The Bloodied Legacy of Cambodia’s Chameleon King

HONG KONG — He was a libertine and a francophile, a filmmaker and a painter, a serial husband and father and philanderer, a cherubic but ruthless god-king who liked to putter about in the garden. He played the sax in his own jazz band. He loved to eat. He once served Champagne to a visiting U.S. secretary of state. At 10 a.m.

Most of all, of course, King Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia was the consummate political flip-flopper, a shape-shifting monarch and realpolitik chameleon who helped to lead the global nonaligned movement but also, at one time or another, tethered his nation to the world’s major powers to preserve its independence.

The diplomatic chronology of King Sihanouk, who died Monday in Beijing at age 89, is mind-boggling in its complexity and contradictions. But his legacy might well be forever sealed and tarnished by his alliance with the hyper-communist Khmer Rouge movement that ravaged Cambodia from 1975 to 1979.

The regime, which came to power through his direct participation, would kill an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians through murder, torture, overwork and starvation — a rampage of such horror and psychosis that it targeted anyone with an education, anyone who spoke a foreign language, anyone who wore eyeglasses or played the piano.

“By allying himself with the Khmer Rouge and urging his countrymen to join, Sihanouk condemned his people to damnation,” said the historian Joel Brinkley in his book, “Cambodia’s Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land.”

Elizabeth Becker and Seth Mydans, in their obituary of King Sihanouk in The Times, write, “In the end, King Sihanouk helped bring Pol Pot to power.”

King Sihanouk had initially persecuted Pol Pot, his Khmer Rouge compatriots and other leftists in the early and mid-1960s — as the Vietnam War was heating up and Southeast Asian communists were mounting insurgencies. The Khmer Rouge politburo fled the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, and many sought refuge in the country’s northwestern forests and in France.

Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodian Leader Through Shifting Allegiances, Dies at 89 nyti.ms/RvqFSe

— The New York Times (@nytimes) October 15, 2012

The Khmer Rouge (or Red Khmer) movement was not even a blip on the geopolitical radar, certainly in Washington and even inside Cambodia. Even as late as 1970, Mr. Brinkley said, “the Khmer Rouge was still a negligible force.”

But that year, 1970, amid domestic political turmoil and worries for Cambodia’s sovereignty because of the Vietnam War, the prime minister, Lon Nol, staged a coup that unseated King Sihanouk.

Lon Nol was wealthy, corrupt, the king’s former police chief and confidant. A mystic who relied on astrologers and soothsayers before making key decisions, he also was in Washington’s pocket.

Many historians fault the coup, along with King Sihanouk, for elevating and enabling the Khmer Rouge. “While Sihanouk’s alliance with the Khmer Rouge certainly contributed to Pol Pot coming to power, such an eventuality was inevitable with Sihanouk no longer at the helm,” the journalist Nate Thayer, who has reported extensively and compellingly from Cambodia, told Rendezvous.

The Lon Nol coup took place while King Sihanouk was in France. Enraged, he flew to China to seek advice and support. The Communist leaders in Beijing pushed him toward their fellow travelers, the Khmer Rouge.

King Sihanouk took Beijing’s counsel and used radio broadcasts to urge Cambodians to join the Khmer Rouge resistance against the Lon Nol government. His messages resonated deeply in rural Cambodia, where he was adored by the peasantry.

“Thousands upon thousands heard him and complied,” said Mr. Brinkley. “Then and only then did the KR movement begin to take off.”

“His name and appearance in propaganda films and booklets helped the Communists recruit peasants in Cambodia and gave respectability to their cause in diplomatic circles,” Mr. Mydans and Ms. Becker write.

Mr. Brinkley said King Sihanouk wrote reassuringly to several U.S. senators at the time that the Khmer Rouge intended ‘to set up a Swedish type of kingdom.’ “

In her book, “When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution,” Ms. Becker said the Khmer Rouge with King Sihanouk as the perceived front man “did not appear to be a radical alternative to what had come before, merely a new variation on familiar Cambodian politicians.”

When Khmer Rouge fighters finally took control of Phnom Penh in April 1975, urban Cambodians obediently followed instructions to leave behind their homes and belongings and head into the countryside. Within days, 3 million people were on the roads. They were marching, Ms. Becker writes, “into a life more miserable than any could imagine.”

“The Cambodians have two faces, two aspects,” King Sihanouk once said. “We can smile, and we can also kill.”

From the Times’s obituary:

King Sihanouk was the titular president during the first year of the Khmer Rouge rule. He said he had resigned a year later and was put under house arrest with his consort, Princess Monique, in one of the palaces. There he listened to world news on a radio and, he said, at times wanted to commit suicide.

He was rescued when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia and overthrew the Khmer Rouge in 1979. But rather than turn against Pol Pot, King Sihanouk went to the United Nations and defended him, saying the country’s enemy was Vietnam.

Mr. Thayer said Monday that King Sihanouk was “indisputably a master politician both domestically and internationally, able to juggle internal forces and global superpowers to keep his country at peace.”

“Cambodia remained an oasis of peace while Vietnam and Laos were engulfed in war and Thailand to the west was a land-based aircraft carrier,” Mr. Thayer said.

“His role in Southeast Asian politics remains unique and unmatched. He was the most transparent of politicians, really. He never tried to hide his faults nor accomplishments. Without Sihanouk, it could be argued, Cambodia would no longer be a nation state.”