Word: norodom
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...their royal palace at Pnompenh one evening last week, Cambodia's King Norodom Suramarit and Queen Kossamak paused for a moment before leaving their private apartment behind the throne room. The acting protocol chief of the royal household, Prince Norodom Vakrivan, had just brought in a package newly arrived from Hong Kong. The accompanying card said that it contained a "gift for the King and queen" from a U.S. engineering company that had helped build the 134-mile Cambodian-American Friendship Highway running from Pnompenh to the seaport of Sihanoukville...
...dealings with the big powers, Cambodia's saxophone-tootling Prince Norodom Sihanouk tries to play it real cool at both ends of the scale. The 36-year-old Prince (who resigned as King in 1955 because he likes being Premier better) has welcomed aid missions to Cambodia from the U.S., France, Russia and Communist China alike. After tours of Red China and the U.S., he proclaimed himself impressed by both. But Neutralist Sihanouk is sadly out of tune with his next-door neighbors on the Gulf of Siam...
Throughout this area last week there was a rapid reshuffling of positions. The reason: Cambodia's Premier, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, suddenly abandoned his "active" (i.e., pro-Western) neutrality and recognized Red China. Sihanouk visited Red China two years ago and appeared impressed with China's totalitarian "vigor." But he was not stampeded into recognition then. Last month, Sihanouk wrote cogently in the American quarterly Foreign Affairs that "a prince and a former king must be well aware that the first concern of the Communists is to get rid of the king and the natural elite of any country...
...Cambodia, this was all right with everybody. Besides, Sam Sary was somebody special. As a delegate to the Geneva Conference that ended the Indo-Chinese war in 1954, Sam Sary had become a hero by leading the fight to prevent partition of Cambodia between Communists and nonCommunists. Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the King who resigned to become Cambodia's Premier, rewarded his longtime friend and admirer (Sary is the Prince's biographer) by promoting Sary to the vice-premiership...
...followed up his words with actions: first he summoned his ambassador home from Moscow, then warned Pnompenh's Soviet embassy and Chinese Communist trade mission to stop their propaganda activities forthwith. Apparently intending to get a brand new start all along the line, he had his father, King Norodom Sura-marit, dissolve the squabbling Assembly, and ordered new elections...