Bungalow 10 Hotel le Royal Phnom Penh
25 January 1967
Mr. Noel is a 1965-66 Alicia Patterson Fund fellowship winner on leave from the Hartford Times. Permission to publish this article may be sought from the Managing Editor, The Hartford Times.
PHNOM PENH — The office was furnished with chairs, rugs and drapes in solid reds and blues. Original oils, both Western and Cambodian, graced the walls. The taste was excellent.
The wide, handsome desk was busy-looking, but not cluttered. Two telephones stood on a side-table, and a switch for a speakerphone. In the window an air-conditioner — forbidden, under austerity rules, save where foreign guests are received — whirred quietly.
As our interview neared an end, Chau Seng fingered a buzzer under the desk, and a man appeared. Wordlessly, he took my host’s immaculate blue suit jacket from a silent-valet stand, handed it to his master, and left the room again.
Chau Seng is more like a top U.S. executive than anyone I have met here. Crisply efficient, he keeps a battery of subordinates jumping, while he sorts out a constant flow of materials destined for his boss, Chief of State Norodom Sihanouk.
He is also, as his office decor and dress make clear, a man who enjoys the fruits of his success.
Like many young American executives, he has too many jobs. His most important post is the High Council to the Throne, where he is the youngest and most active of five men who are, in effect, Sihanouk’s deputies in important matters of state. (1)
He is also editor and owner of the country’s leading French-language newspaper, rector of the new Buddhist University, secretary of the national youth movement, secretary of the all-embracing Sangkum which rules Cambodia in lieu of political parties, president of the major state consumer goods store, and editor-in-chief Of the two slick monthly state magazines, Kambuja and Sangkum.
Chau Seng is also the most articulate spokesman for the radical left in Cambodia today.
This country has recently installed a new government whose right-center tendencies have already stirred up serious rumblings among leftists of all varieties. The new government, moreover, has been offered — and seems ready to assert — an historic degree of independence from Chief of State Sihanouk, whose personal balancing techniques have been crucial to political stability until now.
Chau Seng’s prominent role in public affairs therefore is reassuring to the left — notably the radical left, who feel unrepresented by the opposition “Counter-Government” (see DON-4) — but threatening to the new government itself.
Whether because of his power or his politics, Chau Seng has become the man to get.
The Cambodian left can be divided into two major categories: the moderates and the radicals.
One must view any such division cautiously, because all political opinion in Cambodia — except the tiny Communist Party — is included in the all-embracing Sangkum Reastr Niyum, the Popular Socialist Community. The entire political leadership of the country probably includes no more than 400 men and women, who have worked closely together in the fight for independence and the 13 years since. Political differences are above all individual.
This is particularly true of the left. Although Chau Seng’s La Nouvelle Depeche (The New Dispatch) is clearly radical in character, several leading moderates are regular columnists, and it often espouses causes on which almost all the left, and even many on the right, agree.
But some division is useful.
The moderates, a substantial majority, believe in a socialist economy, but grudgingly recognize that in a capital-poor country, there must be an intermediate period in which private enterprise is tolerated or even encouraged under state controls.
They are mildly anti-American, largely in the context of the Vietnam War which daily impinges on their borders. They are mildly pro-Chinese, again in the war context: China seems the only power capable of staying what they consider the new U.S. imperialism. Many are aware of the dangers of Communist subversion, but feel it less important than Western interference. One finds it difficult to draw them into a spirited defense of China’s current domestic muddle, although they insist that China’s behavior in Cambodia has been strictly proper.
They are, above all, bourgeois. Like most of the center and right, they are part of the small-educated minority, almost all fonctionnaires (civil servants). They tend to be the second or third generation away from the farm.
They are not Chau Seng’s left.
The radical left tends to be younger, and closer to the farm. One of the few organized groups is the Association Generale des Etudiants Khmers, apparently concentrated in the college of law and economics in Phnom Penh, but embracing other campuses as well. But there is an older generation too, including some trained in France after World War II.
They are harsher in criticism of U.S. policies than the moderates, and more skeptical that a modus vivendi with the U.S. can be found. They are unblushingly pro-Chinese, and some will defend vigorously Mao’s cultural revolution. They are also far more dogged in seeking socialist solutions to Cambodia’s economic problems.
