The Eyes of the Pineapple

By the middle of 1945, it was becoming clear to anyone who cared to pay attention that Imperial Japan was doomed. With it, the status of those Khmer nationalists who had colluded with the Japanese in disarming the Vichy French administration became increasingly uncertain. Son Ngoc Thanh, who had returned from Japan early in 1945 to become a minister in the new ‘independent’ administration, was in a particularly difficult position, having been closely associated with the Japanese, although he had also managed to cause some irritation to them by raising the issue of the return of Kampuchea Krom. Moreover, the young figurehead King, Norodom Sihanouk, was untested politically: there was no reason to suppose he would be any less compliant to foreign powers than his predecessor Sisowath Monivong. Desperate times, in the opinion of some of Thanh’s young supporters, seemed to call for desperate measures.

On the night of August 9-10, a group of students and government functionaries assembled outside the palace in Phnom Penh, backed by a crowd of monks. Seven pro-Thanh activists then forced their way into the palace: Mam Koun, Neth Laing Say, Kim An Dore, Hem Savang, Mey Pho, Mao Sarouth, and Thach Sary. Most of the men were low-level clerks; Sary, for example, was a secretary to Kubota, the Japanese consul – the degree of Japanese responsibility for events remains uncertain – while Mey Pho was a palace official, perhaps the group’s ‘inside man’.

Sihanouk was, however, absent: his mother had received some advance notice of events, and the King had safely hidden himself in a nearby pagoda. While the ‘coup’ was decidedly small in scale, there was some excited waving of pistols, and Sihanouk’s personal secretary Nong Kimny was wounded. By 3 a.m. the conspirators had rounded up the entire cabinet, with the exception of Thanh and Sisowath Monireth, and made clear their demands. The key point was the introduction of a ‘progressive government’, as opposed to the usual mixture of minor princes and dusty francophil civil servants: ‘Progressive’, in this context, meant Thanhist and nationalist.

Despite the favour shown to them by the conspirators, the wound sustained by Kimny alarmed Thanh and Monireth, and they ordered the release of the captive cabinet members; Monireth and the Queen Mother then negotiated personally with the group. It seemed, however, an exciting moment for Cambodian self-determination; Keng Vannsak, in an interview, described a group of students waiting up all night for news of the ‘coup’. By the morning of the 10th, Sihanouk had agreed to appoint Thanh as Prime Minister, fulfilling one of the demonstrators’ main demands.

At this point, Thanh made a curious decision: he ordered the arrest of the leading ‘coup’ conspirators. All were jailed, although several were to escape from prison within a short time. Moreover, although Thanh was able to appoint some allies in government posts, notably his old nationalist colleague Pach Chheoun, and began to make overtures in the direction of greater cooperation between Vietnam and Cambodia, much of the administration remained the same.

Within a matter of weeks, events were to turn against Thanh. The French and British colluded with Defence Minister Khim Tit and Monireth, and with the likely acquiescence of Sihanouk (who, as at so many crucial points in Cambodian history, managed to absent himself from the capital) arranged for the Prime Minister to be bundled unceremoniously into a car and driven off to face French justice. Cambodia was, once more, very firmly within the grasp of France.

While the 1945 ‘coup’ was in some ways an amateurish and small-scale event, in this respect it only reflected the small scale of Khmer political activity at the time. Its ultimate significance was much greater, however. This was the first time that nationalist demonstrations had taken on an actively modernist character, previous events (such as the 1942 ‘Umbrella War’) having centred on more traditional expressions of Khmer identity. Beyond this, it created a complex series of betrayals at the heart of the developing political system. Central to these was the betrayal of forward-thinking nationalist Khmers, stitched up by those who believed the French colonialist rhetoric of ‘civilisation’, or were simply determined to hang on to their priveleges. Thanh, in particular, was considered to have betrayed the activists who had placed such trust in his ability to stand up to the traditionalists, while simultaneously earning Sihanouk’s lasting hatred for associating with the plot: as long as Sihanouk remained in power, Thanh and his particular brand of nationalism would never be able to re-establish a foothold in the country. Monireth, passed over as King by the French for his independent-mindedness, would similarly prove a disappointment to those who saw him as an agent of change, and himself likely betrayed Thanh by colluding with the French. And outside storing up resentments for the future, the ‘coup’ was an important step in the radicalisation of sections of the small educated class. Some of those involved in the ‘coup’ reappeared in the Khmer Republic years: Sary joined the armed forces, drifted towards a right-wing brand of nationalism, and (by then a FANK brigadier-general) was to be executed after the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh in 1975, while Kim An Dore also became a Lon Nol associate. The others, however, surfaced in the Issarak movement and some, such as Mey Pho, were among the first wave of Khmers to become members of the Indochinese Communist Party: Neth Laing Say was killed in action as a leftist insurgent in the late 1940s. And although his degree of involvement remains unproven, French intelligence sources believed that the radical Khmer Krom Achar, Mean – later to adopt the name Son Ngoc Minh – had been present among the many monastic supporters of the ‘coup’.