NIU Southeast Asian Studies. Ithaca: Northern Illinois University Press [imprint of Cornell University Press], 2023. US$28.00, paper; US$19.00, ebook. ISBN 9781501769337.
As is properly mentioned by the author, post-1945 histories of Southeast Asia often revolve around singular figures such as Ho Chi Minh or Sukarno. Yet, leaders never act in a political vacuum, hence the importance to consider overlooked political figures; Cambodian nationalist leader Sơn Ngọc Thành (1908–1977) is one of them. Cambodia’s modern historiography remains to this day largely dominated by Norodom Sihanouk, Pol Pot, to a lesser extent Lon Nol, and in the more recent period former prime minister Hun Sen. Not much attention has been given to Thành and the significance of his project of a Khmer Buddhist nationalist state for Cambodia’s political development; therefore, Matthew Jagel’s book is a welcome addition. It challenges the oversimplified idea of the country’s independence as a one-man story (Sihanouk’s “crusade”) and instead reconstructs a complex picture of internal feuds, shifting regional politics, and superpowers’ miscalculations. Thành’s underrepresented figure becomes the means for Jagel to revisit a wider range of political projects in Cambodia in the late colonial and postcolonial periods and foreground Khmer agency in these crucial years.
The book follows a chronological structure. Chapter 1 describes Thành’s formative years as an anticolonial political figure and his brief stint as a prime minister under Japan’s patronage in 1945. Chapter 2 discusses Thành’s political activism in exile and the formation of his guerrilla army, the Khmer Serei. Chapter 3 explores the complicated relations between Thành and Sihanouk, as the latter reorganized Cambodia’s political sphere in the 1950s. Chapter 4 elaborates further on this relationship in the context of the escalating Vietnam War. Chapter 5 examines more closely Thành’s interaction with the US in the 1960s. Chapter 6 describes Thành’s short-lived political rebirth in the Khmer Republic following Lon Nol’s stroke (1971), as he was finally appointed prime minister in March 1972. Yet without much leeway or popularity, he had was forced to resign a few months later. The book ends with Thành’s return to South Vietnam. He was arrested in 1975 by Vietnamese communists and died in prison in 1977.
Jagel attempts to clarify a foggy subject matter. One of his central theses is that, while not being very powerful, Thành and his Khmer Serei, with the help of South Vietnam and Thailand, were a constant thorn on Sihanouk’s side, and possibly a factor in the head of state’s drift toward the communist bloc and his severing relations with Cambodia’s neighbours. Whether Sihanouk perceived Thành as his “brother enemy” or how such a perception might have influenced his politics remains speculative. The book’s major question is the extent to which the Americans supported such disruptive forces. As Jagel shows, the US government was slow to come up with a consistent policy in Cambodia, blinded as it was by the communist threat and the events in Vietnam. Furthermore, the author emphasizes the disconnect and conflicts of interpretation between US traditional diplomatic circles, intelligence agencies, and the army. While American officials kept Thành at bay in hopes of assuaging Sihanouk’s suspicions and preserving Cambodia’s neutrality, elements in the CIA and the US military worked with the nationalist leader. According to Jagel, Thành not only helped recruit Khmer Serei and Khmer Krom in South Vietnam for the US Special Forces, he was also probably involved in various attempts to destabilize Sihanouk, which were facilitated, or at least approved, by the CIA. The author tries to elucidate Thành’s likely role in several plots against the head of state in the late 1950s and devotes a large section to assessing Thành’s possible involvement in ousting Sihanouk in March 1970 and securing Lon Nol’s nascent government.
To do so, the author makes an extensive use of source materials from the Vietnam Center and Sam Johnson Vietnam Archive, and Presidential Libraries and National Archives in the United States; Bophana Audiovisual Center, the Documentation Center of Cambodia, and the National Archives in Cambodia; and collections such as historians David Chandler’s and Kenton Clymer’s. This research enables Jagel to offer, for example, a little-known version of Sihanouk’s deposition based on naval intelligence yeoman Samuel Thornton’s unpublished letter to The Economist, written in 1979 in response to Kissinger’s rebuttal in the same journal of the claims of American involvement made by reporter William Shawcross in his book Sideshow. However, as a result of the author’s reliance on American governmental and military documents and news media, French colonial archives, and the Sihanouk-controlled press of that period, Thành remains mostly an elusive figure, approached only through the reports and comments by other (and often Western) people. Hidden for the main part of his life, he continues to hide from historiographical scrutiny. The author possibly had at the start the idea of writing a biography, but discontinued official records, the quasi-absence of first-hand accounts by protagonists, and the limited collections of newspapers in the Khmer language that survived the Democratic Kampuchea years certainly would have made such a task challenging. This shows again the difficulties of studying overlooked political figures and the importance of the question of the archive for researchers who try to shed light on the blind spots of Cambodia’s post-independence history.
Aside from these shortcomings, this well-informed and well-researched book cleverly and creatively uses available materials to reconstruct this history in a different way. It is also driven by the author’s commitment to offering a “corrective” (1). Some readers may wonder whether, in the end, Jagel overvalues Thành’s role as a major player in Cambodia’s history. I would say no. The change of lens he proposes with his book is a much needed one. Jagel’s strong analysis demonstrates the potential of this shift of focus for opening new terrains of inquiry. Moreover, the book contributes to giving to Cambodia a more prominent place in the discussion of the “Global Vietnam War” and the “indigenization” of the Cold War. Last but not least, it provides new elements for a better understanding of political culture in present-day Cambodia.
Stephanie Benzaquen-Gautier
International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden