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University of Iowa anti-war protests, 1970

1970-10-07 ""Iowa City People's Peace Treaty Committee"" Page 9

cambodia: 
Biting the Fishhook
*for footnotes see CCAS Bulletin. col. 2 #4
jessica smilowitz jeff perason 
(reprinted from the Bulletin of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars)

Neutrality under Sihanouk
For a long time after his abdication from the throne in 1955 and his subsequent rise to power as Chief of State, Norodom Sihanouk's main problem in governing Cambodia was how to deflect political breezes from the sails of the internal leftist-Communist opposition. In the last year and a half, that problem changed to one of how to upstage his political rivals on the right. His defeat in the latter enterprise signals the demise of peace in the only Indochinese nation successful in the last fifteen years in preventing war and strife from sweeping across its borders.
The primary issue of contention between Sihanouk and his opponents from both the right and left has always been over the best way of preserving Cambodia's neutrality, independence, and territorial integrity. The left represented politically bu the Pracheachon Party, served in the early years of Cambodian independence after Geneva as a constant check against tendencies Sihanouk might have had to build western alliances, especially with the United States. The right, drawing its political strength from the higher echelons of the Army and some of the urban intellectuals and bureaucrats, has counterbalances the left by setting itself against Cambodian overtures to the Communist camp and, since 1963, by advocating rapprochement with the United States. 
With these two pressures always at his back, from 1955 to 1969 Sihanouk molded a neutralist policy for his country which showed remarkable sensitivity to the geo-political realities of Cambodia's post-Geneva position in Indochina. With some dissent from the leftist opposition, Sihanouk encouraged and accepted limited American aid from 1955 to 1963. At the same time, chary of the traditionally hostile and American-backed governments in Thailand and South Vietnam, he cultivated cordial and politically lucrative bonds with Red China. These bonds were based not on any great partially on Sihanouk's part for the Communist Chinese way of life, but rather on firm Chinese assurances, obtained as early as the 1955 Bandung Conference, that China supported Cambodian neutrality as a mechanism for depriving the West of another Indochina base With a watchmaker's sense of balance, Sihanouk played China and United States off against each other in the Cold War for about five years.
After 1960, on the contrary, Sihanouk began to feel that Communist hegemony in Indochina was inevitable, and he adjusted the balance in his policy accordingly. 

" He came to regard the United States as incapable of effectively sustaining its allies in Indochina or of acting as a permanent counterpoise to Communist power. Hence neutrality developed in protean form characterized less by conventional nonalignment than by a pattern of accommodation and deference to Communist diplomatic positions as long as these did not appear to imperil the existence of Cambodia. Indeed, Cambodia sought security against Communists from other Communists rather than from the United States." 1

