When the War Was Over (24 page)

Sihanouk had been losing both power and popularity for years. The prince had been unable to separate the problems inside Cambodia from the war raging outside the country's borders. He had been unable to find a middle ground to prevent the right or the left from seeking a new path for Cambodia involving war. On the contrary, his policies seemed to push his enemies to extremes.

By 1969, Sihanouk was ruling Cambodia indirectly. He was the quasi-regal chief of state, the office he created for himself following his father's death in 1963. The government was run by Prime Minister Lon Nol and the cabinet
dominated by Prince Sirik Matak and other centrists or rightists opposed to Sihanouk.

The national assembly was hostile to the prince, as were the armed forces. Only the police, headed by Sihanouk's relative Oum Mannorine, the secretary of state for ground forces, were loyal to the prince. Sihanouk was facing the prospect of becoming a figurehead and little else. All branches of government were reversing his programs. All were showing an impatience with his rule.

In the spring of 1970, Sihanouk took a vacation to France. He planned to rest there and continue on to the Soviet Union and China. With Sihanouk's approval Cambodia had been moving closer to the United States, and the prince wanted to assure the communist giants that Cambodia had no plans to alter its “neutrality” in the Vietnam War.

This was Sihanouk's first vacation in three years, and he left the government in the hands of the men he supported in 1969 to construct a Government of Salvation—Lon Nol and Sirik Matak. On March 8, 1970, shortly after Sihanouk left, the Cambodian army organized demonstrations against the Vietcong in the eastern province of Svay Rieng, which borders on Vietnam. Three days later the demonstrations were moved to the capital. This time the targets were the embassies of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam and North Vietnam.

In a well-coordinated move, the national assembly used the demonstrations as an opportunity to decry Sihanouk's “pro-communist Vietnam” policy and push through a command to add 10,000 soldiers to the army. A cable to that effect was sent to Sihanouk the following day, March 12. That same day the Cambodian government issued apologies to the Vietnamese embassies that included ultimatums to withdraw all Vietnamese troops from Cambodia by the dawn of March 15—in two days.

The last pieces of Sihanouk's policies were being smashed. The prince cabled his mother, Queen Kossamak, in Phnom Penh and told her he would return shortly, on March 18, and give the people a choice between his neutrality and the aggressive policies put forward by Lon Nol and Sirik Matak. Queen Kossamak received Sihanouk's cable on Friday, March 13. But within three days her son changed his mind, as was his habit, and cabled that he would delay his return until March 24 so that he could visit both Moscow and Beijing.

The queen mother then called in Lon Nol and Sirik Matak, her nephew, and told them to stop their demonstrations and return to Sihanouk's policies. She also wrote to the president of the national assembly, Cheng Heng,
and said she would dissolve the assembly if it did not stop issuing anti-Vietnamese proclamations. Since the queen mother had no official government powers, and appeared to be acting as her son's proxy, the cabinet and the national assembly offered, instead, to send a delegation to Paris to speak with Sihanouk and work out a compromise. The offer was refused; the queen mother and Lon Nol had sent a delegation to Sihanouk with documents showing North Vietnamese intentions, but he refused to meet them.

That night, with or without Sihanouk's approval, the police attempted to mount a coup d'état against Lon Nol. Oum Mannorine, Sihanouk's relative and overall chief of the police, was forced to resign the following day—but on charges of corruption and not for attempting an ill-fated coup.

The reason for this charge, and the refusal to broadcast reports of the attempted coup, came the following day. On March 18 a real coup took place, against Sihanouk, whose behavior the preceding week had played into the hands of his opponents. Lon Nol and his supporters claimed that the prime minister originally hoped merely to change Sihanouk's policies toward the Vietnamese communists, not overthrow him, but the attempted coup and Sihanouk's belligerent behavior persuaded Lon Nol to throw in his lot with Sihanouk's open rival—Prince Sirik Matak.

The coup seemed the handiwork of Sirik Matak and his American supporters. It was presumed in Phnom Penh circles that Matak received political and financial support from the Central Intelligence Agency and the coup would be to the advantage of both.

