When the War Was Over by Elizabeth Becker Page A

intensified anti-European nationalism in places like Dutch Indonesia.
    But it was not until the desperate spring of 1945 that the Japanese risked upsetting the situation in Indochina. By then both the Issaraks in the west and the Vietnamese communists in the east had grown and established their own armed groups.
    On March 9, 1945, the Japanese staged a coup de force in Cambodia and in one sweep arrested the French military, police, and native guards and eventually imprisoned the entire French civilian population. This blow at the French was also aimed at heading off any rise of the anti-Japanese communists. Four days later the young Cambodian king, Norodom Sihanouk, abrogated the treaties of 1863 and 1884 signed by his grandfather King Norodom and declared the period of the French protectorate over. In his Cambodian New Year message a few weeks later Sihanouk said: “It is a year during which the Empire of the Rising Sun, the liberator of the Asian people, has given to Cambodian history the inestimable gift of independence.”
    In a short time, the Japanese showed their promises of protection to Cambodia were as shallow as those given by other foreign powers before them. Japan plundered the country. The Japanese took thousands of tons of rice for their army and requisitioned a corps of 7,000 Cambodian soldiers for immediate duty. The sudden imprisonment of all French administrators and technicians left the economy in a mess. Yet the Japanese wanted more help and more control. Under pressure, Sihanouk accorded the Japanese the right to impress Cambodian laborers into coolie road gangs. The Japanese language was taught in the capital’s schools and to Cambodian bureaucrats. Under the pretext of liberating Cambodia from the French, the Japanese imposed direct military rule and occupation on the country.
    Emboldened by the Japanese example following the coup de force against the French, the Thais tightened their control over the northwest territories they had grabbed in 1941. The Thais raised taxes in the Cambodian provinces they held and forced Cambodians to speak the Thai language. Disillusionment was universal throughout the country. Cambodia’s fierce insistence on neutrality in the next decades had strong roots in this period.
    There remained one major point of contention: Who deserved the mantle of nominal leadership in Phnom Penh? Son Ngoc Thanh was brought back by the Japanese from his exile in Tokyo and made foreign minister of “independent” Cambodia. He felt he deserved to be leader of the country and began challenging the young King Sihanouk. His record as a singular anti-colonialist made him a serious rival to Sihanouk in the public’s mind as well as his own. And Thanh seemed unperturbed by the stain that leadership
of a puppet regime might entail. He was already thinking ahead to the end of the war, which was nearer than Cambodia or Japan knew.
    On August 9, 1945, the day the United States dropped a nuclear bomb on Nagasaki spelling Japan’s defeat, allies of Thanh staged a coup d’état in Phnom Penh and made Thanh prime minister. They wanted an established nationalist at the head of Cambodia at war’s end, not a young collaborationist king who had proved little more than his ability to work with either French or Japanese overlords.
    Thanh was made prime minister to prevent France from returning to Cambodia. De Gaulle and the Free French had stated their intention to take back the colonies. Thanh was desperate to stop the French, and he searched for a natural ally. He tried to form a coalition with the ICP’s Vietminh led by Ho Chi Minh, the only Vietnamese who were opposed to the return to French colonial rule and, Thanh thought, strong enough to fight it. Thanh also sought the support of the Thai government and the Khmer Issarak in the northwest.
    But Thanh’s own defense minister, secretly encouraged by Sihanouk, fled to Saigon to warn the French of Thanh’s