When the War Was Over Read Free Page B

in rich delta soil; foothills of the mountains and large
rubber plantations form the northeastern corner; and almost in the middle of the country, where the rivers cross and form an X, sits the capital, Phnom Penh.
    Fish from the lake and rivers were plentiful. Cambodia regularly supplied its population more rice per person than any other country in Southeast Asia, even when crops were poor. The landscape remained largely as in medieval times, awash with emerald rice paddies, shaded and dotted by bamboo stands and knots of palm trees. Farmers lived in huts or traditional wooden houses built on stilts for protection from monsoon floods. The pointed spires of pagodas dominated villages and the peasants’ lives.
    The country even had its own annual miracle. The Tonle Sap River changes its course every August, flowing upstream half the year, downstream the other half—the effect of changes in the water table caused by the heavy monsoon rains and of the respective altitudes of the Mekong and the Tonle Sap.
    The Cambodians celebrated this event with a water festival; they had religious holidays to mark most seasonal changes. Their society was old enough to have entwined religion and culture with the country’s geography and environment, and their festivals and arts and the details of their daily life are distinctive. Cambodian society was perhaps too rarefied; the French compared the Cambodians in their attachment to their country to delicate wines—they could not travel outside their provenance.
    Cambodia, however, did not escape the dark side of the tropics. Disease remained rampant if not carefully monitored; most often it was not. The weather is extreme; long, seemingly endless hot seasons are followed by heavy monsoon rains. The jungle and its beasts always threaten to take back the cultivated terrain. Drought and alternating floods can play havoc with crops.
    Portraying himself as the embodiment of Cambodia’s supposedly long-held belief that the monarch is a deva-raj or god-king, a semidivine ruler with absolute secular power and the benediction of the gods, Sihanouk treated Cambodia as his own paradise. He took it upon himself to design a state to “protect” Cambodia, to keep out unwanted foreign or modern influences that might disrupt the largely rural, Buddhist life in his kingdom. Sihanouk saw independence from France largely as a necessary step to prevent the First Indochina War (1946–1954) from spilling into Cambodia and destroying it forever. Independence, in his view, was not the prelude for bringing Cambodia into the twentieth century. It was insurance that Cambodia could remain an Asian beauty, unspoiled by too much modernity, which could also upset his own power.

    Sihanouk resembled an Asian replica of an old European monarch rather than the leader of a third world country aspiring to a place in the modern world. He cherished the pastoral life and the arts while disdaining commerce, industry, and financial enterprise. While Thailand, Malaysia, later Singapore, and even war-torn Vietnam north and south struggled to build modern financial and industrial bases, Cambodia under Sihanouk gradually built industrial projects. The prince preferred to concentrate primarily on education and building an infrastructure of roads, railways, and a seaport, an approach inherited, perhaps unconsciously, from the French colonizers of Cambodia.
    The prince believed that “agricultural pursuits ran highest in productivity, while commercial and other service activities are looked upon as more or less parasitic.” Sihanouk disdained neighboring Thailand, where peasants were abandoning their fields to work in new factories and live in city slums, and he discouraged large industrial schemes and foreign commercial ventures that might have attracted Cambodia’s villagers to Phnom Penh. To this extent his plan worked—there was little large-scale urban migration during his rule. Phnom Penh