INDOCHINA
Phnom Penh blues
RAWLE KNOX
Nobody seemed very surprised when war came explosively to Phnom Penh last week; no one sounded much as though he cared. us Defence Secretary Laird virtuously repeated that his country's ground troops would not return to Cambodia though its planes would go on bombing the place. His opponents saw American ois in Cambodia anyway and their worst fears (for whom, one wonders?) were again confirmed. The Cambodians, at least in public, said almost nothing at all.
The Cambodians, consolate in rice spirit and Buddhism, have also a strong Hindu heritage; strong enough to know that Sita, abducted to Lanka by the villainous Ravan- na, was a whit surprised when the first recon- naissance team sent by her husband Rama to seek her turned out to be led by Hanuman, a chieftain of the monkeys. So, somewhat (and no offence here, for Hanuman is a god), must Colonel Lon Nol have felt last April when he appealed for American help against Hanoi and found the South Vibtnamese on his door- step. The Americans, like Rama, came later; but as they could hardly whisk Cambodia away like a rescued bride, they left the South Vietnamese behind instead. Lon Nol remains rather surprised, but at least he has shown that he can live with the South Vietnamese (or Cochin Chinese), whereas his countrymen have for centuries shown their plain dislike of the North Vietnamese (or Annamites) Who came to Cambodia as settlers and then, in recent years, as an army of occupation.
Once upon a time—actually it was about fifteen years ago—I came upon two Ameri- cans in a village outside Phnom Penh, arguing about a tube well that had been sunk by the application of us aid. Those were the days when people even cared whether the Cambodians had water. The visiting senator Wanted to know why there wasn't an Amer- ican flag with two clasped hands showing anywhere and the local us AID man said because Snooky wouldn't like it. The senator then asked who the hell Snooky thought he was—and the full answer to that question would have been the history of modern Cambodia. For King Norodom Sihanouk succeeded his grandfather to the throne in 1941 (the French preferring him to his father), and, after many changes of status but never 'until now—loss of power, -arrived in Peking only last March to begin the business of forming a government in exile. Sihanouk never liked the Americans be- cause right at the beginning of SEATO they tried to get the Filipinos to turn him into a good Asian, and that was a disastrous e_xperiment. The truth is that when the krench suddenly granted independence to
Cambodia, and to neighbouring Laos, it took the diplomatic services of the world by sur- prise. Obviously it was policy to love the Cambodians and Laotians, but who was there to carry the message of the West's affection? Her Britannic Majesty's first man in Vientiane confessed he had had to look the place up on the map. His colleague in Phnom Penh was ranked by the Foreign Office so far below the salt that he could only have been reposted as ambassador to one other capital in the world—somewhere in Latin America. Nevertheless he was instruct- ed to do right by Snooky, and that he and his successors always tried to do. The occasional visitor who suggested that Sih- anouk appeared a rather one-sided neutral was told that the prince did what he did to preserve the peaceful independence of Cam- bodia. A few critics suggested that he might be more concerned to preserve the interest of the Norodom family, but from the royal palace always came the assurance that its interests and those of the country were one. Anyway Han Su Yin had given Son Altesse her accolade ...
I was in Cambodia again, as it happened, when President Kennedy was killed. Sihan- ouk ordered five days mourning and five days in which the Cambodian press was not to attack the United States. But the Ameri- cans went on trying right up to 1965, when the knowledge that arms being landed at the American-built Port Sihanouk were then be- ing driven straight up the American-built Norodom Highway for use by the Vietcong, became too common for diplomatic niceties to bother about. Washington and Phnom Penh broke it off.
Two little histories tell one quite a bit about Sihanouk's nationalism. There is the case of Son Ngoc Tranh, now after years of exile back in Phnom Penh and a political adviser to Lon Nol. Son Ngpc Tranh was made premier of Cambodia in 1945 by the Jap- anese, and led the Khmer Issarak movement against the French when they came to re- occupy the country. The French reinstalled Sihanouk, a move which, at intervals, they later regretted; and they captured Son Ngoc Tranh. In 1951 Sihanouk quixotically de- manded that the French return Son Ngoc Tranh, who was soon in rebellion again and in 1959 was sentenced to death in absentia. Another character whom Sihanouk had sentenced to dire punishment in his absence is Mr Chan Seng, Cambodia's Minister of Economy in 1967. Sihanouk dismissed him for pro-Chinese sympathies, and he fled before he could be arrested. Chan Seng at last report was a minister in the government of the National United Front of Kampucha —which is based in China and has, as its leader, Sihanouk.
No wonder Snooky always had such a good press; he could be relied on to be unreliable. By contrast Lon Nol, with no apparent flair or grandeur, cuts a poor figure. How can correspondents take ser- iously a man whose name is palindromic and appoints as his official spokesman someone called Am Rong? To Cambodians, however, Lon Nol is no novelty. In 1966 he was freely chosen premier in an elected Cambodian Assembly. Sihanouk at once formed a 'counter-government' within the Assembly and on the excuse of some rioting of dubious origin, soon took over power again.
The latest review of the war in Hanoi emphasises that it must be pursued with vigour in Cambodia and Laos, as well as Vietnam. The Annamites have always fought an Indochina war. The French knew that; and tried to confine them to North Vietnam. The Americans embarked on a Vietnam war, and discovered Indochina. Lon Nol, quite apart from facing the shot and shell of the Vietcong, is fighting a history of political domination by the Norodom kings and economic exploitation by the Annamites. He deserves a little more of Washington, and of the western world. Angkor Wat disappeared into the jungle and Phnom Penh, I feel, if its thinly concreted kite- scrapers do not first fall to the huffing of the big bad wolf, will end only as a name buried in dusty files of protest somewhere at the UN. To return to the Ramayana, poor Sita, when she got home, was declared by Rama to have been unfaithful. It took her an age to prove her virtue. Poor Lon Nol, if he ever gets home, would never have the time.
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