When the War Was Over (11 page)

Without ceremony, the police jailed Cheav with his colleague, another monk named Nuon Duong. The French ignored Buddhist law, which required them first to take the monks to their own council, the Buddhist Sangha, to be disrobed before being given over to the civil authorities—an act that protects the sanctity of the religious station. The French had not only jailed a popular leader, they had also desecrated the Buddhist clergy. In response, other dissidents called the first anti-French demonstration in Phnom Penh history.

The demonstration was the brainchild of Son Ngoc Thanh. When
Nagaravatta
was banned he had decided the time had come to attempt a pro-Japanese coup and declare Cambodia independent of France. After the arrest of Cheav, Thanh took refuge in the home of a Japanese captain and quickly won the approval of some sympathetic Japanese for a demonstration for that ultimate aim. Thanh gave the Japanese advance notice of demands he would press on the French: release of all political prisoners, reorganization of the country's public institutions, close economic collaboration with
the Japanese to bolster their war effort, and a constitution that would provide the country with a “National Socialist Monarchy.”

On July 20 nearly 2,000 people answered Thanh's call. They met behind the royal palace and started their march about 9:00 in the morning. They ended up in front of the French colonial office of the resident superior not far away, near the city's Wat Phnom. They were filled with the words of Cheav to the police when they arrested him: “Sir, you can do everything you like here. You are the master. You can take my life, but my spirit will continue to live.”

The marchers reached the colonial headquarters and were told only a handful of representatives would be allowed in to present their demands. The crowd rebelled, saying such representatives would only be arrested as soon as they entered. The crowd included nearly 500 monks. The French security police descended upon the unarmed demonstrators and bashed heads while the Japanese police watched from the sidelines. The demonstration broke up and the protesters fled, many never to return to the capital. In a few days nearly 200 dissidents were arrested, but not Thanh.

He remained in Phnom Penh, hidden by the Japanese, and sent a series of letters to Japanese headquarters in Saigon imploring the Japanese to send an army to overthrow the French and implement his demands. By the end of the year he realized his requests would not be met, and he left the country. In January he flew from Bangkok to Tokyo, where he remained for three years. There he was trained by the Japanese, and given the rank of captain in the Japanese imperial army. In Japan Thanh more easily accepted Japanese rationales for holding off the coup he wanted so determinedly. Thanh wrote to his colleagues back in Cambodia:
“We must wait.
Only Japan's complete victory in Asia will resolve all the Asian problems to which the lot of our Cambodia is linked.”

The Cambodians arrested by the French met a far worse fate. A few leaders were sent to Saigon, where they were sentenced to imprisonment on the notorious penal island Puolo Condore with Cheav. The now legendary monk died in that prison three years later, reportedly saying in his final days: “I will die happy if I were sure that my country will be liberated from the foreign yoke. I pray for freedom.”

Those who survived and returned to Cambodia brought back stories of sympathy with their fellow Vietnamese prisoners who pleaded with them to join their Vietnamese communist movement—the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP)—and “bash” the French. Others who fled the July demonstration ultimately accepted the invitation. Achar Mean, a teacher of Pali at a
Phnom Penh monastery, fled to Kompong Cham province and later to Vietnam. After World War II, he became the first Cambodian known to have joined the ICP, under the pseudonym Son Ngoc Minh.

The temporary alliance between the Buddhists and the elite was over. With Thanh in Japan, Cheav imprisoned in Vietnam, and other Buddhists afraid to return to Phnom Penh, the key figures that had propelled the drive against French colonialists were gone from Phnom Penh. The elite and the Buddhists dropped their contacts and went in separate directions. Ultimately the aristocrats of the Sisowath alumni group would become leaders of independent Cambodia under Sihanouk while some of the key Buddhists became communists.

The monk who became known as Son Ngoc Minh, a combination of the names Son Ngoc Thanh and Ho Chi Minh, was only the first of dozens of Buddhists who abandoned Phnom Penh and sought aid for an independence movement from the Vietnamese.

