Lon Nol

Lon Nol overthrew Prince Sihanouk in March 1970, ruled the Khmer Republic through five years of war, and fled a fortnight before the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh. He was a provincial governor and police official under the French, then defence minister and army commander under Sihanouk, and had spent the 1960s suppressing the small Cambodian communist movement, including the Samlaut peasant rising of 1967. The coup was carried out by the National Assembly while Sihanouk was abroad, and the American role in it is still argued over; what is not in doubt is that Washington backed the new government immediately and that the Nixon administration had been bombing eastern Cambodia secretly since 1969. He demanded that the North Vietnamese leave the border sanctuaries, which they would not do, and his small army was pushed back almost at once. Sihanouk, exiled in Beijing, allied with the Khmer Rouge he had persecuted, and his prestige in the countryside converted a marginal insurgency into a mass movement, which is the decisive consequence of the coup. Lon Nol suffered a stroke in 1971 and governed erratically thereafter, relying on Buddhist mysticism and astrology and on an army whose payroll was inflated with phantom soldiers by its own officers. American bombing of Cambodia intensified to a peak in 1973, when Congress cut it off. He declared himself president in 1972 in an election generally regarded as rigged, and left for Hawaii on 1 April 1975. Phnom Penh fell on 17 April and was emptied within days. He died in California in 1985, and the government he lost is remembered chiefly for what followed it.

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