Milton Osborne, Before Kampuchea

At the airport in Phnom Penh they have a set of shelves just full of awful histories of Cambodia in the bad times (I mean good books about awful history). I've read quite a few of them and, having visited the country in late 1979 when it was all too recently over with, I have little desire to explore the theme further. There was one, however, that looked more promising and so it turned out. Milton Osborne was a junior diplomat in the Australian embassy in Phnom Penh during 1959-61 and he returned as a Cornell PhD student in 1966. The book, Before Kampuchea, is basically a memoir, drawing on his journal of that year, which also dips back and forth to what the place was like during his earlier stay and how it was on a subsequent visit in 1971, during the Lon Nol years. He argues that 1966 was a turning point that led inexorably to the catastrophes of 1970-79, though I would say it's more a case that he could see, in 1966, that things were not going to turn out as he'd earlier expected. (I don't really believe in turning points). Still, a lot happened in 1966 that was a significant part of the downward spiral to disaster.

I found it fascinating reading. There is so much about the city that has changed and also not changed. The elite back then was no less venal than it is now, the corruption was no less rampant, the gambling no less prominent, the culture of impunity no less deeply entrenched. There were some interesting details on the dealings of Sihanouk's second wife, Monique, and her family that I didn't know about. There were also four interesting portraits of Cambodians he knew - an army officer, a Catholic priest, a Communist and a prince (from the Sisowath family) - all dead or disappeared by 1979 (the book was last updated in 1984, so there is little chance that the disappeared would not have reappeared by then if still alive). His conversations with all of them throw interesting light on the deep problems facing the country. Of course, the one segment of society to which Osborne had no access was the peasantry and, as he admits, he can throw no light on what made so many of them follow the French-educated intellectual Communists in the end. The sheer incompetence of successive elite regimes (Sihanouk, Lon Nol) and the genocidal US bombing of 1973 must have something to do with it.

My main disagreement with Osborne's line of thought is that he persists in seeing Sihanouk as a nationalist rather than a dynast. I think that Sihanouk's consistent goal was to preserve the Cambodian state in the form of the monarchy and he just took it for granted that his subjects would see things the same way. He assumed, rather than worked to gain, loyalty from the masses. It isn't that he was unpopular, he just had no idea and didn't much care what was going on down at the grass roots. He played statehood in the same way his ancestors had - as a series of deals with more powerful states that, while forcing him to pay tribute, also allowed him a degree of autonomy. He also clung to the French who, in the 19th century had preserved the state (ruled by his grandfather Norodom) from being gobbled up by Thailand and Vietnam. Sihanouk had a good grasp of the past, but he just had no real concept of the nation-state.

Reprinted by Orchid Books, Bangkok in 2004.