Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
minister to light it himself. In the small funerary chamber, away from the prying televi-
sion cameras, a “miracle” had occurred. In Hun Sen's own telling, relayed in a speech
to Buddhist nuns and city officials a few days later, King Sihamoni and his mother tried
three times to set the casket alight, but the flame failed to catch. Then the supreme patri-
archs of the two main Buddhist sects tried. They too failed. “For the fifth time, it was me
alone,” Hun Sen told his audience. “I brought forth the fire and the flame finally ignited
… Now I have to inherit the task of protecting the monarchy.” He was anointed, he pro-
claimed, by a “miracle of the late King Father's sacred power.”
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As Cambodia's last God-King passed on, its first genuinely constitutional monarch re-
mained a forlorn figure. Norodom Sihamoni was always a reluctant king, plucked from an
artistic European milieu to serve the Cambodian throne. At the age of nine, he was sent by
Sihanouk to Czechoslovakia, where he completed primary and high school and went on
to study classical dance at Prague's Academy of Musical Art. Sihamoni still speaks fluent
Khmer Rouge takeover in 1975 he returned to Phnom Penh with Sihanouk and became
a prisoner with his parents in the Royal Palace. Along with his brother Narindrapong, he
was forced to wear black and put to work weeding the palace gardens and sweeping out
his father's secretary in Pyongyang and then moved to Paris, where he taught classical
dance and, in 1993, became Cambodia's ambassador to UNESCO.
Until then, Sihamoni had had a relatively happy life. Unlike his half-brother Ranariddh,
he had never craved the royal limelight. For a lifelong bachelor with no chil-
dren—Sihanouk once noted delicately that his son “regards women as his sis-
the restricting social mores of his native country. “I don't want to be king,” he said in
1995. “I want to consecrate my life to culture, to choreography, to film. The throne does
not interest me. I have never wanted to be king … If I were asked, I would say no.”
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But when the moment came nine years later, Sihamoni reluctantly accepted the burden.
Within the royal family, he would always say he took the throne only out of love for his
father.
Unlike Sihanouk, the new king had no aptitude for the trench warfare of Cambodian
politics. His coronation in October 2004 elicited some brief hopes of an activist reign,
but Sihamoni was no match for Hun Sen. A month later the CPP shot down plans for a
new public forum in which people could air their grievances directly to the new king.
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Within a year the die was cast. In October 2005 Sihamoni docilely put his signature to the
controversial border treaty that Hun Sen had brokered with Vietnam—one that Sihanouk
