The first thing to remember about Norodom Sihanouk, the former king of Cambodia, who died yesterday, in Beijing, is that he was the titular head of the Khmer Rouge in the nineteen-seventies, when it held power under the command of Pol Pot, and presided over the extermination of nearly two million Cambodians. Never mind that Pol Pot (who was raised in the royal palace in Phnom Penh before being sent to school in Paris, where he became a Communist) called for regicide in his first published writing, declaring in 1952 that the monarchy was “a running sore that just people must eliminate.” Sihanouk was always in it for Sihanouk.
Having made a hash of his attempts to play Cold War forces off against one another on the edge of the Vietnam War, Sihanouk had been ousted and saw Pol Pot as his way back to power. Pol Pot saw Sihanouk as the perfect cover story for his revolution—a royalist front for the total erasure of Cambodian history and the fantasy of Year Zero. When I visited Cambodia just after Pol Pot’s death, in 1998, I wrote of Sihanouk: “His name became the Khmer Rouge’s greatest recruitment tool, and the most extreme Communist movement in history swept to power on royal coattails.” And yet, instead of being held responsible for helping to unleash hell, “that sexy Prince Sihanouk,” as Spalding Gray called him in “Swimming to Cambodia,” managed for much of the rest of his life to act as if he was as wronged as the great mass of Khmers.
The second thing to remember about Sihanouk is that when he decided to start spending a lot of time abroad, after being restored to his throne in the nineteen-nineties, he moved to Pyongyang. Yes, of all the places on earth, Pyongyang—where Kim Il Sung’s insane misrule was killing millions of his own people by starvation (and those were the lucky ones who didn’t get sent to the North Korean gulags to be finished off). That’s where Sihanouk felt at home, in a place that almost no other human being with a choice would want to be seen luxuriating, as the guest of another dynast who purported to be the embodiment of the people whose lives he wasted on an epic scale and without apology.
The third thing to remember, keeping Sihanouk’s accommodation of the Khmer Rouge and affiliation for Pyonyang firmly in mind, is the first thing that most of the obituaries will tell you: that the Cambodian people always remained respectful, even worshipful of him. Rather than seeing him as the personification of their wretched twentieth-century history, they imagined in him a national glory that he never represented except in fantasy.
Like Pol Pot’s perverse ideology of annihilation in the name of nationalist authenticity, the mirage of Khmer monarchism—that the king was the nation’s greatness and glory made flesh—was concocted in Paris, untroubled by reference to historical reality. When the French colonized Indochina in the late nineteenth century, they discovered the magnificent temple and palace complex of Angkor buried deep in the jungle. Realizing that Cambodia had once been among the most sophisticated powers on earth, French scholars encouraged twentieth-century Cambodians to imagine that their decadent and largely impotent royal family carried all the promise of past Khmer greatness. The French built a fancy new royal palace in Phnom Penh, where Sihanouk came of age. So it was not as surprising as one might wish it was, that as the Khmer Rouge began their reign of mass murder, forty-some years ago, Pol Pot and Sihanouk paused to pose for photographs together in the Angkorian ruins.
Sorting through the Sihanouk story, in 1998, I described the twisted influence of the French glorification of the Cambodian past on the Cambodian present: “To be told that you are mighty while being confronted by the fact that you are not is to be told that there is something wrong with you. When such a humiliating rupture between image and substance is left unrepaired, it can become eviscerating. It leaves you dangling from the gallows of Salman Rushdie’s formulation: ‘Shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence.’ ”
After Pol Pot’s death, Hun Sen, the ex-Khmer Rouge cadre who has ruled Cambodia since 1985, was determined to crush the monarchy as well as democracy as he consolidated his power—and he has succeeded. Going back through my notes as the Sihanouk obituaries hit the wires last night, I came across this undated remark of the dead king’s, which I had flagged and highlighted, but which didn’t make it into my piece: “Time will inevitably uncover dishonesty and lies; history has no place for them.” It seems impossible that Sihanouk really believed that.
Read Philip Gourevitch’s 1998 Letter from Cambodia, “Pol Pot’s Children,” and his piece “Alone in the Dark,” from 2003, about North Korea.
Photograph by Howard Sochurek//Time Life Pictures/Getty.
