- 20 Feb 2013 13:50
#14177409
Simple:
-> He was locked in a bitter power struggle with the right wing of his own regime. This quite likely led him to pursue an alliance with the Left. During the Vietnam war, he very much wanted Lon Nol overthrown.
-> It's likely that he was genuinely resentful against Western imperialists, especially considering how frequently they installed right-wing puppet regimes in Third World countries, overtly colonial or neocolonial.
-> Cambodia is deeply Buddhist: The Diem governments in Western puppet South Vietnam openly suppressed Buddhists and tried to install a militant Catholic regime. Backing them would have been immensely unpopular in Cambodia.
-> Sihanouk's own popularity with the masses depended on being seen as a bulwark of Cambodian independence. Backing the imperialists would have negated this political goodwill.
-> He might have believed that aligning with the socialist bloc might grant him a reprieve from communist agitation, or cut some sort of deal in which he could remain a constitutional monarch.
This wasn't entirely far-fetched: The Soviet Union and to a lesser extent Beijing had sometimes persuaded local communist parties to cut deals with local government in pursuit of some sort of anti-fascist or anti-imperialist strategy. Sihanouk however failed to consider the particular nature of his own country's communist party, which was batshit insane and also not at all in the sphere of influence of the socialist powers he was courting.
Both Sihanouk and the Khmer Rouge thought they were playing each other: Sihanouk probably planned to launch some sort of unity government with an assumed opportunist wing of the Cambodian commies, the Vietnamese-backed Cambodian People's Party and his own populist loyalists organized in the Khmer Rumdo. On the other hand, the Khmer Rouge wanted to use Sihanouk to delegitimize Lon Nol's fascists.
Some people (the usual anticommunists) will be all too eager to pin the blame for the Khmer Rouge coming to power on the Vietnamese (who merely backed an united front of leftist forces during the cambodian civil war), but before they do we must remember it was the Vietnamese who put an end to Pol Pot's macabre theatre of blood, restoring sensible commies to power... And were it not for the Americans and Sihanouk himself, Cambodia would still be socialist today and the Khmer Rouge would never have caused any trouble ever again.
"Cm'on, baby, eat the rich!!!" -Mötorhead.