Norodom Sihanouk

King Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia (born October 31, 1922) was born in Phnom Penh as a son of King Norodom Suramarit and Queen Sisowath Kossamak.

Throughout Cambodia's turbulent history he has occupied various executive positions. These included two terms as king, one as president, two as prime minister, and one as Cambodia's non-titled head of state, as well as numerous positions as leader of various governments in exile. The Guiness Book of World Records identifies him as the politician who has occupied the world's greatest variety of politicial offices thurought his career.

He commenced his formal education in a Phnom Penh primary school, the Ecole Francois Baudoin. He continued his secondary education in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), Vietnam and military school in Saumur, France. When his uncle, King Sisowath Monivong, died on April 23, 1941, the Crown Council selected Prince Sihanouk King of Cambodia. He was crowned in September 1941. Others suggested his accession was arranged by the French.

After World War II and into the early 1950s, King Sihanouk developed more of a nationalist approach and began demanding that the French leave the country. He went into exile to Thailand in 1952 and refused to reenter Cambodia until it was independent. He returned when Cambodia was granted full independence on November 9, 1953. On March 2, 1955, he abdicated in favor of his father. A few months later he became the Prime Minister. At the death of his father in 1960, Prince Sihanouk was elected head of state, rather than King.

As war raged in Vietnam, Sihanouk sought desperately to preserve Cambodia's neutrality. Alternately taking sides with the People's Republic of China and then the United States, he was not successful in preventing the war from spilling over into his country. In March 1970, while he was out of the country, a coup took place that ousted him from power. After the coup Prince Sihanouk fled to Beijing and organized forces to resist the Lon Nol government in Phnom Penh. When the Khmer Republic fell to the Khmer Rouge in April 1975, Prince Sihanouk became the head of state merely as a moderate symbol, while true power was held by Pol Pot. The next year on April 4, Sihanouk was forced out of office and into political retirement. He then sought refuge in the People's Republic of China and North Korea.

The Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in December 1978 ousted the Khmer Rouge. Although wary of the Khmer Rouge, Prince Sihanouk eventually joined forces with them in order to provide a united front against the Vietnamese occupiers. In 1982, he became president of the coalition government of Democratic Kampuchea, which consisted of his FUNCINPEC, Son Sann's KPNLF and Khmer Rouge. The Vietnamese withdrew in 1989 and left behind a pro-Vietnamese government under Prime Minister Hun Sen.

The peace negotiation between CGDK and PRK lasted until 1991 when all sides agreed to a comprehensive peace settlement which was signed in Paris. Prince Sihanouk returned to Cambodia in November 1991 after thirteen years in exile. In 1993, he was reinstated as King of Cambodia.

King Sihanouk's leisure interests include music and films. He has directed many movies and orchestrated many musical compositions over the years.

Sihanouk in History

Sihanouk continues to be one of the most controversial figures in Southeast Asia's turbulent, and often tragic, postwar history. Admirers view him as one of the country's great patriots, whose insistence on strict neutrality kept Cambodia out of the maelstrom of war and out of the revolution in neighboring Vietnam for more than fifteen years before he was betrayed by his close associate, Lon Nol. Critics attack him for his vanity, eccentricities, and intolerance of any political views different from his own. One such critic, Michael Vickery, asserts that beneath the neutralist rhetoric Sihanouk presided over a regime that was oppressively reactionary and, in some instances, as violent in its suppression of political opposition as the Khmer Rouge.

According to Vickery, the royal armed forces under Lon Nol slaughtered women and children in pro-Khmer Issarak regions of Batdambang in 1954 using methods that were later to become routine under Pol Pot. Another critical observer, Milton E. Osborne, writing as an Australian expatriate in Phnom Penh during the late 1960s, describes the Sihanouk years in terms of unbridled greed and corruption, of a foreign policy inspired more by opportunism than by the desire to preserve national independence, of an economy and a political system that were rapidly coming apart, and of the prince's obsession with making outrageously mediocre films--one of which starred himself and his wife, Princess Monique.

Sihanouk was all of these things--patriot, neutralist, embodiment of the nation's destiny, eccentric, rigid defender of the status quo, and promoter of the worst sort of patron-client politics. He believed that he single-handedly had won Cambodia's independence from the French. The contributions of other nationalists, such as Son Ngoc Thanh and the Viet Minh, were conveniently forgotten. Sihanouk also believed he had the right to run the state in a manner not very different from that of the ancient Khmer kings--that is, as an extension of his household. Unlike the ancient "god-kings," however, he established genuine rapport with ordinary Cambodians.

He made frequent, often impromptu, trips throughout the country, visiting isolated villages, chatting with peasants, receiving petitions, passing out gifts, and scolding officials for mismanagement. According to British author and journalist William Shawcross, Sihanouk was able to create a "unique brand of personal populism." To ordinary Cambodians, his eccentricities, volatility, short temper, sexual escapades, and artistic flights of fancy were an expression of royal charisma rather than an occasion for scandal. Sihanouk's delight in making life difficult for foreign diplomats and journalists, moreover, amused his subjects. Ultimately, the eccentric humanity of Sihanouk was to contrast poignantly with the random brutality of his Khmer Rouge successors.

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