Included among the radicals are some who are considered crypto-communists; their activities are closely watched by the security police.
Chau Seng is of this left. But, with the possible exception of some of the students, they are not his left. Several Cambodian observers have told me that leftists consider Chau Seng an opportunist, in part because his taste for comfort contrasts so sharply with the spartan credo of the radicals. Some are reported to find him useful for the time being, but likely to be set aside if the left ever came to power.
If true, this attitude is hopelessly optimistic. The only man in Cambodia today who can set Chau Seng aside is Norodom Sihanouk — although others are trying.
In late October, as the new right-center government was getting under way amidst a barrage of leftist criticism and agitation, Chief of State Sihanouk made several concessions to shield the new Cabinet from what it considered the most likely strongholds of opposition.
One of these, announced November 3, was the “demotion” of Chau Seng.
“It is claimed,” Sihanouk said, “that Chau Seng, director of my cabinet, is the ‘cause of the ills,’ because, they say, it is he who through erroneous reports he submits to me…. pushes me to acts or decisions which wrong someone or other.
“I have therefore moved Chau Seng to the Royal Palace…. Chau Seng, outside his functions as High Councilor to the Throne, will not occupy himself with anything but the revues Sangkum and Kambuja, and will have no further part of the activities of the cabinet of the Chief of State.”
Already on Sihanouk’s desk, it was later learned, was the opening salvo of the “get Chau Seng” movement: a detailed report by a former subordinate in the cabinet of incidents where Chau Seng had ignored requests from government officers and used his own judgment in deciding what to pass on to Sihanouk.
Any such screening job is going to offend people at times; most observers felt the case made against Chau Seng was flimsy. But the new government had its way, and someone else now controls the mail.
Since then, however, the High Council to the Throne -notably Chau Seng — has reached new dimension as the eyes, ears and hands of the Chief of State.
Cambodia’s constitutional monarchy is an unusual political creature. The government rules, but the Chief of State (actually former king, and legally now proxy for a king) oversees, suggests, prods, countermands.
Increasingly, in the last few months, Sihanouk’s cabinet seems to play the role simply of a secretariat, rather like the administrative staff of our ‘White House; while the High Council plays the role of “roving ambassador” to the elected government.
Since his demotion, for instance, Chau Seng has convened and chaired more than a dozen public work sessions, at many of which high government officers were called in “conforming to the high instructions of Samdech (Sihanouk).”
Some of these work sessions have been in his own field of expertise: government publications and Cambodia’s public relations. But I many have been incursions into others” duties which, in another country, would have brought on some ministerial resignations. Chau Seng’s work sessions have looked into shortcomings in the juvenile correctional system; effectiveness of the central government in getting flood relief out to the provinces; negotiation of air routes and a new hotel contract with Pan American; failure of customs agents to stop border smuggling; and the complex problems of the state paper factory.
The work sessions not only air the problems; they appear to draw together the participants to find solutions, with crisp executive efficiency. In the weeks following each such work session, there is evidence that the government is following through.
Meanwhile, there are other indications of Chau Seng’s growing authority. Shortly after the new government took over, a top man in the planning ministry was shifted to a less sensitive post. When the left pro-tested, Sihanouk “co-opted” the man to his own cabinet. Within a few weeks, he turned up as administrator-director of Sangkum and Kambuja, and thus Chau Seng’s right-hand man.
It is conceivable that he was put there to temper Chau Seng’s activities. But the visible effect so far has been to strengthen the remarkably efficient machine, which works for Sihanouk out of the Kambuja office.
“Without doubt our ‘nostalgics’ for the American aid and presence, like their friends outside, the ‘Free Khmer’ movement, dream of a ‘liberal’ Cambodia in the image of our neighboring countries. The success of a Suharto in Indonesia gives them extraordinary encouragement. But these apprentice-sorcerers forget the essential: the Khmer people, under the leadership of our venerated national leader, victims of the crimes of imperialism and its valets and sub-valets, will oppose at all costs this road to servitude.”
“The specialty of the American imperialism and its valets at all levels is to reverse roles with consummate art. Hypocrisy naturally plays a determining role in all the attitudes, words and acts of these enemies of the democratic popular forces.”
The tone of voice is unmistakably La Nouvelle Depeche. The words are probably not Chau Seng’s: editorials he writes himself are usually less cluttered with jargon, and he seems restrained somewhat by his own recognition of his overstatements. “I’m a bit of a railer,” he said in an interview.
Nonetheless, the Depeche is Chau Seng’s newspaper, and he has the power of any editor-in-chief to veto the work of any of the dozen “contributing editors” who sometimes write his page-one editorials. And although the language may vary, the ideas are certainly in agreement with his.
Although Chau Seng is not rabidly anti-American (“I admire the Americans because they are frank”) his sympathies at the moment are unmistakably with Mainland China, “the only country in the third world which has consolidated its revolution.”
“China has chosen a revolutionary road which is completely different from Russia and the others,” he told this interviewer. “It is trying not to fall back into bureaucracy, into embourgeoisment.” There are two ways to change leaders, he said, “either democratically, like in England, or less democratically.” If China’s Red-Guard purges dismay him, he isn’t letting on.
Until the new government took office, Chau Seng’s newspaper — founded, before Chau Seng’s advent, on direct orders of Prince Sihanouk — appeared a semi-official government organ. One of the demands of the right-center was to clearly separate the government from La Depeche.
There were reports that what they really wanted was to separate Chau Seng from La Depeche. In any case, what happened was that Chau Seng, in an after-dark raid on the old office of the paper, carried off the key files and documents and went on publishing.
There continue to be efforts to discredit him. He has been directly attacked (and, even under loose Cambodian law, probably libelled) in the opposition press; and has been indirectly attacked through criticism of a system of French-language teaching installed when he was minister of education almost seven years ago. Both were clumsy and ineffective.
It is characteristic of Cambodian politics that Chau Seng’s detractors are afraid to state their real reasons for attacking him. They apparently dare not attack his radical-left views for fear of rallying leftist support to him; and they dare not attack his power, since so much of it stems from Norodom Sihanouk.
Chau Seng, at 37, has lots of time. A graduate of teacher’s college in Cambodia and then a provincial French university in pedagogy, he returned to Cambodia in 1957 as an instructor in pedagogy.
Within a year, he had been tapped by Sihanouk to be chef du cabinet to the prime minister — then Sihanouk himself — and later director of administrative and political affairs in the prime ministry.
In 1958, he was elected to his first of two terms in the National Assembly. In the ensuing years, he has served as minister of education, of information, of tourism, of agriculture and of commerce, and also a term as vice-president of the Assembly. He did not run for re-election as a deputy in the fall of 1966; one gets the impression, in conversations with him that he feels above the hurly-burly of electoral politics.
Soon after Chau Seng’s ”demotion” from chef du cabinet to High Councilor, the “Whispers” column of the Counter-Government Bulletin carried this note:
“A high personality, speaking of a colleague whom he detested cordially, once commented: ‘Yes, the High Council to the Throne is a sidetrack.’
“Some time later the same personality, named to that same post, was queried by a friend with a long memory. He riposted: ‘Yes, but that depends on who it is’.”
High Councilor Chau Seng has clearly not been sidetracked yet.
(1) The others: Penn Nouth, Prince Norodom Kantol (former prime minister), Prince Norodom Viriya and Kou Roun, former minister of internal security.
BACKGROUND AND DETAIL
The Moderate Left
“The situation in Popular China evolves, evolves…. Certain men seize the opportunity to advocate an ‘agonizing reappraisal’ of our policy…that we should not lean on a ‘sick man,’ let alone one moribund…. (But) Khmero-Chinese relations, which are in other respects excellent, do not need to follow the fluctuations of the situation in China, especially since (China) has done nothing in external affairs which would put in jeopardy our interests.”
Those lines, from an editorial in the Bulletin of the Counter-Government, are typical of the moderate left in Cambodia today. They are not openly pro-Russian in the current Communist ideological dispute, perhaps because China is bigger, nearer, a more imposing presence within Cambodia, and more likely to take offense.