On the one hand, Sihanouk began to loosen Cambodia's moorings with the west. In 1963 he stopped accepting American aid; in 1965, United States and South Vietnamese forays across the Cambodian border and the tragic bombing of Cambodian settlements spurred him to sever diplomatic relations completely. From this time until 1969 Sihanouk publicly denounced American and South Vietnamese border incursions, while privately conveying their activities in the eastern provinces. This was part of his "accommodation and deference to Communist diplomatic positions."
On the other hand, Sihanouk began accepting more Chinese economic and military aid and sought to predetermine post-Vietnam Cambodian security by obtaining Chinese support and guarantees from North Vietnam for the ultimate evacuation of Communist sanctuaries on theborder. In June, 1969, he succeeded in winning an agreement from the Provisional Revolutionary Government, "formally and in writing," to withdraw its troops from Cambodia after the Vietnam war. It is noteworthy that he was unable to secure similar written assurances from the Thai, Lao or South Vietnamese governments. 
However, unorthodox, Sihanouk's Communist weighted equilibrium of the neutralist scales worked extraordinarily well. As late as February this year, a visiting New York Times correspondent could write that it was still "safe to travel the roads by day and night, even near the Vietnamese border," and "few armed or uniformed men are to be seen." 4 A rare and happy fortune for an Indochinese country. 
As Nixon gradually revealed his cards on Vietnam in the early months of 1969, however, it began to appear as if Sihanouk had put his money on the wrong side of the table. The announcement of Vietnamization was almost a pledge that American strength was going to endure in South Vietnam for years and possibly shore up a Vietnamese, South Korea for decades. Sihanouk realized this, and so did the Cambodian right. During 1969, Sihanouk's efforts to arrive at a reconciliation with the United States and outflank his own general assumed the nature of a race against time. 
Although the small 30,000- man army which Cambodia possessed before the coup was made up primarily of staunch pro-Sihanoukian peasants, the generals were a different breed. Most, like Lon Nol, had aristocratic origins, were careerists, and were the group in the country most harmed by the suspension of American aid in 1963. Their obsolescent hardware and their impressment into service as public works cadre rather than a fighting force since Geneva severely taxed their self esteem
As Sihanouk through 1969 sought to repattern Cambodia's foreign relations to conform with his new appraisal of the United States' future in Indochina, opposition from the right and the Army (always led by Lon Nol) became more confident and more demanding. In the summer of 1969, Lon Nol backers in the mass Sangkum Party pressured Sihanouk to agree to letting Nol (then Prime Minister as well as Commander in Chief of the Army) form a cabinet which would be directly responsible to him and not to Sihanouk. At the time this was seen as sort of a bloodless coup, although it was obviously not the only coup Lon Nol had in mind.
While coping with the right wing upsurge, Sihanouk made major efforts during all of 1969 (and earlier) to improve relations with the United States and demonstrate his changing position toward the Indochinese Communist camp. Sihanouk's tacit toleration of allied thrusts into Cambodia can be traced at least to Dec. 29, 1967, when he stated that he could not intervene to stop United States forces from pursuing Communist troops into Cambodia. 6 Following this muted consent for allied incursions, a clandestine special forces operation known as Project Omega was set up, using Montagnard gureillas to conduct "hit and run" attacks against Communists along the Cambodian border; and by May, 1969, American B-52 bombers were conducting air strikes on Communist supply dumps and camps in the north east section of Cambodia.7 Also in May, Sihanouk authorized a joint border sweeping operation by Cambodian and South Vietnamese troops in one of the vicinities of the April 29 United States thrusts, near South Vietnam's Tayninh Province (the Fishhook area).8 Earlier, he had put a curb on the release of surplus supplied to the Communists from North Vietnamese and Chinese shipments to Cambodia arriving in the port of Sihanoukville, supplies which formerly he had seep in small amounts up to the border sanctuaries.9 
He resumed diplomatic relations with the United States in July, and held private meetings with Chester Bowles, in which Sihanouk consented publicly not to protest United States border incursions as long as they occurred in unpopulated areas, and the United States in return agreed to provide compensation for lost life or property resulting from raids. 10
Still more evidence of cooperation between America and Cambodia under Sihanouk was his arrangement for and subsequent reliance upon an American intelligence operation, code name Vesuvius to operate in Cambodia and generate precise information on the position and strength of Communist troops in his own country. 11
Finally in December, Sihanouk dramatized his break with "deference and accommodation to Communist diplomatic positions" by calling the Communist presence in Cambodia to world intention in a protest against Vietcong activities at the border: at the same time, he threatened to sever relations with North Vietnam and the Provisional Revolutionary Government 12. His threat was backed up with a Cambodian army action in Svayreig Province (Parrot's Beak) on January 24 in which the Cambodians reportedly chased 700 Communist soldiers back into South Vietnam.13
By February of 1970, as Sihanouk embarked to France to receive treatment for obesity it appeared that he had regained control of his balancing game. The United States now occupied the loaded side of the scales, and news analysts in Saigon could day that there was "less tension along the border" between American and Cambodian troops, " and a seeming tacit agreement -- though denied by both sides -- that bombing in jungle areas along the frontier was permissible."14 In an interview on March 10, Sihanouk said he'd be "very happy" to meet with Nixon, 15 but there was still no sign that he was any more interested in building formal western alliances than he had ever been. Despite the strong words he directed at the Communists, diplomatic relations were still intact and military situation in the border did not portend the events which recently became more water under the dam of the Vietnam War. 
Yet it was just miscontinued obdurateness against forming any military alliance which could jeopardize Cambodia's sovereignty that precipitated Sihanouk's fall. Upon learning in Paris on March 11 that rioting against the North Vietnamese and Vietcong embassies had broken out in Pnompenh, Sihanouk did not seem surprised. Without mentioning Lon Nol specifically, he predicted by a plot by the right to oust him and "throw our country into the arms of an imperialist capitalist power." 16 Before setting out for Moscow and Peking to try and obtain further restrictions against Communist activity in Cambodia, and still perhaps expecting to return to his country as leader, Sihanouk said that he would take his differences with the Right to the people and the army in person. They, he said, could decide whether to follow him on a continued course of neutrality, or to follow "those personalities on the course that will make Cambodia a second Laos." 17
The personalities and not the people. however made the decision first.

