Only Sihanouk can forgive the Khmer Rouges

By Torsten Krauel

HONG KONG: Beijing's old diplomatic quarter near Tiananmen Square was home in the late 1970s to an eye-catching and heavily guarded residence. The property on Anti-Imperialism Street was China's gift to Norodom Sihanouk.

Why? Because when Cambodian premier Lon Nol deported him with Washington's connivance on 18 March 1970, Beijing was quick to realize the prince's political value and offered him a home.

Before his hasty departure, Sihanouk, the Cambodian king, had occupied a villa in Phnom Penh. The house had been derelict for years, and the head of the Norodom family lived as Pol Pot's hostage. The deposed prince allied himself with the mysterious, grinning guerrilla chief in 1970 and had returned to Phnom Penh after Pol Pot's victory over Lon Nol, to the city which a Norodom had declared Cambodia's capital in 1434.

But by the time Sihanouk realized the madness Pol Pot was wreaking on the country it was already too late. And so the prince lived on with a few diplomats from Sweden and North Korea in the haunted metropolis that the dictator had ordered be cleared. Doors slammed in the wind and rats ruled the streets.

At the inception of the Norodom dynasty some 800 years ago, Cambodia covered all of Indochina. Pol Pot aimed to recreate the kingdom, and for this he needed the prince. He armed against Vietnam, which also harbored grand dreams.

Both countries' embassies were neighbors in Beijing; on Pol Pot's side huge sheets were slung between the trees, grotesque tatters over the deathly still ground.

Sihanouk, now 76 and ill, had made Pol Pot presentable in the early 1970s. He believed then that only his intervention could prevent the country being taken over by an increasingly belligerent Hanoi.

But Pol Pot carried on murdering, first the city-dwellers, then Cambodia's Vietnamese minority. Vietnam's blitzkrieg in early 1979 put an end to the war of destruction; Pol Pot went into hiding, and Sihanouk fled to Beijing. But the prince knew that if he stayed silent, Cambodia would be swallowed up by its more powerful nabber.

He once said that only Shakespeare could portray his life. Sihanouk, proclaimed king in 1950, and then a self-professed left-winger in politics, was elected as titleless head of state in 1960. And then he brought himself to legitimize Pol Pot once again -- to recommend him to the West and the United Nations.

The king without a country lived in China and then North Korea -- a chess-player used as a pawn by others in the maelstrom of world politics. Several weeks after Pol Pot had fled, Beijing unsuccessfully attacked Vietnam, threatening revenge. In answer, Moscow marched to its borders.

Travelers through Siberia at the time would have seen the heavy weaponry, thundering its way to the east for an attack through the Manchuria steppes and on to Beijing.

Washington, Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang all fought for influence with Sihanouk. They viewed the popular, five-times married monarch -- a passionate saxophonist and director of melancholy films about his country -- as the key to Cambodia's return to legitimate rule and the one person who still held his people's respect.

After Pol Pot's reign of terror, which claimed 2 million lives, Sihanouk returned in 1991 as the king of a country which was ravaged between political hyenas.

He pardoned their leaders (his son from his first marriage and Pol Pot's brother-in-law, Ieng Sary), while there was still threat of a renewed blood-bath. Now, as a sign of the fragile stability, he has declared that Pol Pot's comrades-in-arms should face trial.

Yet a trial would tear Cambodia apart. Many former Khmer Rouge officials still possess power in the country. As a foreword to his film "Ambition to Ashes," Sihanouk wrote in 1995 that, "Fighting against fate is pointless; love is often stronger than political calculation."

Is it likely he will pardon the Khmers Rouges? He alone has the power to grant this act of true greatness. Not Premier Hun Sen, himself once Pol Pot's man, now behind a tribunal; not the Swede returning from Pol Pot's dead kingdom who broke down on arriving back in Beijing in 1978.

Only Sihanouk can forgive. No one else.

In 1986, Ariane Mnouchkine staged a ballet in Paris on a remarkable life: "The terrible, but unfinished story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia."

Although a general pardon would be a terrible form of irony, it would be a fitting end to Sihanouk's biography.

-- Die Welt