The C-G Bulletin recognizes, and criticizes selectively, the inefficiencies and bureaucratic bungling which have marked the formative years of most of the new state-owned basic industries and state commercial firms.
The moderates may even concede that these result from moving too quickly, without enough experience and trained personnel. But they reject any suggestion of even a modest return to private enterprise. If the Chinese could get rich, they insist doggedly, Cambodians can take over their functions and make the state — and the common people — well to do instead.
Cambodia is moving into a new stage, recognizing that private business — historically dominated by the Chinese commerçant — must be encouraged. Many moderate leftists concede that the commerçants need not be entirely eliminated, but believe their control of the economy must still be whittled down drastically.
Tep Chhieu Kheng, editor of the C-G Bulletin, is typical of many of these moderates.
Son of a well-to-do family prominent in Cambodian affairs — including nationalist independence movements — for many years, he was sent to France to complete his lycee education as soon as World War II ended. He then was graduated from the Sorbonne in journalism, and completed four postgraduate years at the renowned Institute de Hautes Etudes en Cinematographie.
(Chau Seng was born to a farm family just over the border in what is now South Vietnam. His family was able to send him to Phnom Penh to school.)
He returned to Cambodia in.1957 to a job in the state Bureau de Cinema.
Tep Chhieu Kheng
In 1958 he became editor of the Agence Khmere de Presse, the government information daily, and became also the favorite reporter who followed Prince Sihanouk, on his constant trips around the countryside. He held this post until last fall, when he was fired after he wrote (in the C-G Bulletin) two articles suggesting that the Agence Khmere de Presse was carrying too much “news” about the activities of the new minister of information, and not enough real news.
He has recently been named director of the printing-works of the Sangkum — if not a sinecure, certainly a job designed to give a favorite a steady income — in addition to his part-time job as editor of the C-G Bulletin and member of the Counter-Government.
He is also, under the initials T.C.K., an almost-daily columnist in La Nouvelle Depeche. In this capacity, he is frequently at odds with Chau Seng, often in the same issue of the paper. Without directly attacking T.C.K., Chau Seng carefully spells out, usually at twice the length, the hard-line version of the moderate position T.C.K. has taken. (This is, incidentally, the correct chronological order. Tep Chhieu Kheng turns in his copy early in the day; Chau Seng’s is written later, often after reading T.C.K.)
When China exploded her first A-bomb on a projectile, T.C.K. applauded the growing Chinese strength, but warned that “might doesn’t make right.” Two days later, Chau Seng wrote an unreserved paean of praise for China’s success in undermining the “nuclear blackmail” of the United States.
It is also typical of the Counter-Government, as illustrative of the moderate left, that it accepts Norodom Sihanouk’s position — so difficult for most Americans to understand — of criticizing many U.S. actions, but holding the door open.
Thus in the editorial on China quoted above, the C-G Bulletin noted that some Cambodians seek greater distance from China “in order to ‘reconcile’ us with the Americans. Referring directly to Sihanouk’s oft-repeated formula, the editorial continued:
”The only condition which we set for resuming relations with them is that the U.S.A. put a stop to acts of aggression against our country, and agree to respect the Cambodian boundaries in their present limits.”
The Radical left
Phouk Chhay’s office as director-general of SONAPRIM, the Societé Nationale pour Produits Importés, is, by contrast ~with Chau Seng’s spartan: a large desk, an unimposing set of interview-conference chairs, second-hand bookshelves and files. He was wearing an open flannel checked shirt when we met at the close of the business day. The glass of orange juice he offered from the undisguisedly second-hand small refrigerator was the only semblance of luxury.
(This is, incidentally, the rule in Cambodia; Chau Seng is an exception. For most of my interviewing, I have felt at ease in an open shirt. Most offices are furnished in leftover French colonial.)
Phouk Chhay was born into a small-town peasant family, which also owned a little store. He made his way through college on scholarships, completing his license in law in 1963 at the Faculty of law and Economic Sciences of the Royal University in Phnom Penh.
(Earlier, he had almost gone to the U.S.; his father’s death forced him to turn down a scholarship. During law school, he was helped by the U.S.-backed Asia Foundation.)
