“History will remember me like the overthrown Prime Minister”, loved to tell Norodom Ranariddh. The first son of King Norodom Sihanouk, former head of the Cambodian government between 1993 and 1997, died Sunday, November 28, in Aix-en-Provence (Bouches-du-Rhône), at the age of 77. The mark he will leave in the history of the small Southeast Asian kingdom will be, as he had predicted, that of a major political destiny abruptly stopped on July 5, 1997, when his old adversary Hun Sen s ‘seize power – which he will never share with anyone again.
Norodom Ranariddh was born on January 2, 1944 in Phnom Penh, to Princess Phap Kanhol, the first of Sihanouk’s seven wives. He studied at the prestigious French Lycée René-Descartes, in Phnom Penh, then in France, where he acquired in 1973 a doctorate in public law, after a thesis on the law of the sea. He then taught at the University of ‘Aix en Provence.
In 1970, Sihanouk was overthrown by General Lon Nol. Ranariddh, who is visiting Cambodia at the time, is briefly imprisoned and then released. In 1975, he was in France when the Khmer Rouge took power and plunged the country into horror. Norodom Sihanouk, once presented as their leader, is a prisoner in his palace with his wife and several of his children. It was not until 1979 that the Vietnamese army did not overthrow the genocidal regime, during which at least 1.9 million Cambodians lost their lives.
But this intervention of the communist neighbor, often described as the hereditary enemy of Cambodia, is denounced as an invasion by the West. Faced with the government set up by Hanoi, several groups took to the bush: the Khmer Rouge, but also Republicans, and supporters of Sihanouk, grouped together in a political formation with an extended name: the Funcinpec, or “National United Front for a Independent, neutral, peaceful and cooperative Cambodia ”.
“Snake pit”
It is to organize the Funcinpec, and to lead its military branch, the Sihanoukian National Army, that Norodom Ranariddh is pulled by his father from his peace of Aix. “Prince Sihanouk let me go in the snake pit”, he tells at the time to World. The prince settles in Bangkok, and supervises the action of the royalist troops from the Thai border. In 1991, the contours of peace were sketched out during the Paris agreements: Sihanouk withdrew from Funcinpec, preparing to regain his throne, and elections between the various Cambodian factions were organized in 1993.
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