Thus by 1942 there were all kinds of foreigners eager to encourage rebellion in Phnom Penh. To the east, the solidly anti-Japanese Vietnamese communists had tried to recruit Cambodians for years, but with little success. Ho Chi Minh founded the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930 with directives from the Comintern in Moscow that he build a party incorporating the communist movements in Cambodia and Laos as well as Vietnam. But there was no communist group in Cambodia, and the ICP found recruits to their party only among the Vietnamese coolies working the rubber plantations in eastern Cambodia. But once the independence drive took hold in Phnom Penh and the French suppressed the Buddhists, the ICP finally began to have hopes of recruiting Cambodians into the party.

In the West, the Issaraks grew more quickly. Moreover, the Issaraks cooperated with the Japanese at first in a secret, informal alliance against the French. The Issaraks also depended on the hospitality of the Thai government for safety from the reach of the French colonial police and for the arms and ammunition needed to lead a revolt.

Both the Vietnamese-controlled communist movement in Cambodia and Thai-supported Khmer Issarak won new recruits following the 1942 disturbances. A large number of nationalists who fled Phnom Penh eventually joined the Issaraks in western Cambodia; some established contacts with the ICP in the east.

The French retained control in Phnom Penh. However, Japan began to suffer defeats in the Pacific, and in 1943 the Japanese changed their strategy. They intensified anti-European nationalism in places like Dutch Indonesia.

But it was not until the desperate spring of 1945 that the Japanese risked upsetting the situation in Indochina. By then both the Issaraks in the west and the Vietnamese communists in the east had grown and established their own armed groups.

On March 9, 1945, the Japanese staged a
coup
de force
in Cambodia and in one sweep arrested the French military, police, and native guards and eventually imprisoned the entire French civilian population. This blow at the French was also aimed at heading off any rise of the anti-Japanese communists. Four days later the young Cambodian king, Norodom Sihanouk, abrogated the treaties of 1863 and 1884 signed by his grandfather King Norodom and declared the period of the French protectorate over. In his Cambodian New Year message a few weeks later Sihanouk said: “It is a year during which the Empire of the Rising Sun, the liberator of the Asian people, has given to Cambodian history the inestimable gift of independence.”

In a short time, the Japanese showed their promises of protection to Cambodia were as shallow as those given by other foreign powers before them. Japan plundered the country. The Japanese took thousands of tons of rice for their army and requisitioned a corps of 7,000 Cambodian soldiers for immediate duty. The sudden imprisonment of all French administrators and technicians left the economy in a mess. Yet the Japanese wanted more help and more control. Under pressure, Sihanouk accorded the Japanese the right to impress Cambodian laborers into coolie road gangs. The Japanese language was taught in the capital's schools and to Cambodian bureaucrats. Under the pretext of liberating Cambodia from the French, the Japanese imposed direct military rule and occupation on the country.

Emboldened by the Japanese example following the
coup de force
against the French, the Thais tightened their control over the northwest territories they had grabbed in 1941. The Thais raised taxes in the Cambodian provinces they held and forced Cambodians to speak the Thai language. Disillusionment was universal throughout the country. Cambodia's fierce insistence on neutrality in the next decades had strong roots in this period.

There remained one major point of contention: Who deserved the mantle of nominal leadership in Phnom Penh? Son Ngoc Thanh was brought back by the Japanese from his exile in Tokyo and made foreign minister of “independent” Cambodia. He felt he deserved to be leader of the country and began challenging the young King Sihanouk. His record as a singular anti-colonialist made him a serious rival to Sihanouk in the public's mind as well as his own. And Thanh seemed unperturbed by the stain that leadership
of a puppet regime might entail. He was already thinking ahead to the end of the war, which was nearer than Cambodia or Japan knew.

On August 9, 1945, the day the United States dropped a nuclear bomb on Nagasaki spelling Japan's defeat, allies of Thanh staged a coup d'état in Phnom Penh and made Thanh prime minister. They wanted an established nationalist at the head of Cambodia at war's end, not a young collaborationist king who had proved little more than his ability to work with either French or Japanese overlords.