He began work at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but continued at law school on his doctorate in political science. He is now working on another post-graduate study, a massive sociological analysis of Khmer leadership from 1945-65, which he hopes to publish in France. In 1965, he left Foreign Affairs for a state bank, and then in 1966 was appointed, by Sihanouk, to head SONAPRIM.
Phouk Chhay is 27, extremely bright, and — like many others — owes part of his success to Sihanouk’s recognition of his talent.
He is also too young to be running the huge, inefficient SONAPRIM, which needs an experienced businessman at the helm, not a part-time political scientist. Yet a deputy who suggested in the National Assembly that SONAPRIM’s functions ought to be done away with if it couldn’t operate more efficiently was roundly abused by both the radical and moderate left, including most of Phouk Chhay’s close friends and collaborators (he is an occasional contributor) in both the C-G Bulletin and La Depeche.
Phouk Chhay is president (appointed by Sihanouk) of the university division of the all-embracing Jeunesse Socialiste Royale Khmere; founder-president of the Association Generale des Etudiants Khmers, and president of the Association de I’Amitié Khmero-Chinoise. He has visited China twice and Cuba once in official delegations. His wife, a Cambodian of Chinese descent, speaks Khmer and Chinese, but little French.
He stresses his peasant background, and suggests that the true left — represented, he feels, by the current student generation — is that which has avoided the “bourgeois” taste for comfort and self-advancement which often characterizes those whose family escaped the farm several generations ago. (But he avoids questions which might lead him to criticize Chau Seng’s taste for comfort, and reminds his listener of Chau Seng’s farm background.)
“The students,” he says, “are much closer to the masses.” Whether they are or not, Phouk Chhay as their spokesman considers that he is. In early 1963, he published a thesis urging rejection of U.S. aid. He argued that it was helping line the pockets of the rich, but too seldom reached to the common man.
(He was publicly criticized by Sihanouk, who rejected the thesis. But before the year was out, other events had piled up. Adopting many of Phouk Chhay’s arguments, the Prince announced rejection of U.S. aid.)
More recently, Phouk Chhay has been a champion of China, and his student group — to say nothing of the friendship society — have been diligent in exchanging messages of support and good will.
Asked about the cultural revolution during our interview, he said it was necessary: China felt threatened by the U.S., and was building its defenses for an inevitable war. Strapped for resources, its only solution was to take the youth out of school (110 million of them, costing the government $800 apiece to educate) and make higher-priority use of both money and manpower.
It was one of the most unblushing defenses of the Red Guard I have yet heard.
Phouk Chhay is one of four men most commonly mentioned when one asks for representatives of the radical left. The other three are Hu Nim, Hou Yuon and Khieu Samphan. All are deputies; all were members of the Counter-Government when it was first founded, but were quietly ousted at Cabinet demand.
I found Khieu Samphan at his desk in the Assembly before a session one morning.
Also of peasant background, but a graduate of economics in France, he claims no employment other than the Assembly (his second term) and some part-time teaching at the Faculty of law and Economic Science.
Khieu Samphan was challenged publicly by Sihanouk last summer to participate in the government (that is, in the Cabinet) instead of staying outside to criticize. He talked with several elders in the Cabinet, and then wrote the Prince a polite public letter declining.
Economic reform, he said, was a long-range process, in which the “suppression of peasant debt” would be a crucial tool, as well as creation of co-operatives and similar associations. His participation in the government at that time, he said, “would not be a great contribution,” but to the contrary, “in the absence of concrete and immediate results, would certainly be used against me.” He — and his two colleagues — also turned down invitations to serve as balancing forces in the present Lon Nol government.
He has not proposed a law to follow up his suggestion far wiping out peasant debt, he said in our interview, but “the moment will come.”
Khieu Samphan insisted that lie is not opposed to Cambodian diplomatic relations with the U.S. in principle, but considered any move unlikely given current American attitudes. When I asked him whether he felt current negotiations with Pan American to build badly-needed tourist facilities were a U.S. foot in the door, and if so whether he would oppose any contract, he looked long and reflectively into space — and then pointedly brought up a new subject.
