went on an unstoppable killing spree to exact the revenge for its fallen comrades during Sihanouk’s reign. The irony was that Sihanouk returned as the puppet King during the time when the Khmer Rouges took control of the country for one whole year before he was again forced into exile. During the one year as the Cambodian King (again) he stood by and watched his people being slaughtered. One might say that he had no choice whatsoever but he did nothing at all and would have continue presiding over these killings nonetheless if he were not forced by Pol Pot into exile (this time in North Korea).

Pracheachon’s editor had this to say after his arrest, “Our country is supposed to have a constitution… and to have proclaimed its attachment to the Declaration of Human Rights.”