Norodom Sihanouk

Norodom Sihanouk: The King Who Would Not Stay Crowned

French colonial officials put an eighteen-year-old on Cambodia's throne in 1941 because they judged him pliable. He spent the next sixty-three years proving them catastrophically wrong — becoming, in turn, an independence leader, an elected prime minister, an exiled figurehead for the regime that later imprisoned him, and, twice, a king who chose to stop being one. Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, which he had helped legitimize from exile, eventually placed him under house arrest and, in his own biographer's phrase, spat him out "like a cherry pit."

A Throne Chosen for Him

Norodom Sihanouk was born on October 31, 1922, in Phnom Penh, the only child of Prince Norodom Suramarit and Princess Sisowath Kossamak. When his grandfather, King Sisowath Monivong, died in 1941, French colonial authorities bypassed more assertive claimants and crowned the eighteen-year-old Sihanouk on May 3, 1941, expecting a compliant monarch who would leave French control over Cambodia undisturbed.

Independence, Then Abdication by Choice

Instead, Sihanouk became the central figure in securing Cambodian independence, which he declared on November 9, 1953, ending nearly a century of French colonial rule. Then, in a move almost without precedent for a reigning monarch, he abdicated in March 1955 — not under pressure, but explicitly to escape what he called the "intrigues" of palace life and govern directly as a politician. His new Sangkum Reastr Niyum movement won the September 1955 elections with 83 percent of the vote, and Sihanouk became prime minister of the country he had just finished ruling as king. Through the Sangkum years he pursued a doctrine he termed "Buddhist socialism," positioning Cambodia as officially neutral in the Cold War while tilting increasingly toward Beijing, signing friendship treaties with China and tolerating North Vietnamese use of Cambodian territory as the Vietnam War intensified next door.

Overthrown, and an Unlikely Alliance

In March 1970, while Sihanouk was abroad seeking medical treatment in France, General Lon Nol led a National Assembly vote to depose him. Sihanouk fled to Beijing, where Premier Zhou Enlai assured him China still recognized him as Cambodia's legitimate leader. From exile he formed a government-in-exile known as GRUNK and, in a decision that would define the rest of his life, allied himself with the Khmer Rouge — the communist insurgency he had spent years suppressing — as the only available vehicle to fight his way back to power against Lon Nol.

Figurehead, Prisoner, Survivor

When the Khmer Rouge captured Phnom Penh in April 1975, Sihanouk returned as nominal head of state, a figurehead atop a regime that was, in fact, run entirely by Pol Pot and the Party Centre. During a February 1976 tour of the countryside he witnessed the forced labor and mass population transfers underway, and moved to resign; the regime accepted his resignation that April and placed him under house arrest inside the Royal Palace, isolated for most of the next three years while the Khmer Rouge killed an estimated 1.7 to 2 million Cambodians. Only after Vietnam's invasion toppled the regime in December 1978 was Sihanouk permitted to leave for Beijing, in January 1979.

Rebuilding a Resistance, Reclaiming a Crown

Unwilling to rejoin forces with the Khmer Rouge despite Chinese pressure to do so, Sihanouk eventually founded FUNCINPEC in 1981 as an independent royalist resistance movement and, from 1982, chaired the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea, Cambodia's internationally recognized government-in-exile through the 1980s — a coalition that, awkwardly, still included the Khmer Rouge as a faction. The 1991 Paris Peace Accords ended the civil war, and after UN-supervised elections in 1993 in which FUNCINPEC, led by his son Norodom Ranariddh, won a plurality, Sihanouk was restored to the throne on September 24, 1993, thirty-eight years after he had first walked away from it.

A Weakened Second Reign

His second reign proved far less commanding than his first turn in power. He installed Ranariddh and Hun Sen as co-prime ministers in an uneasy power-sharing arrangement that collapsed into a violent 1997 coup, after which Hun Sen consolidated control and Sihanouk's practical influence receded to ceremony and moral suasion. In October 2004, citing his health, he abdicated a second and final time; the Royal Council of the Throne selected his son Norodom Sihamoni to succeed him.

The Filmmaker King

Alongside six decades of statecraft, Sihanouk maintained an unusually prolific artistic life: he wrote, produced, and directed roughly fifty films between 1941 and 2006, frequently starring in them himself and weaving in nationalist and autobiographical themes, and he composed songs — including some performed at diplomatic functions in New York in the 1980s and later for guests at his palace. He married six times and fathered at least fourteen children, including Ranariddh and Sihamoni.

Death

Sihanouk died in Beijing on October 15, 2012, at age 89, of a heart attack following years of treatment for cancer, diabetes, and hypertension. His ashes were interred at the Silver Pagoda within Phnom Penh's Royal Palace in July 2014, following a state funeral that drew mass public mourning across Cambodia.

Why Norodom Is Called a Genius

If genius applies to Sihanouk, it is a genius for survival and reinvention rather than for building durable institutions. His biographer Milton Osborne described him as a leader focused on "achieving a limited number of practical goals" at any given moment rather than pursuing a coherent ideology — a trait that let him pivot from French-appointed monarch to elected socialist premier to Khmer Rouge ally to exiled statesman to restored king, outlasting colonial rule, a military coup, a genocidal regime, and a civil war, while Cambodians came to remember him as "the father of Cambodian independence." He himself insisted the constant thread was "the defence of the independence, the territorial integrity and the dignity of my country and my people," and his rapid, often bewildering shifts earned him the enduring press label "mercurial" — a word meant as much in admiration of his agility as in criticism of his inconsistency.

The honest counter-case is severe. Sihanouk's 1970 alliance with the Khmer Rouge, whatever its tactical logic, lent crucial legitimacy to a movement he knew to be communist and militant, helping deliver it the popular base it used to seize power in 1975 — a decision that preceded one of the twentieth century's worst genocides. He served that same regime as a figurehead for a year even as its atrocities became visible to him, resigning only in 1976, well after the mass evacuations of cities and forced labor had begun. His second reign, from 1993, saw him reduced to a largely symbolic role as Hun Sen built the authoritarian one-party dominance that still governs Cambodia today, a durable outcome Sihanouk's own maneuvering did little to prevent.

Legacy

Sihanouk remains Cambodia's most singular twentieth-century figure — the man most associated with its independence and its trauma alike, a king who abdicated twice by his own choice and a nationalist whose most consequential political bet, the Khmer Rouge alliance, became inseparable from the country's greatest catastrophe.

Achievements

• Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour
• Notable work: Twilight
• Educated at Cavalry Training School Saumur
• Worked as politician, film director and actor