Cambodia
A HIGH American official has been quoted as saying that with the explosion of new nations since the war, a Secretary of State cannot be certain whether his envoy to a new government should be an ambassador or a psychiatrist. Anyone who has had cause to watch the course of United States relations with Cambodia in recent years might easily decide that this is precisely the country the American official had in mind.
After many months of sliding downhill, formal diplomatic relations between Washington and Pnompenh are now completely severed. If there is to be any meaningful intercourse between the two governments, it will have to take place through intermediaries or at the much bruited but not altogether likely international conference to discuss Cambodia’s neutrality. The conference, if it ever materializes, would be expected to reach beyond Cambodian questions and, either openly or in masquerade, to grow into an international negotiation to seek an end to the war in Vietnam.
Daily life in Cambodia is, more than in many other countries, a very sound indication of what it is like to do business these days with Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia’s publicity-sensitive head of state. There was a time when Pnompenh was considered a gay little capital. It has always been fairly small and provincial, but when the Diem regime in Vietnam was imposing a superficial morality on Saigon, Pnompenh, with its treelined French avenues and typically Cambodian nonchalance, maintained an open-door policy to refugees from “Vietnamese aggression” and became unusually lively.
This is no longer so. Following “biased” reports from Western newsmen let in for the occasion of the independence day celebrations last November, all journalists from “imperialist countries” were recently banned. They could not, it was complained, report objectively on Cambodia; only the press of the Eastern bloc manages to do this successfully, largely by copying government handouts about its own progress and achievements. But the West is considered persistent in its abuse of Cambodia, so that even before cables (which it was proudly announced would be uncensored) were sent out last November, they were read by the authorities, and official contradictions were given before any story ever appeared in print.
No criticism wanted
In no other country in the world is the foreign press seized upon by the head of state with such hostile avidity. A report that in most states would be considered beneath anyone’s dignity to comment upon, Prince Norodom Sihanouk takes up, elaborates, and pillories. If Peter O’Toole in an insignificant French screen review says, on filming Lord Fim, that Cambodia is full of snakes and jungles, then this gets full publicity and a twopage reply in deadly earnest. If the Financial Times produces a list showing Cambodia as the country with the lowest per capita figure for gross national product, then this at once becomes part of an Anglo-Saxon plot. When the Financial Times replies that its figures came from the United Nations, Sihanouk asks his advisers if it would not be better to leave the UN.
Criticism is anathema to the prickly Prince, who behaves, as he has always done, as a typical Oriental despot. An anonymous letter, supposed to have been written by some Cambodian students in Paris and criticizing his conduct of public affairs and finances, arrived the day before Sihanouk should have entered the hospital for a brief checkup and diet. He canceled his arrangements, summoned the rubber-stamp National Assembly to debate the charges and to exonerate him, spoke for four hours nonstop on the radio telling how hard he had worked and how little profit he got from it, and condemned the students as either Marxist republicans or right-wing imperialists.
Anonymous letters indeed rule the country. People are encouraged to write them to denounce corrupt practices, real or imagined, and one of the Prince’s senior advisers, who occupied the highest positions, has been successively stripped of ail power as a result of, as it happens, unjust allegations in an unsigned letter.
Perhaps the most accurate reflection of this intolerance of criticism is shown in the treatment of a French doctor who wrote to the paper Le Matin in Cambodia an open letter following the death in an auto accident of the Polish delegate to the International Control Commission (a body set up by the Geneva agreements of 1954). Dr. Royer maintained that the Pole would not have died in most countries, that the standards of driving, especially of buses, were deplorable in Cambodia, and that instead of giving the dead man’s family a few medals and fine speeches, the government should do something about improving road manners. He then proceeded to give concrete examples of what needed to be done.
He was rewarded by a forty-eighthour notice to leave the country, his possessions were seized and sold by public auction, his past was dug up and made as murky as possible, and Le Matin was closed down forever. The government wrote a virulent attack on Royer and made the whole affair a political issue, since it was the fault of the imperialists if driving standards were poor, and Cambodia had no need to be told what it should do. This said, it then proceeded with indecent haste not only to give out speeches and medals but also to implement Dr. Royer’s suggestions in a series of unexplained governmental decrees.
But, try as he may to stem the flow of complaints, people are becoming increasingly critical of the Prince’s handling of affairs, and more particularly, of the economic results of his policies, which have managed to bring the country to the edge of disaster. Sihanouk is by nature extravagant and unrestrained; he talks grandly of having willed all his prosperity to the nation (which simply means he has disinherited his children) and boasts about the frugality of his private life — a point many dispute.
Few dispute the grandeur of his public life, his vast entertainments, his movement around the capital in a huge American car surrounded by motorcycled militia and numerous police cars, and his frequent trips abroad accompanied by advisers in the role of court favorites, attendants in scores, and the entire troupe of the Royal Ballet. When the Prince generously gives a million riels to one of the four new universities he has created, one knows that this must come from state funds because his own, as he admits, are almost nonexistent now.