Neutrality under Lon Nol
On March 18, just as Sihanouk was preparing to carry his new policy of firmness on the Communist presence in the eastern provinces of Cambodia to Moscow and Peking Lon Nol and 

[insert]" A showdown between the extreme right wing and myself is most probable." 
Prince Norodom Sihanouk
Chief of State of Cambodia
Paris, France
March 12, 1970 

9

Saving...

cambodia: Biting the Fishhook *for footnotes see CCAS Bulletin. col. 2 #4 jessica smilowitz jeff perason (reprinted from the Bulletin of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars) Neutrality under Sihanouk For a long time after his abdication from the throne in 1955 and his subsequent rise to power as Chief of State, Norodom Sihanouk's main problem in governing Cambodia was how to deflect political breezes from the sails of the internal leftist-Communist opposition. In the last year and a half, that problem changed to one of how to upstage his political rivals on the right. His defeat in the latter enterprise signals the demise of peace in the only Indochinese nation successful in the last fifteen years in preventing war and strife from sweeping across its borders. The primary issue of contention between Sihanouk and his opponents from both the right and left has always been over the best way of preserving Cambodia's neutrality, independence, and territorial integrity. The left represented politically bu the Pracheachon Party, served in the early years of Cambodian independence after Geneva as a constant check against tendencies Sihanouk might have had to build western alliances, especially with the United States. The right, drawing its political strength from the higher echelons of the Army and some of the urban intellectuals and bureaucrats, has counterbalances the left by setting itself against Cambodian overtures to the Communist camp and, since 1963, by advocating rapprochement with the United States. With these two pressures always at his back, from 1955 to 1969 Sihanouk molded a neutralist policy for his country which showed remarkable sensitivity to the geo-political realities of Cambodia's post-Geneva position in Indochina. With some dissent from the leftist opposition, Sihanouk encouraged and accepted limited American aid from 1955 to 1963. At the same time, chary of the traditionally hostile and American-backed governments in Thailand and South Vietnam, he cultivated cordial and politically lucrative bonds with Red China. These bonds were based not on any great partially on Sihanouk's part for the Communist Chinese way of life, but rather on firm Chinese assurances, obtained as early as the 1955 Bandung Conference, that China supported Cambodian neutrality as a mechanism for depriving the West of another Indochina base With a watchmaker's sense of balance, Sihanouk played China and United States off against each other in the Cold War for about five years. After 1960, on the contrary, Sihanouk began to feel that Communist hegemony in Indochina was inevitable, and he adjusted the balance in his policy accordingly. " He came to regard the United States as incapable of effectively sustaining its allies in Indochina or of acting as a permanent counterpoise to Communist power. Hence neutrality developed in protean form characterized less by conventional nonalignment than by a pattern of accommodation and deference to Communist diplomatic positions as long as these did not appear to imperil the existence of Cambodia. Indeed, Cambodia sought security against Communists from other Communists rather than from the United States." 1 On the one hand, Sihanouk began to loosen Cambodia's moorings with the west. In 1963 he stopped accepting American aid; in 1965, United States and South Vietnamese forays across the Cambodian border and the tragic bombing of Cambodian settlements spurred him to sever diplomatic relations completely. From this time until 1969 Sihanouk publicly denounced American and South Vietnamese border incursions, while privately conveying their activities in the eastern provinces. This was part of his "accommodation and deference to Communist diplomatic positions." On the other hand, Sihanouk began accepting more Chinese economic and military aid and sought to predetermine post-Vietnam Cambodian security by obtaining Chinese support and guarantees from North Vietnam for the ultimate evacuation of Communist sanctuaries on theborder. In June, 1969, he succeeded in winning an agreement from the Provisional Revolutionary Government, "formally and in writing," to withdraw its troops from Cambodia after the Vietnam war. It is noteworthy that he was unable to secure similar written assurances from the Thai, Lao or South Vietnamese governments. However, unorthodox, Sihanouk's Communist weighted equilibrium of the neutralist scales worked extraordinarily well. As late as February this year, a visiting New York Times correspondent could write that it was still "safe to travel the roads by day and night, even near the Vietnamese border," and "few armed or uniformed men are to be seen." 4 A rare and happy fortune for an Indochinese country. As Nixon gradually revealed his cards on Vietnam in the early months of 1969, however, it began to appear as if Sihanouk had put his money on the wrong side of the table. The announcement of Vietnamization was almost a pledge that American strength was going to endure in South Vietnam for years and possibly shore up a Vietnamese, South Korea for decades. Sihanouk realized this, and so did the Cambodian right. During 1969, Sihanouk's efforts to arrive at a reconciliation with the United States and outflank his own general assumed the nature of a race against time. Although the small 30,000- man army which Cambodia possessed before the coup was made up primarily of staunch pro-Sihanoukian