ABSTRACT
Sihanouk, the great survivor, has seen a number of political incarnations in the sixty years since his original appointment to the throne of Cambodia. Nine seems a reasonable classification. In Chapters 2 and 3 we met the young protégé of the French (1941-45); the absolute monarch of a nominally independent state under Japanese tutelage (1945); a semi-constitutional monarch, again under French tutelage in the early days of Cambodian democracy (1946-52); the King who won Independence from the French (1952-54); the frustrated absolutist who resorted to abdication when denied a ‘Royal Constitution’, and founded his own mass party to fight elections instead (1954-55); and the populist/autocratic leader of a non-aligned nation-state (1955-70), including ten more years as Head of State (but not monarch) after his father died in 1960 and the throne became vacant once more. It was this sixth ‘life’ that was Sihanouk’s undoing, for his autocratic and mercurial ways were unsuited to the solution of Cambodia’s increasingly complex problems. Arguably these problems could not have been surmounted by any leader or combination of leaders, in whatever political system. But a search for consensus and coalition-building was the least the situation required. Sihanouk, on the contrary, was the least able to seek it. His personalized regime seemed almost calculated to alienate every group and make solutions even more elusive. Sihanouk himself was ‘part of the problem’.
