was also a member of the school basketball team and a stagehand with the amateur theatrical troupe.
Halfway through his second year at the college, the political situation changed abruptly in a way that even the most inattentive teenager could not fail to notice.
For almost a year, Japan had been losing ground in South-East Asia. By early 1945 it faced the prospect of a massive Allied counter-attack. Tokyo revised its strategy. The priority became to secure the loyalty of the former colonial peoples by playing on their nationalist sentiments. On the evening of March 9, Japanese army units, which, with Vichy’s agreement, had been stationed in Indochina since 1941, launched a
coup deforce.
French officials in all three territories were placed under arrest and French civilians interned. The operation did not go entirely smoothly: there were numerous instances of Cambodians helping Frenchmen to escape and, in northern Vietnam, communist guerrillas harassed Japanese outposts. But French rule collapsed overnight, and three days later, under Japan’s prodding, Sihanouk proclaimed Cambodian independence on the grounds that France was ‘no longer in a position to offer its protection’. For Ieng Sary, in his first year at the Lycée Sisowath, as for millions of Cambodians, the unthinkable had happened:
For the first time I saw a Frenchman tied and bound. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Those people were untouchable, they were so high up they were like gods. And this man had his arms tied behind him. It was on the
men
[the
open ground beside the palace], where the Japanese had dug trenches . . . I watched as he was marched off . . . I was horrified — and fascinated. It made a very deep impression on me.
Mey Mann, too, remembered discussing the event with his classmates. ‘We saw that a yellow race — the Japanese — had got the better of the white colonialists, the French. That awakened something in us. It made us start thinking.’
In April, the leaders of the ‘Umbrella Revolt’ returned. Sihanouk, on Japanese advice, appointed Son Ngoc Thanh Foreign Minister and subsequently Premier. Bunchan Mol became a government adviser, aided by his nephew, Thiounn Mumm, then a nineteen-year-old student at the University of Hanoi.
Mumm, like Keng Vannsak, was ferociously intelligent. His family’s wealth and connections meant that he was brought up with the children of the French elite, which made him realise at an early age that he would have to make a choice between the values of his French playmates and loyalty to his fellow Khmers. Like his three brothers, Mumm took it for granted that Cambodians were equal, if not superior, to the French. By the age of fourteen he had concluded that the root of his countrymen’s backwardness was their lack of education, a view he would hold for the rest of his life. He later became the first Cambodian to attend the Polytechnique, the most prestigious of the French
Grandes Ecoles,
equivalent to getting a First at Oxford or
summa cum laude
at Harvard — an achievement designed, he said afterwards, ‘to show Cambodians that it could be done’. But in 1945, Mumm’s concern was how to run the country’s secondary schools — of which there were still only two, the Lycée Sisowath and the Collège Preah Sihanouk at Kompong Cham — after their French teaching staff had been interned. Supported by Bunchan Mol and Ea Sichau, another of Thanh’s student aides, he argued that the government should appoint Khmer university students who had returned from Hanoi to fill the vacant posts, rather than bringing in better qualified Vietnamese professors, as the Education Ministry wished. After a furious argument at the Cabinet Office, during which Mumm slapped the Minister’s face, the young firebrand had his way.
At Kompong Cham, Sâr and his classmates had other priorities. Immediately after the coup, the
school was closed
for an extended New Year vacation. Khieu Samphân, Sâr and a
Halfway through his second year at the college, the political situation changed abruptly in a way that even the most inattentive teenager could not fail to notice.
For almost a year, Japan had been losing ground in South-East Asia. By early 1945 it faced the prospect of a massive Allied counter-attack. Tokyo revised its strategy. The priority became to secure the loyalty of the former colonial peoples by playing on their nationalist sentiments. On the evening of March 9, Japanese army units, which, with Vichy’s agreement, had been stationed in Indochina since 1941, launched a
coup deforce.
French officials in all three territories were placed under arrest and French civilians interned. The operation did not go entirely smoothly: there were numerous instances of Cambodians helping Frenchmen to escape and, in northern Vietnam, communist guerrillas harassed Japanese outposts. But French rule collapsed overnight, and three days later, under Japan’s prodding, Sihanouk proclaimed Cambodian independence on the grounds that France was ‘no longer in a position to offer its protection’. For Ieng Sary, in his first year at the Lycée Sisowath, as for millions of Cambodians, the unthinkable had happened:
For the first time I saw a Frenchman tied and bound. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Those people were untouchable, they were so high up they were like gods. And this man had his arms tied behind him. It was on the
men
[the
open ground beside the palace], where the Japanese had dug trenches . . . I watched as he was marched off . . . I was horrified — and fascinated. It made a very deep impression on me.
Mey Mann, too, remembered discussing the event with his classmates. ‘We saw that a yellow race — the Japanese — had got the better of the white colonialists, the French. That awakened something in us. It made us start thinking.’
In April, the leaders of the ‘Umbrella Revolt’ returned. Sihanouk, on Japanese advice, appointed Son Ngoc Thanh Foreign Minister and subsequently Premier. Bunchan Mol became a government adviser, aided by his nephew, Thiounn Mumm, then a nineteen-year-old student at the University of Hanoi.
Mumm, like Keng Vannsak, was ferociously intelligent. His family’s wealth and connections meant that he was brought up with the children of the French elite, which made him realise at an early age that he would have to make a choice between the values of his French playmates and loyalty to his fellow Khmers. Like his three brothers, Mumm took it for granted that Cambodians were equal, if not superior, to the French. By the age of fourteen he had concluded that the root of his countrymen’s backwardness was their lack of education, a view he would hold for the rest of his life. He later became the first Cambodian to attend the Polytechnique, the most prestigious of the French
Grandes Ecoles,
equivalent to getting a First at Oxford or
summa cum laude
at Harvard — an achievement designed, he said afterwards, ‘to show Cambodians that it could be done’. But in 1945, Mumm’s concern was how to run the country’s secondary schools — of which there were still only two, the Lycée Sisowath and the Collège Preah Sihanouk at Kompong Cham — after their French teaching staff had been interned. Supported by Bunchan Mol and Ea Sichau, another of Thanh’s student aides, he argued that the government should appoint Khmer university students who had returned from Hanoi to fill the vacant posts, rather than bringing in better qualified Vietnamese professors, as the Education Ministry wished. After a furious argument at the Cabinet Office, during which Mumm slapped the Minister’s face, the young firebrand had his way.
At Kompong Cham, Sâr and his classmates had other priorities. Immediately after the coup, the
school was closed
for an extended New Year vacation. Khieu Samphân, Sâr and a
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