The American-instigated coup that ousted Prince Sihanouk on March 18, 1970 is aptly described as the “beginning of the end of Cambodia” by Seymour Hersh in his book The Price of Power. The coup really was the start of a minor apocalypse for the country. Sihanouk had kept his country neutral in the raging conflict in neighbouring Vietnam by performing a balancing act between the communist and right wing forces. The anti-communist faction that deposed Sihanouk strengthened ties with the US and formally allowed South Vietnamese to conduct cross-border raids against communist sanctuaries in Cambodia, which were under secret US bombardment since March 1969, with the result that the communists moved further inland towards the Capital Phnom Penh.
Claiming that the Cambodian capital was in danger President Nixon launched an invasion of Cambodia on April 30 1970 in support of Lon Nol’s anti-communist government in Phnom Penh. The US foray into Cambodia ended two months later, without achieving anything, with 344 American, 818 South Vietnamese and untold communist combat deaths. The bitter civil war in Cambodia continued unabated and the social order collapsed. In 1975, the same year that Saigon fell, Lon Nol was overthrown by the communists. The reign of genocide that followed killed hundreds of thousands of Cambodians. The total number of civilian deaths in a population of 8 million at the time, including those from starvation and disease, is estimated to be around 1.7 million.
Though the US never admitted its role in the Cambodian coup investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has marshalled compelling evidence, from high level sources, that leaves little doubt that Sihanouk’s fall was the work of US agents. Sihanouk charged the same in his memoir, My War with the CIA (1973), but was belittled for his allegations. A highly classified military plan, initially code named Dirty Tricks, later baptised Sunshine Park, called for infiltration of mercenaries into Cambodian army units and assassination of Prince Sihanouk by a US trained assassination team disguised as Vietcong (the communist guerrilla force in South Vietnam). Sihanouk’s murder was to be used as a pretext for a right-wing coup. Mercenaries were infiltrated in the Cambodian army units before the coup but the assassination part of the proposal was rejected by Premier Lon Nol. He condemned it as “criminal insanity”. Hence the coup was staged while Prince Sihanouk was on a two-month foreign tour.
Prince Sihanouk, who often made equivocal statements on important issues, was nonetheless consistent in one view — that the US could not win in Vietnam. He advised US officials to establish normal diplomatic relations with North Vietnam because he thought that a unified socialist Vietnam was inevitable in the long run. He also admitted that he was powerless against the North Vietnamese and Vietcong sanctuaries inside Cambodia and told a visiting US senator that he was aware that Americans were bombing the sanctuaries but would not protest as long as the areas under attack were not inhabited by Cambodians. He said, “It is in one’s own interest, sometimes, to be bombed…in this case, the US kills foreigners who occupy Cambodian territory and does not kill Cambodians.” He also declared that if the Americans withdrew from Vietnam there would be no bombing incidents in his country. Sihanouk’s message was clear. He was suggesting that South Vietnam could not be prevented from going communist and that the US should consider a face saving retreat. Nixon and Kissinger considered him an enemy for giving such candid advice.
The major reason behind the American inspired coup and subsequent invasion of Cambodia was Vietnamisation — the idea that the US could buy its way out of the Vietnam quagmire, ‘honourably’, by increased military assistance and economic aid to the South Vietnamese government of Nguyen Thieu. Militarily Vietnamisation aimed at strengthening the South Vietnamese army through aid and training to the point where it could take on the Vietcong on its own, thus making the American withdrawal from Vietnam not to appear as an act of defeat and betrayal. In President Nixon’s thinking the North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia and in Laos along the Vietnamese border, that lay in the general area of the Ho Chi Minh trail — Vietcong’s supply line — were the biggest hurdles to his exit strategy i.e. Vietnamisation. The North Vietnamese and Vietcong could presumably continue a war of attrition indefinitely from the sanctuaries by conducting cross-border raids into South Vietnam and then fleeing back to the security of the safe havens in Cambodia and Laos. The spring 1970 invasions of Cambodia and Laos were primarily undertaken in support of Vietnamisation. But that was not the only reason.
The American Joint Chiefs of Staff had long advocated an invasion against the sanctuaries. Having been humiliated by the Vietcong into a stalemate in South Vietnam, where the Vietcong was in control of most of the countryside, they sought to expand the war as a way of assuaging their sense of defeat. The invasion had no support in the US State Department and many of Kissinger’s top aides in the National Security Council vehemently opposed it. The US’s anti-war movement, spearheaded by students, went berserk in the wake of the invasion. One-third of the US Universities were closed because of protests and four students got killed in disturbances at Kent State University on May 4, 1970.
President Nixon, shaken and nervous, held a press conference on May 8, 1970 and announced the unilateral withdrawal of American troops by July 1. However the, supposedly, secret bombing of the Cambodian sanctuaries continued until the signing of peace talks in 1973. It was a clear indication of the failure of the Cambodian invasion. The invasion had backfired by not only in its failure to destroy the North Vietnamese strongholds, that became more dispersed, but also by bringing the North Vietnamese and the Cambodian communist insurgents, the Khmer Rouge, together. The two groups had been antagonistic to each other until then. Most ironic was the fact that American Generals soon realised that instead of aiding Vietnamisation the invasion had become an obstacle to the policy by spreading the South Vietnam forces in a futile struggle in Cambodia instead of having them take greater responsibility in fighting the Vietcong in South Vietnam.
The writer is a freelance columnist. He can be reached at [email protected]