Norodom Sihanouk: A Once and Future Prince

Cambodian Prince Norodom Sihanouk's curious appearance at the United Nations last week, on behalf of a government that he had never liked and that had ceased to exist, can be explained simply: he hates the Vietnamese more than he hated the Khmer Rouge regime of Premier Pol Pot, which had ruled Cambodia for four years until its overthrow by Vietnamese-backed rebel forces last week. For most of that time, Sihanouk had been kept under virtual house arrest in Phnom-Penh. Two weeks ago, Pol Pot sent for the Prince and asked him to go to the U.N. to protest the Vietnamese invasion. Sihanouk replied, "I am ready."

Arriving in Peking the next day, Sihanouk embraced old friends, including several Western correspondents. Giddy with the sense of release, he later treated the press to an extraordinary news conference. For almost six hours, he talked, now giggling, now pouting, now scowling, jumping up and down from his chair. He sent out for sandwiches to feed the reporters, and went on and on. He denounced the new Hanoi-backed regime in Phnom-Penh, but he was frank to admit his differences with Pol Pot. "I do not approve of his internal policies, his violation of human rights," Sihanouk said. "I would like to see my people have the right to their pagodas, to travel freely, to love and to be loved, to be able to see their wives and to be with their wives and children and not be separated ... These are basic rights of humanity ... We are not animals, like buffaloes and oxen."

After his arrival in Manhattan, Sihanouk agreed to be interviewed by TIME Staff Writer James Wilde, who has known him since 1955. Wilde remembers Cambodia in the mid-1950s as a gentle, bucolic land of temple bells and gilded stupa spires gleaming in a green landscape. In those days, Sihanouk was known as something of a playboy who dabbled in songwriting, crooning, saxophone and accordion playing, moviemaking and women. On occasion, Wilde reported, "the Prince would hold press conferences in the open-air dance pavilion of his wedding-cake palace. Sometimes his daughter would execute classical Cambodian dances, and there was always champagne to mark the end of an audience."

Those were also the years when the volatile Sihanouk brilliantly maintained his balancing act of keeping Cambodia neutral. "He got the U.S. to build a four-lane highway, to the port of Kompong Som," recalls Wilde, "and when the monsoons washed parts of it away, he got the Russians to repair it. He delighted in inviting the diplomatic corps to help build irrigation projects. Every time he dug up a bit of earth at one of those ceremonies, the peasants would catch it, for he was sacred and so was everything he touched."

Sihanouk's tightrope diplomacy ended in failure in 1970 when he was deposed by American-backed Marshal Lon Nol. His country was invaded a few weeks later by American and South Vietnamese forces in an effort to rout the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese from their Cambodian sanctuary. After Lon Nol was overthrown in 1975, Sihanouk returned to Phnom-Penh. He served briefly as head of state in the Khmer Rouge government and then was shoved aside in early 1976. Twice a year the Pol Pot government permitted him a well-guarded visit to the countryside to inspect the nation's progress under the Communist regime. "I was told repeatedly that the Cambodian people were no longer my children but Pol Pot's children," Sihanouk said last week. Four of his own older children are still in Cambodia, their whereabouts unknown.

What had happened to Cambodia's fervent Buddhism of earlier times? "I was told that the monks and priests had voluntarily given it up," Sihanouk says. "The Pol Pot regime said that Buddhism would come back one day. Perhaps it will. But the only religion permitted was Communism according to Pol Pot. The temples, the pagodas were burned or turned into pigstys or granaries or schools of politics where the young were taught to work hard and love the heart and soul of Pol Pot. But I always said my prayers. I was the only practicing Buddhist in all Cambodia for three years; the others were not allowed to. Perhaps some of the old people still believed, but they dared not practice it. When I prayed, my guards looked on and laughed."

Despite all this, Sihanouk opposes what he calls the "Hitler aggression" of the Vietnamese. He is convinced that the invading force was drawn from among the ethnic Cambodians who live in the delta region of southern Viet Nam. "These people are completely unknown to me," he insists. "I am certain they are Vietnamese citizens, not native Cambodians." Since he expects the fighting to continue for a long time, Sihanouk plans to live in exile indefinitely.

When invited by Wilde to pose for pictures with his wife Monique, Sihanouk regally asked an aide, "Where is the princess?" Then, as if recalling that he was no longer a sovereign except to those who remember him fondly, he quickly added, "I mean my wife." Finally, as in the years before wars and coups destroyed his templed land, the audience was over and French champagne was served.

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