A. Gaffar Peang-Meth Ideologically or politically motivated historians can make a study of history confusing. Allowing for some personal bias to affect one's interpretation is understandable. Surely one man's bias is another's objective telling.
Nevertheless, careful research will reveal that interpretations motivated by a political viewpoint can turn out to be demonstrably wrong.
The fashion has been to claim the U.S. B-52 bombings of Cambodia and the U.S. invasion of "neutral" Cambodia in 1970 were the primary catalyst for the rise of the Khmer Rouge genocidal regime.
I wrote in this space on Sept. 16 that Cambodia's "neutrality" was destroyed in 1963, and I cited a 1972 KCNA News Service Release and the "Protocol" to the 1965 agreement for China's military aid to Cambodia, allowing the Vietnamese communists' use of Khmer soil in the war against the Americans.
The pre-1970 Cambodian Ministry of Information published an invaluable collection of then Chief of State Sihanouk's speeches, "Les Paroles de Samdech Preah N. Sihanouk."
In the January-March 1964 collection, Sihanouk's political outlook was stated on Feb. 21: "In all frankness, it is not to our interest to deal with the West which represents the present but not the future. ... Our interest is to deal with the camp which will one day dominate the whole of Asia -- and to deal with it before its victory."
This was the foundational rationale for Cambodia's assistance to Vietnamese communist forces. In March 1964, demonstrators sacked the U.S. Information Service Library, besieged the U.S. Embassy, tore up the U.S. flag, and burned parked cars.
In June, Sihanouk told a press conference in Paris: "The four-fifths of our frontiers with South Vietnam are occupied, in a permanent or occasional fashion, by the troops of the National Liberation Front."
The 1907 Second Hague Conference's Convention V on Rights and Duties of Neutral States in War on Land stipulates the territory of neutral states is inviolable. A neutral state must not allow belligerent troops, munitions or supplies on its soil.
In international law, when a neutral state fails, for any reason, to prevent a violation of its neutrality by one belligerent, the other belligerent may justify its action on the neutral territory.
In 1968, Sihanouk's foreign policy accommodated opponents of communism. He declared "no objection" to a U.S. presence in the region as a "counter-weight" to China, which "inspired and directed" local communist activities. He wrote to the French newspaper "Le Monde," charging Peking and Hanoi with subversion and conspiracy to "overthrow our regime from within." This was Cambodia's "neutrality" -- to balance opposing forces by ceding license to each.
The first U.S. B-52 bombing strike, three to five miles inside Cambodia, occurred on March 18, 1969. On March 28, Sihanouk showed reporters a detailed map of the location of Vietnamese communist forces "by entire battalions and regiments" along the Khmer border from northeastern Rattanakiri to the southern sea -- an area of 3,500 square kilometers. Not until the May 13, 1969, press conference did he speak of "the first report" he received on "several" U.S. B-52 bombings.
Srey Pheach, 77, a 1958-1975 civil servant of the foreign ministry, wrote that after U.S. reporters discovered a Vietcong base on Khmer soil during Jacqueline Kennedy's 1967 visit, Sihanouk wanted the International Control Commission to visit the area. As it took the ICC three months to accept the invitation, Pheach says, it was arranged for Vietnamese forces to withdraw, their base converted into a Khmer training center. When Pheach took the ICC team to Kompong Cham, there were no Vietnamese.
Back at his office, Pheach learned that North Vietnam's ambassador had just registered Hanoi's dissatisfaction with Foreign Minister Prince Phurissara over the ICC's inspection -- it impeded its struggle against the U.S.
As Vietnamese troops in northeastern Rattanakiri and Mondulkiri provinces prevented Khmer troop movements, Pheach met with the Vietcong and North Vietnamese diplomats to ask them to remove their troops before another ICC visit. The Vietnamese declined to leave and told Pheach they would shoot. Phnom Penh's solution was to end the ICC's presence in Cambodia.
Pheach confirmed William Shawcross's allegation in "Sideshow" that in Paris, Sihanouk told Lon Nol to stage anti-Vietnamese demonstrations to show Khmer discontentment with the Vietnamese communist presence, before the prince was due to visit Czechoslovakia to plead with socialist countries to help get Vietnamese troops out. Like all demonstrations, mobs can run out of control, as Lon Nol's staged ones did -- Vietnamese Communist embassies were set on fire.
Pheach, posted in 1969 in Prague, where Sihanouk's son, current King Sihamoni, was a student, learned from the latter, "not to worry," the prince's father would deal with the traitors upon his return to Phnom Penh.
Pheach said the "coup" on March 18, 1970, was "accidental" -- Phnom Penh leaders who heard tape recordings menacing them with death decided to pre-empt the Prince.
The French say, "Les absents ont toujours tort" -- those who are absent are always in the wrong. Lon Nol, who led Cambodia during its five-year alliance with the U.S. during the last years of the Indochina war, is not alive to tell his story.
In today's alliance between King Father Sihanouk and Big Brother Hun Sen, Lon Nol remains a convenient target for the missteps in the pursuit of Cambodia's foreign policy goal of neutrality, and for the rise of the Khmer Rouge.
A. Gaffar Peang-Meth, Ph.D., is retired from the University of Guam, where he taught political science for 13 years. Write him at peangmeth@yahoo.com.
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