By any standards, Norodom Sihanouk was one of the most remarkable political figures of the 20th century. During the course of a lifetime that lasted 89 years,
he filled the roles of king, prime minister and chief of state of his country and in doing so took actions for good and bad that had profound effects on the course of Cambodia's modern history.
In his early adult life, he was by his own account a playboy. He was a musician of more than modest talent, but in his other artistic endeavours as a filmmaker his efforts were at best mediocre. In the late 1970s he was, for nearly three years, a prisoner of the murderous Khmer Rouge. It says much about this extraordinary man that such a listing only touches the surface of his many public and private roles.
Above all, and for those who have studied modern Cambodian history, Sihanouk was a subject of controversy. For some, the present writer included, he was a man of many, but flawed, talents, whose personal weaknesses cost his country - dearly. For others, he was the man who by his personal efforts transformed a sleepy kingdom from a French protectorate into a modern Southeast Asian state.
According to this view, whatever faults he may have possessed were negated by his many positive contributions and by the fact, on which all can agree, that he always acted in the belief that he had the good of his country and its people in mind.
Sihanouk's installation as King of Cambodia in 1941 came as a surprise to most contemporary observers. Born in 1922, the only child of Prince Norodom Suramarit and of Princess Sisowath Kossamak, there was little reason in the early years of his life to think that Sihanouk might one day occupy the Cambodian throne.
With a father who was an intelligent but rather lazy man and an amiable womanizer, and a mother who was strong-willed and a staunch supporter of Cambodian traditions, Sihanouk appeared to be just another of the many members of the sprawling royal family who might theoretically be eligible to mount the throne, but seemed, in fact, unlikely to do so. This was so because the reigning king at the time of his birth, King Sisowath, was a member of a different branch of the royal family from Sihanouk. And when Sisowath died in 1927, he was succeeded by one of his sons, King Monivong.
This succession seemed to accord with the prevailing view within the French administration in Cambodia that members of the Norodom branch of the royal family, to which Sihanouk belonged, were less reliable allies than their cousins, the Sisowaths. Indeed, the possibility of a Norodom ever being placed on the throne seemed unlikely to most observers.
Sihanouk's own account of his early life makes clear that he was a lonely child. His parents had little to do with him as his mother followed the advice of an astrologer and handed control of the young prince over to an elderly female relative for the first five or six years of his life. She, in turn, delegated her responsibilities to a female servant, whom Sihanouk later described as being like one of the trusted house slaves in Gone with the Wind. As for his father, although he was not unkind to his only legitimate child, he spent little time in his company.
Nevertheless, Sihanouk's parents did not neglect his education, sending him first to the Ecole Francois Baudoin in Phnom Penh, then enrolling him as a student at the Lycee Chasseloup-Laubat in Saigon, the best-regarded secondary school in French Indochina, where he embarked on a classic French education.
In a telling comment on this period, which gives a sense of his previous loneliness, Sihanouk has stated that it was while he was living in Saigon, boarding with a French customs official of Indian descent, that he made his first friendships. These were with two fellow lyceens, one an ethnic Vietnamese, the other an ethnic Chinese.
Overall, and despite maintaining links with the wider royal family in Phnom Penh during vacations, the picture that emerges of Sihanouk in his mid to late teens is of a vulnerable, even timid individual.
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