peasants, the generals were a different breed. Most, like Lon Nol, had aristocratic origins, were careerists, and were the group in the country most harmed by the suspension of American aid in 1963. Their obsolescent hardware and their impressment into service as public works cadre rather than a fighting force since Geneva severely taxed their self esteem As Sihanouk through 1969 sought to repattern Cambodia's foreign relations to conform with his new appraisal of the United States' future in Indochina, opposition from the right and the Army (always led by Lon Nol) became more confident and more demanding. In the summer of 1969, Lon Nol backers in the mass Sangkum Party pressured Sihanouk to agree to letting Nol (then Prime Minister as well as Commander in Chief of the Army) form a cabinet which would be directly responsible to him and not to Sihanouk. At the time this was seen as sort of a bloodless coup, although it was obviously not the only coup Lon Nol had in mind. While coping with the right wing upsurge, Sihanouk made major efforts during all of 1969 (and earlier) to improve relations with the United States and demonstrate his changing position toward the Indochinese Communist camp. Sihanouk's tacit toleration of allied thrusts into Cambodia can be traced at least to Dec. 29, 1967, when he stated that he could not intervene to stop United States forces from pursuing Communist troops into Cambodia. 6 Following this muted consent for allied incursions, a clandestine special forces operation known as Project Omega was set up, using Montagnard gureillas to conduct "hit and run" attacks against Communists along the Cambodian border; and by May, 1969, American B-52 bombers were conducting air strikes on Communist supply dumps and camps in the north east section of Cambodia.7 Also in May, Sihanouk authorized a joint border sweeping operation by Cambodian and South Vietnamese troops in one of the vicinities of the April 29 United States thrusts, near South Vietnam's Tayninh Province (the Fishhook area).8 Earlier, he had put a curb on the release of surplus supplied to the Communists from North Vietnamese and Chinese shipments to Cambodia arriving in the port of Sihanoukville, supplies which formerly he had seep in small amounts up to the border sanctuaries.9 He resumed diplomatic relations with the United States in July, and held private meetings with Chester Bowles, in which Sihanouk consented publicly not to protest United States border incursions as long as they occurred in unpopulated areas, and the United States in return agreed to provide compensation for lost life or property resulting from raids. 10 Still more evidence of cooperation between America and Cambodia under Sihanouk was his arrangement for and subsequent reliance upon an American intelligence operation, code name Vesuvius to operate in Cambodia and generate precise information on the position and strength of Communist troops in his own country. 11 Finally in December, Sihanouk dramatized his break with "deference and accommodation to Communist diplomatic positions" by calling the Communist presence in Cambodia to world intention in a protest against Vietcong activities at the border: at the same time, he threatened to sever relations with North Vietnam and the Provisional Revolutionary Government 12. His threat was backed up with a Cambodian army action in Svayreig Province (Parrot's Beak) on January 24 in which the Cambodians reportedly chased 700 Communist soldiers back into South Vietnam.13 By February of 1970, as Sihanouk embarked to France to receive treatment for obesity it appeared that he had regained control of his balancing game. The United States now occupied the loaded side of the scales, and news analysts in Saigon could day that there was "less tension along the border" between American and Cambodian troops, " and a seeming tacit agreement -- though denied by both sides -- that bombing in jungle areas along the frontier was permissible."14 In an interview on March 10, Sihanouk said he'd be "very happy" to meet with Nixon, 15 but there was still no sign that he was any more interested in building formal western alliances than he had ever been. Despite the strong words he directed at the Communists, diplomatic relations were still intact and military situation in the border did not portend the events which recently became more water under the dam of the Vietnam War. Yet it was just miscontinued obdurateness against forming any military alliance which could jeopardize Cambodia's sovereignty that precipitated Sihanouk's fall. Upon learning in Paris on March 11 that rioting against the North Vietnamese and Vietcong embassies had broken out in Pnompenh, Sihanouk did not seem surprised. Without mentioning Lon Nol specifically, he predicted by a plot by the right to oust him and "throw our country into the arms of an imperialist capitalist power." 16 Before setting out for Moscow and Peking to try and obtain further restrictions against Communist activity in Cambodia, and still perhaps expecting to return to his country as leader, Sihanouk said that he would take his differences with the Right to the people and the army in person. They, he said, could decide whether to follow him on a continued course of neutrality, or to follow "those personalities on the course that will make Cambodia a second Laos." 17 The personalities and not the people. however made the decision first. Neutrality under Lon Nol On March 18, just as Sihanouk was preparing to carry his new policy of firmness on the Communist presence in the eastern provinces of Cambodia to Moscow and Peking Lon Nol and [insert]" A showdown between the extreme right wing and myself is most probable." Prince Norodom Sihanouk Chief of State of Cambodia Paris, France March 12, 1970 9