Archive note: This text comes from the old archive of Nomika Epilekta and is preserved with care for historical and informative reading.

Under the constitution of Cambodia, the royal throne is not strictly hereditary; each monarch is elected by a council consisting of the prime minister, the president of the National Assembly, two Buddhist abbots and other such figures. The monarch, however, must belong to one of Cambodia's three historical dynasties: the Ang Duong line (which has died out), the Sisowath and the Norodom. It seems that from Cambodia we in Greece also learned that leaders must always come from political families...

During the interwar period, while French colonial rule still existed, the king was Monivong Sisowath. The main royal duty then was ceremony and, above all, preserving the royal ballet of Phnom Penh.

In 1941 the French, wanting the throne to be given to someone even more obedient than Monivong, raised the 19-year-old Sihanouk Norodom to kingship. They badly miscalculated.

Short and charming as he was, Sihanouk had impressed the wife of the French administrator of Cambodia, who exclaimed: “Comme il est mignon ce petit!..” (“How cute that little one is!..”) Unfortunately, however, they were wrong and paid dearly for their little mignon Sihanouk, who first sat tight for a few years, playing the fool and apparently concerning himself only with the ballet, until he learned the tricks; then, in 1950, he launched a remarkably well-orchestrated international campaign that resulted in Cambodia's full independence in 1953.

It should be noted that the Sisowath family never forgave Sihanouk for passing them over in the succession in 1941. For that reason, from time to time they staged various coups and conspiracies against him. Thus the plainly pro-American coup of 1970, when Lon Nol overthrew Sihanouk while the latter was on an official visit to Moscow, was organized by a Sisowath, Sirik Matak, who had become the richest businessman in the country at that time.

In the end, Sirik Matak was executed by the Khmer Rouge when they seized power in 1975, while Lon Nol managed to escape. He fled to Hawaii, where the Americans gave him 500,000 dollars for his services as a national savior.