Thanh was made prime minister to prevent France from returning to Cambodia. De Gaulle and the Free French had stated their intention to take back the colonies. Thanh was desperate to stop the French, and he searched for a natural ally. He tried to form a coalition with the ICP's Vietminh led by Ho Chi Minh, the only Vietnamese who were opposed to the return to French colonial rule and, Thanh thought, strong enough to fight it. Thanh also sought the support of the Thai government and the Khmer Issarak in the northwest.

But Thanh's own defense minister, secretly encouraged by Sihanouk, fled to Saigon to warn the French of Thanh's plans. In Sihanouk's name, the defense minister asked the French to return to Phnom Penh immediately and prevent an association with the Vietnamese that he feared would lead to a Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia, not independence.

On October 10, 1945, after British, French, and Indian units had entered the capital, Thanh was arrested as a “war criminal.” Sihanouk, who had ended the French protectorate and was technically the man most guilty of treason against France, capitulated to a renewal of French control over Cambodia. He curried French favor and remained on the throne. Later he explained his actions: “We are too poor to support or defend ourselves. . . . We are a small power of three million people sandwiched between twenty million Annamese [Vietnamese] and twelve million Siamese [Thais].”

With these maneuvers, Sihanouk came into his own. During his first years as king, Sihanouk obeyed the French colonial administration without public complaint. Even his pliant acceptance of the Japanese
coup de force
in 1945 was predictable. Sihanouk's adroit powers of manipulation did not come to the fore until war's end, when his rule of the country was at stake. Then he showed he could rid Phnom Penh of his rivals, particularly Son Ngoc Thanh. He had been willing to return Cambodia to French colonial power as long as he could remain king.

King Sihanouk remained on the throne, and the French granted Cambodia the status of “autonomous state within the French union.” Sihanouk had
given up a fight for independence to keep his crown and had outmaneuvered Thanh in the process. None of this was lost on the city's youth, who had witnessed this first chapter in Cambodia's modern history and were preparing to take command of the next episode.

While Sihanouk was plotting for the return of the French to Cambodia, Ho Chi Minh and his Vietminh League were devising plans to prevent the French from recolonizing Vietnam. During World War II, Ho and the Vietminh had worked with the Allies against the Japanese, primarily gathering intelligence and providing logistics support for the Americans. By the end of the war Ho was the undisputed father of Vietnamese independence, and on September 2, 1945, in Hanoi, he triumphantly declared Vietnam an independent nation. The Vietnamese emperor, Bao Dai, quickly approved the declaration.

Eleven days later, however, the French returned to Saigon through the intervention of the British occupation command. Despite promises to grant colonies independence after the war, the Allies allowed France to recapture their Indochinese colonies. War broke out shortly thereafter and spread to the north by 1946. The French were intent on denying Ho his victory and preventing the spread of his popularity to the south, where the Vietminh were in competition with other nationalist groups. This battle became known as the First Indochina War and lasted until 1954.

This war eventually spread to Cambodia, but at its commencement there was no nationalist figure to rally Cambodians against Sihanouk and his abandonment of independence. Hem Cheav, the monk, died in prison; Thanh had been imprisoned by the French at Sihanouk's request. His supporters from the days of
Nagaravatta
and the Sisowath alumni group had scattered into three directions. Most of the Buddhist dissidents who had worked with Cheav fled to the provinces, and a significant number eventually cooperated with the Vietnamese communists, joining the party themselves and fighting in the Vietnamese ranks from bases in South Vietnam. Others joined the reinvigorated noncommunist Issaraks, headquartered on the other side of the country in the northwest provinces, and declared they would fight against Sihanouk and the French with the help of the Thais. Most of the Sisowath alumni group nationalists in the capital joined together and formed a political party to fight the French and Sihanouk through peaceful means.

It was a confused period during which French and Cambodians alike lost track of who was fighting them. The Issarak groups were the most amorphous. All they had in common was their desire to defeat the French. The communists also believed in fighting the French, but they wanted a revolution afterward, and they tried to convince the Issaraks to join them; at times the communists took the Issarak name itself. The nationalists in Phnom Penh seemed as if they were mounting a separate, unrelated challenge to the French, since they disavowed armed resistance and promoted moderate social change. They formed the nucleus of the newly established Democrat Party.