IT WAS WHILE RETURNING from a visit to the USSR in March 1970 that Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia learned that he had been deposed in a coup d'etat led by Lon Nol and Sirik Matak, and engineered by the CIA.
The coup produced a wave of protest in Cambodia, which was only haltedtemporarily -by a massive invasion by US and South Vietnamese troops in August 1970, ordered personally by Nixon. For the next few weeks, daily TV reports showed headless Cambodian and Vietnamese peasants floating down the Mekong river, and US tanks destroying Cambodian rubber plantations. Cambodia had taken its place in the Indochinese Revolution.
The coup marked the end of two conflicting processes. On the one band, all Sihanouk's attempts to build a neutralise state, somehow based on an independent coonomy and uniting the various classes in Cambodia, had failed.
His manoeuvies were doomed from the start.
He never understood that in an imperialist spoch. the toad of independent capitalist development for a poor country is closed by the forces of the world marker-not to mention the strategir designs of the major imperialists and that there is no middle way" berween an economy bused on private property and one based on a dictatorship of the working class and poor peasunts. Nor did he understund that the cconomic dependence of small countries on the main imperialist powers ruled out complete ly any real politicul independence.
Thus the perspective of developing a progresive national bourgeoisie which could unite the contending classes as well as confronting the imperialists was a complete illusion, for which tens of thousands of Cartbodians have paid with their lives.
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On the other hand, the coup also signalled the failure of the US to knit Cambodia into its web of pro-imperialist puppets. This increasingly threatened the whole stability of the South East Asia bloc:
The coup succeeded where persuasion, econontie blockades, CIA plots, Thai and South Vietnathese invasions, and daily bombing faids since 1966 had all failed In the final analysis, it was the importance to the USA of tying Cambodia to its coat-tails that necessitated Sihanouk's overthrow, and this had to be done by deposing him because his Bonapartist class-balancing act would not allow him to go voluntarily The polarisation between the classes that had been slowly developing in Cambodia since the curly 1960s was given a new himpetus by the coup. Within a week the Nanona. Crited Front of Cambodia (PUNK) had been formed and was This organisation was based Jirnly un workers and intellectuals who had left Phoom Penh over the previous three years to prepare for the confrontation that they recognised would inevitably come.