It proceeded with order and without bloodshed. The army was put on alert, and tanks surrounded the appropriate government buildings. But the military was restrained from any unnecessary maneuverings, and Lon Nol publicly underlined the continuation of Buddhism in the new order. There was no storming of the palace, no bloody fights in the street. Communication with the outside world was shut off for over twenty-four hours, and the international airport was closed for a few days. A handful of officials were placed under house arrest, and some members of the royal family, including Queen Kossamak, who suffered the monarchy's fall from grace alone in her villa.

The story was spread that the queen performed a ceremony to discover what this debacle meant for her son. She drew a sacred sword from its scabbard and found its blade tarnished a hideous black color. It was the worst possible omen.

In the streets of Phnom Penh there was no more mention of the White Crocodile.

The new republic was headed by a triumvirate—Lon Nol, Sirik Matak, and Cheng Heng, the president of the national assembly. Cambodia's high court of justice tried Sihanouk in absentia and found him guilty of high treason, specifically for “illegally” granting Vietnamese communist troops permission to occupy Cambodian territory, to use the Sihanoukville seaport for aid shipments, and to establish bases on Khmer soil. The court said the prince had violated his own policy of neutrality and had threatened the integrity and independence of Cambodia. Sihanouk was condemned to death. (No one mentioned Lon Nol's active role in these agreements with the Vietnamese communists.)

From the start, the republic staked its legitimacy on a vow to rid the country of the threat from the Vietnamese communists. As head of the armed forces, Lon Nol automatically became the figure charged with fulfilling that promise. In preparation for the coup, Lon Nol, as prime minister, had sent the demand to the Phnom Penh embassies of the North and South Vietnamese communists to withdraw their troops from Khmer soil within forty-eight hours. It was a preposterous demand, particularly since Lon Nol had played a key role in helping the communists send aid to their bases.

After the coup the Vietnamese diplomats said they still considered Sihanouk the legitimate head of a state which had accorded them the right to maintain border sanctuaries inside Cambodia. Border clashes erupted immediately between Cambodian troops and the Vietnamese communists. Nine days after the coup the Vietnamese closed down their embassies and returned home.

The Chinese made one last effort to work with Lon Nol, while they were putting together an alliance with Sihanouk and the Khmer Rouge. The Chinese sent emissaries to Phnom Penh with the offer of recognition to the new government if it complied with three conditions: permission for the Chinese to continue supplying the Vietnamese through Khmer territory; authorization of Vietnamese communists to maintain their bases inside Khmer territory; and support of the Vietnamese communists in government statements.

Even at this late date the Chinese were willing to “postpone” the Cambodian revolution in order to help the Vietnamese revolution and maintain a Chinese-Vietnamese front against the United States. They would sell out the Cambodian communists to ensure a defeat of the Americans in Vietnam. But the Chinese demands were virtually the bill of particulars used against Sihanouk at his trial. Phnom Penh rejected Beijing's offer.

Fighting broke out immediately in the Vietnamese border sanctuaries. Lon Nol's troops made symbolic attempts to push out the Vietnamese, in
the vain hope they would retreat without a fight. But this was 1970 and the Ho Chi Minh trail was far too valuable to them. North Vietnamese units fought back. Presumably with U.S. coordination, Lon Nol turned to the South Vietnamese for help, and by the end of March three battalions of South Vietnamese rangers joined Cambodian troops two miles inside Cambodia to attack a Vietcong hideout. By April the Vietnamese communists were launching isolated attacks against Lon Nol's troops far beyond the border: in the south and northeast and near Phnom Penh itself.

The North Vietnamese now asserted that Cambodia was no longer neutral, pointing to Lon Nol's entente with South Vietnam as proof. Cambodia was an active participant in the war. Hence the North Vietnamese felt justified in attacking Cambodia. They launched multiple sporadic attacks against Lon Nol's troops, and some 150 soldiers occupied the Cambodian town of Saang for three days. In late April the Chinese called together an “Indochinese Summit” that brought together Sihanouk, representatives of the Khmer Rouge, and the Vietnamese and the Lao communists. All claimed that the Vietnamese were now “allies” of the legitimate Cambodian leader, Prince Sihanouk.

