Norodom Sihanouk, the flamboyant Cambodian monarch whose intermittent rule was marked by shifting alliances, decades of strife and the near-destruction of his country, died Monday in a Beijing hospital after suffering a heart attack. He was 89 and had battled cancer and other ailments in recent years.
China’s state-run Xinhua news agency reported the death, citing Cambodian Deputy Prime Minister Nhik Bun Chhay. It said Cambodian authorities would bring Sihanouk’s body back to his homeland for a royal funeral.
One of the great survivors of modern Asian politics, Sihanouk served in a variety of leadership roles — both real and titular — in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, and in various governments-in-exile over seven decades. He twice was crowned king and twice abdicated. He also wielded power as a sovereign prince, a prime minister (serving 10 separate terms) and a head of state.
As war raged in neighboring Vietnam in the 1960s, Sihanouk struggled to keep his country out of the fighting. But his policy of accommodating the North Vietnamese communists alienated his army, and he was overthrown in 1970 in a rightist coup led by a U.S.-backed general, Lon Nol.
In response to that betrayal, Sihanouk sided with the radical Cambodian communist guerrillas he had dubbed the Khmer Rouge. (The Khmer people are Cambodia’s predominant ethnic group.)
His support gave the Khmer Rouge legitimacy in the eyes of many Cambodians, and it facilitated the movement’s eventual victory, which resulted in a four-year reign of terror that claimed an estimated 1.7 million lives.
That legacy produced the harshest indictment leveled against Sihanouk: that his impulse to settle personal scores nearly ruined his country and made him complicit in the Khmer Rouge holocaust.
“It is beyond question that Sihanouk deeply loved the Cambodian people,” wrote Bruce Sharp, a longtime Cambodia observer and founder of a Web site about Indochina, in a review of Sihanouk’s memoirs. “But Sihanouk had one critical flaw: as much as he loved the Cambodian people, he loved himself just slightly more. At a pivotal moment in Cambodian history, he chose his own interests above those of Cambodia, and millions of people paid with their lives.”
Held as a virtual prisoner in his palace during the Khmer Rouge rule, Sihanouk was largely isolated from the excesses. “I did not see the killing,” he told the New York Times in 1982, “but I saw the forced labor of my people.”
At the time of his death, Sihanouk was the self-styled “king-father” of Cambodia, a title he adopted after abdicating as constitutional monarch in October 2004 on grounds of poor health.
He handed the throne to his youngest surviving son, Norodom Sihamoni, now 59, a ballet instructor, choreographer and diplomat who had lived in France for nearly 20 years.
Although widely revered in Cambodia as a god-king, Sihanouk also was well known for his human shortcomings. He was so erratic and temperamental that the adjective “mercurial” became a staple of news stories about him.
He could also be vain, egotistical, self-indulgent, divisive, hypersensitive to perceived slights and given to bouts of gloom and self-pity. But he always stressed that, whatever his faults, there was no doubt about his dedication to his country, its people and its independence.
Born Oct. 31, 1922, in Phnom Penh, Sihanouk was placed on the throne in 1941 by Cambodia’s French colonial rulers following the death of King Sisowath Monivong, his maternal grandfather.
The eldest son of Prince Norodom Suramarit and Princess Sisowath Kossamak, Sihanouk claimed descent from at least 80 Cambodian kings. Before his coronation, he studied at a secondary school in Saigon. He later attended a military school in Saumur, France.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
