The Cambodian Communist party’s alliance with Vietnam remained in force. In mid-1968, Keo Meas, a high-ranking Cambodian cadre, was dispatched to Hanoi with documents destined for the Cambodian Communists there. Three of the documents—dealing with Samlaut, the people’s war, and perceptions of worldwide revolution—were the subjects of a fifteen-day study session for Cambodian Communists in Hanoi. At the conclusion of the session, a Vietnamese party member told the assembled Khmer that the time was not ripe for them to return home and that the Cambodian revolution would have to wait on the liberation of South Vietnam.33

Sihanouk Loses His Grip

It is ironic that while the Red Khmer were struggling to stay afloat, reeling from attacks by Lon Nol’s army, their principal opponent, Norodom Sihanouk, was less secure than at any time since 1955. In early 1969 his regime was beset by a range of “contradictions” (tumnoah), and without knowing it, it was subjected to a “rectification campaign” by the Communists. As Ouk Boun Chhoeum told Serge Thion in 1981, “Sihanouk had launched attacks on the movement, officials were expropriating land.... We profited from this to make propaganda against him.” Armed resistance to Sihanouk’s rule led to military repression, which in turn pushed more people into the resistance. Government revenues fell as rubber plantations produced less because of wartime conditions and as more and more rice was sold on the black market. The population and its demands for services continued to rise, while taxes often went uncollected. As the Second Indochina War, which the prince had worked so hard to avoid, spilled over Cambodia’s borders, a small guerrilla army was killing twenty to thirty Cambodian soldiers a month. The country had become too complex for Sihanouk to manage. Never a good listener, he responded by talking louder and longer, by making films, and by seeking more allies overseas.34

By this time, Sihanouk had hardly any influential friends. A Western diplomat remarked that in his career he had never seen such a wide gap between a ruler and an indigenous middle class. To the Red Khmer, the prince had become indistinguishable from Lon Nol as their “Number One Enemy.” Sihanouk’s campaigns against radical students, his violent response to the Samlaut uprising, and his diplomatic rapprochement with the United States made the possibility of a united front, in spite of Vietnamese encouragement, remote. In the meantime, elite support for the prince eroded further as Sino-Cambodian businessmen found themselves blocked from participating in the economic boom affecting much of Southeast Asia. Cambodian bureaucrats and army officers felt the pinch of declining revenues. Many of their children, unhappy at Sihanouk’s failure to deliver justice or employment, drifted toward the left. Others, less politicized, grew weary of his monologues, his narcissism, and his unsavory entourage.