ប្រវត្តិសាស្រ្តបិទមុខ

Prince Sihanouk (centre) in Beijing, with Mao Zedong (left) and North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho (right).

Prior to my going to intern at the Phnom Penh Post in March, I’ve assembled a long list of Cambodia-related reading material, covering politics, history, language, anthropology and travel writing. The first cab off the rank was Khmers Stand Up! by Justin Corfield, a history of the right-wing Khmer Republic that lasted from the deposition of Prince Norodom Sihanouk in 1970 to its ignominious disintegration under Khmer Rouge attack in April 1975. I’ve always wanted to learn more about this period, hoping to discern some further explanation for the cataclysms that Cambodia endured under Pol Pot.

Khmers Stand Up! is basically a published version of Corfield’s PhD thesis (completed at Monash University in 1989) and, like all good academic studies, is thoroughly researched: Corfield follows the arcana of National Assembly meetings and the ebb of factional politics with precision, eventually losing the lay reader in the profusion of unfamiliar names and the long passages describing (amongst other obscurities) the gestation of the republic’s 1972 constitution. But in its preference for dry accuracy over style, it suffers the flaws of much scholarly work. The author’s prose is leaden and clunky, utterly immune to rhetorical flourishes of any kind, and a good copy editor could have a field-day with some of the more laborious sections of the text. But Khmers Stand Up! tells a fascinating story. Even Corfield’s awkward writing style can’t dispel the ancient drama of imperial decline-and-fall, transported to an infant Southeast Asian republic, ringed by enemies, manned by a rotating cast of superstitious generals and grasping politicians.

The men who overthrew Sihanouk in March 1970, General Lon Nol and Prince Sisowath Sirikmatak, attempted a bold experiment in Khmer democracy — and what turned out to be a rather incongruous one, given that the administration was helmed by self-serving strongmen for the five years of its existence. But compared to the iron-fisted traditionalism of Sihanouk’s rule (1953-70) and the well-known horrors of what came later under Pol Pot, the Khmer Republic almost seems a period of calm.

Nearly from the moment of its inception, however, the Republic started coming apart at the seams. Sihanouk, abroad at the time of the coup, raged against its traitorous architects and plotted his return. He received no succour from the Soviets, but found a comfortable exile in Beijing, where he allied with his erstwhile enemies in the maquis – the radical Khmer Rouge, still yoked to their ‘fraternal’ Vietnamese minders. Despite a reckless ultimatum from Lon Nol, the Vietnamese communists refused to withdraw from their sanctuaries on Cambodian territory. President Richard Nixon, seized by delusions of victory in Vietnam, sent US troops over the border in April 1970 to capture the NLF ‘headquarters’ that was assumed to be directing the Viet Cong 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, sucking up economic and military aid, the NLF and its Cambodian apprentices turned their fire on the new government.

As part of the communist propaganda drive against Lon Nol, Sihanouk returned to Cambodia’s ‘liberated zones’ in March 1973, traveling from Hanoi by land to Angkor Wat, where he posed for photos wearing the iconic black pyjama and checked neck-scarf uniform of the Khmer Rouge. In the pictures released to publicise the event, Sihanouk and his wife Monique wear pasted-on smiles, posing in temple doorways and shaking hands awkwardly with Khieu Samphan and other communist leaders, driven into hiding by his own security forces in the 1960s.

Meanwhile, the new government struggled with student protests, constitutional legitimacy and the steadily approaching maelstrom of civil war. Corruption was especially rife in the army, which, under US largesse, expanded from a modest force of 20,000 into a bloated legion of nearly 250,000. A common practice amongst commanders was to over-report the number of troops in their units, thus siphoning these phantoms’ pay into their own pockets. Others, bent on self-enrichment, also sold arms directly to the enemy. Unsurprisingly, the battlefield effectiveness of the army was questionable and, despite the reported bravery of its rank-and-file, it wilted under the assault of 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 this had its own tragic aspect: just a week before the US Congress ordered a bombing halt in August 1973, an American B-52 accidentally dropped its pay-load on the Mekong ferry town of Neak Loung, killing some 200 civilians. In a surreal scene described in William Shawcross’ Sideshow, US ambassador Emory Swank arrived on the scene in sleek consular limo, dispensing US$100 bills to the grieving relatives of the deceased — that then being the going rate for a Cambodian life. (The pilot was fined $700).

Corfield’s telling of the story becomes more engaging as it hurtles towards its dramatic denouement. President Lon Nol, half-paralysed by illness and prey to creeping superstitions, eventually lost touch with the realities of government, preferring the seclusion of his home at Kompong Som (Sihanoukville). But few other men had the skill to unite their rivals and gather the threads of the fraying republic. There were strongmen like Lon Nol’s brother Lon Non, adept at intimidation and graft; In Tam, the leader of the National Assembly and therefore distrusted within the army; and Prince Sirikmatak, beloved of the US embassy but increasingly isolated after the 1970 coup. By early 1975, republican leaders were willing to countenance the return of Sihanouk; but the prince’s devil-pact with the Khmer Rouge had already been sealed, and he was to spend the next five years as their prisoner, confined to the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh.

The end, when it came, was swift and unrelenting. The communist army that marched into the capital on 17 April 1975 was freed of its Vietnamese masters, and armed with a militantly xenophobic form of Maoism. The city was emptied. Symbols of the old regime, like the new Central Bank, were dynamited. The story of what came next is all too familiar. Corfield’s book is a reminder — and a timely one, given the US position in Iraq — that the road to political hell is often paved with the noblest of intentions.

(cf. http://spstrangio.wordpress.com/2008/01/13/review-khmers-stand-up/)