Neither he nor the other two deputies with whom he is lumped, he insisted, have even an informal caucus, and he brushed aside suggestions that they “represent” the radical left. The National Assembly, he insisted, is much less tightly organized than that, and the brotherhood of the Sangkum is the overriding allegiance.
(It must be noted that all three hold important — perhaps key — committee posts in the Assembly. Hu Nim and Hou Yuon are president and vice-president of both the Commission on Finances, and the Special Commission on the Budget. Khieu Samphan serves on the latter committee, and is vice-president of the Commission on Economic Affairs and Planning. This could mean they were being put where they can be watched; or it could simply mean the Assembly, having elected a right-center government, was simply not sophisticated enough to see these three as possible hindrances to action. Or this might also be another example of the famous Cambodian Balancing Act.)
However the Assembly sees them, Sihanouk sees them as a faction to be watched.
Shortly after the three were relieved of duties in the Counter-Government, the Agence Khmere de Presse carried a curt news story, without comment, on formation of a pseudo -Counter-Government “cell” in Kompong Cham, in Hu Nim’s constituency.
Sihanouk immediately took to the air to charge that “a group directed by Hu Nim are carrying on subversion among the population… directed against the administration of the country and the province itself … and aimed against the Sangkum and the Royal Government,
“I state therefore, for the attention of our Reds, that the organism they have invented is absolutely unconstitutional and that I will not tolerate such agitation.”
If they wanted to form a party, he added, they were free to do so, or to intervene in constitutional bodies.
A few days later a letter from Hu Nim was published, denying any subversive intent. The group was simply gathering petitions for needed public works in their town, he said, such as a new road. He submitted the petitions, with 351 signatures.
Hu Nim
But that same day’s bulletin also carried a report of two new meetings of the same group, which agreed to operate secret, to collect money for medicines, and to develop policies “to gain the esteem of the population.”
It was obvious, from the detail published, that the police had an informer in the group. The area is probably under continuing surveillance; it was here, five years ago, that a Communist Party leader was arrested, purportedly carrying plans for subversion. Their reported origin: Vietnam. There are also recurrent rumors of wounded Viet Cong drifting across the border in this area — rumors which reports of Hu Nim’s group “collecting money for medicines” did little to still.
“Our Reds should know,” Sihanouk said in a speech four days after broadcasting his attack on Hu Nim’s activity, “that in an Indochina entirely communized, progress will always be accorded to Vietnam or the Laos of Souphanouvong (the Pathet Lao)….
“I deplore the fact that these Reds, although intellectuals, are incapable of seeing the truth…. that communization of Cambodia would be accompanied by the danger of losing our independence and our territorial integrity “
Chau Seng and Balance: An Interpretation
Norodom Sihanouk’s whole theory of political stability in his young nation rests on balance. The Sangkum, over which he presides, embraces all opinion. Until this fall, so did each government, whose ministers Sihanouk personally chose. When Khieu Samphan assumed some prominence as a critic last summer, the Prince tried to get him into the government; he tried again to bring him into the new Cabinet.
The Counter-Government was created at a time when the Assembly had chosen a new Cabinet, which was, in Sihanouk’s definition, unbalanced. Sihanouk put the radicals into this new organ, but had to decommission them when the new Cabinet — already furious at creation of the “sanctioned opposition,” — insisted that they would be the last straw.
Hindsight suggests Sihanouk may have been right: better an outspoken radical with a legitimate platform than a disgruntled, frustrated radical stirring up quiet trouble.
Where does Chau Seng fit in? Partly as simply a very efficient “man who gets things done”: he is extremely useful to his prince.
But there is more than that. Chau Seng may be distrusted by the radical left, but he nonetheless represents their point of view in the public forum — and he may thereby draw the teeth of any seriously subversive campaign. He is, in a sense, the radical-left component of the balanced equation, whether the more hard-core radicals like it or not.
His accumulation of power may be another matter. Old-timers in here recall that a flamboyant figure in Cambodian affairs — Sam Sary — had a meteoric career rather like Chau Seng’s, until he overstepped himself, and Sihanouk crushed him.
“But Chau Seng,” one observer commented “is much smarter than Sam Sary was. He is far more capable of staying on top.”
Received in New York February 2, 1967.