While China brokered alliances and coordinated the Indochinese Summit, the Soviet Union stayed out of the picture. China was staking a claim as the chief mediator for revolution in Indochina. The Soviets planned another strategy entirely. The Soviet Union refused to break ties with Lon Nol and maintained an embassy in Phnom Penh throughout the war. The Khmer Rouge interpreted this behavior as Soviet endorsement of a Vietnamese strategy in Indochina that excluded them. Nothing would be straightforward about the Cambodian war or revolution.

Lon Nol appealed to the United Nations in March 1970 to declare the Vietnamese communists aggressors in Cambodia, but the UN responded by saying that such a request should be made to the commission set up by the 1954 Geneva Convention. That legal convenience turned out to be a blind alley. The previous year, in 1969, Sihanouk had ended the commission's mandate in Cambodia, two months after he had signed the agreement allowing the Vietcong bases inside Cambodia.

After two weeks of petitioning world bodies, Lon Nol publicly appealed to any country for aid to fight “Vietnamese communism.” On April 30 the U.S. and the South Vietnamese governments responded by launching a surprise full-scale attack against the communist sanctuaries in eastern Cambodia, without notifying Lon Nol. In less than two months the Phnom Penh leadership had walked into the Second Indochina War in a naive and haphazard fashion. It set the tone for how they waged and lost the war.

At this stage Lon Nol moved ahead of the other coup architects and took control over the sources of power in Phnom Penh. Sirik Matak, who had been America's original hope in Cambodia, and who had Phnom Penh's bourgeoisie on his side, was incapable of stopping Lon Nol. Aloof, impeccable, more polished than his short, stout cousin Sihanouk, Matak had convinced the Americans he could modernize Cambodia with American aid and tilt Cambodia toward American foreign policy. By his later actions one can surmise that Matak expected, in exchange for Cambodian cooperation, that the United States would protect Cambodia from the Vietnamese, not drag it into a full-scale war. He proved a political naif not only in his dealings with the United States but, crucially, in his underestimation of Lon Nol.

Unlike Matak, Lon Nol seemed to relish the idea of finally confronting the North Vietnamese, whom he blamed for all the indignities Cambodia had ever suffered at the hands of Vietnam over the centuries. He was the least modernist member of the triumvirate, the most obvious source of the crocodile rumors that preceded the coup, and an enigma in the world of Phnom Penh politics. He was a man with peasant sensibilities and not much apparent talent, a man who had climbed to power through the military as Sihanouk's loyal hatchet man. The prince had valued Lon Nol for his ruthlessness, his willingness to do the prince's dirty work as head of the police and military and to do so without complaint and with relative discretion. Sihanouk considered Lon Nol too limited to be a threat, as did Lon Nol's co-conspirators in the coup. They were to be proved wrong.

In this regard, and many others, Lon Nol had much in common with the man who would become his nemesis—Saloth Sar. He was just as plodding in his youth and just as ambitious. Born in 1913, Lon Nol possessed the same exaggerated pride in being a “true Khmer.” Lon Nol encouraged his soldiers to call him their “Black Papa” to distinguish himself as a real Khmer because of his darker skin. (Another officer in the army was known as “White Papa” because of his fairer skin.)

Lon Nol rose through the offices of the military but with an equally strong career in politics. He founded a political party to contest the first national elections in 1946 and named it the Khmer Renovation Party to express his hope that the country's traditions could be updated rather than changed. He was appointed by King Sihanouk to fight the Issarak rebels and Vietminh in the northwest during the First Indochina War. In the 1955 elections, Lon Nol merged his small political party within Sihanouk's Sangkum Party.

During the fifties and sixties few ambitious Cambodians considered a military career. Lon Nol was appointed chief of staff of the newly independent
Cambodian army in 1955 and used that post as a springboard to power. The army was largely drawn from the peasantry and not the educated classes. Lon Nol could maintain his peasant sensibilities with his men and prevent other politicians from taking over. Moreover, there was very little money to be earned in the army, particularly after Sihanouk cut off American aid, and Lon Nol, with Sihanouk's support, had complete control over advancement. Long before the coup, the army belonged to Lon Nol and not Sihanouk.