The need is cash
By cutting off American aid at the end of 1963 and hoping to get by on the slogan “Cambodia aids itself.” Sihanouk not only deprived the country of foreign exchange, a loss that Peking has not made good, but also deprived the army of its funds. The riel remains grossly overvalued (the official rate is 35 for $1, but in Hong Kong one gets 100), and the economy of the country stagnates.
Tourism, which is potentially the greatest foreign-exchange earner, given the location in Cambodia of the stupendous ruins of Angkor, is criminally neglected, and even the “bons tourisliques,” which used to give a more favorable rate of exchange, have been abolished as “too difficult to administer.” If tourists do not come, says Sihanouk, it is not the fault of the exchange rate but of the anti-Cambodian propaganda of the imperialist press. The difficulties of entry and exit, the accessibility of Angkor through Pnompenh instead of directly from Saigon or Bangkok as in the past, not to mention the riots last year directed against the American and British embassies, have apparently nothing j to do with it.
What the country needs is, simply, cash. The American negotiators at the Delhi talks last December chose to ignore the thinly disguised noises from Pnompenh implying that though Cambodia would never accept U.S. aid, it would not necessarily be averse to a no-string loan or even a straight gift. That, and the Castro-like cry for a bulldozer for every Cambodian killed on the border attacks from Vietnam — which are at the root of anti-Americanism in Cambodia — came to nothing. So the Prince found a new cliché, “the policy of austerity.” This new drive forbids the use of air conditioners in government buildings except when VIP’s are present, forbids any ministerial expansion, obliges ministers, deputies, and many working in government departments to accept a “voluntary” 10 percent cut in salary, bans the travel abroad of Cambodians, and requires even domestic air tickets to be paid for in foreign currency.
Fripperies are out. But that fact does not prevent the project for the national theater from going ahead; nor has it stopped the foundation of a luxurious Norodom Sihanouk Museum, in which all the relics and achievements of the god-king are assembled, including his certificate of primary education and his collection of signed photos from other heads of state. It has not even involved the dimming of the streetlights, more numerous than those on Broadway, that line the roads leading nowhere through the jungle at Sihanoukville, Cambodia’s new and only seaport.
Austerity program
Prices are rising astronomically, and Pnompenh long ago was, at the official exchange rate, far more expensive than New York. Potatoes recently reached $1 a pound. Hotel prices are exorbitant, and it costs nearly $3 to have a continental breakfast in a decent restaurant. Sihanouk blames the rise in prices on the distributors and has threatened to nationalize the grocers if their prices do not come down. Last year he nationalized the banks, imports, exports, and the boy scouts, and state monopolies already exist in tobacco, liquor, and perfume, and in the country’s few industries.
The three foreign oil companies, Caltex, Esso, and Shell, proposed a counterplan to nationalization when it was presented, and this is being studied as well as their balance sheets for the last ten years. Taxes are being increased, and these will add to the cost of living. The latest tax of nearly $6 on every radio receiver hits hard in a country where the only luxury is often a small transistor set. Small wonder that people are glum and hostile.
Purity campaign
Brothels, opium dens, and bars are being raided as a profitable means of increasing state revenue and, presumably, bribes for the special and secret police, whose numbers have swollen of late. Bribery is exposed in governmental office boys, but no one else ever seems to get caught; important cases are all judged, of course, by the Prince. All games of chance, including cards, are forbidden, and any person caught is due for a stiff prison sentence; this falls hard on the small remaining foreign community, who have few other distractions left to them except an innocent rubber of bridge. Even the hostesses at the nightclubs have been put into a uniform designed by Sihanouk himself and are capped with little air-hostess berets.
The gaiety has gone. Frenchmen who have lived all their lives here are going while they can, but the French still remain the largest single Western community and were the only occidental nation deemed friendly at the last independence day. Although Sihanouk maintains that his policy is one of strict neutralism, it is a neutralism facing only one side — the lineup with Peking and Djakarta is already made, for the Prince sees in China the only counterbalance to the historical predators from Thailand and Vietnam (North or South). In Indonesia the Prince presumably sees another demagogue, whose economy has managed to remain on the verge of ruin for ten years or more.
As criticism increases and as the activities of leftand right-wing rebel groups in neighboring states are given great publicity in order to build up national unity in a country conscious of its 20 percent Chinese and Vietnamese minority, Sihanouk finds his way out more difficult. It is the upper class and the foreigners who have suffered by nationalization. The middle and lower classes suffer from the policy of austerity, and bribery becomes a necessary means of livelihood in a nation where the civil service, when it is paid, receives a miserable salary.
The peasant is, according to impartial observers, less well off than ten years ago, less well fed and clothed. Pnompenh boasts a new international stadium, wide new avenues, and big building projects; provincial centers have expanded a little, but outside the towns there are no signs of change at all.