Sihanouk at his arrival in Moscow in March 1970
Lon Nol
March 17, 2010By A. Gaffar Peang-Meth
Pacific Daily News
Forty years ago tomorrow, on a ride to Moscow Airport, Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin told Prince Sihanouk that the prince had been removed from power as Cambodia's chief of state.The events that led to Sihanouk's downfall and those that followed cause me to write today's column with a heavy heart. Cambodia's national tragedy cost Cambodians two million lives and delivered the country to Vietnamese expansionism. The tragedy also took my parents' lives, alienated some of my best friends and separated me from the land of my birth.
Had those in power chosen different courses of action, much loss could have been avoided. As Karl Marx said, "History does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this."
Men tend to reject what they don't conform to their view, because not to reject means accepting they were wrong. They look for what supports their views, brush off what doesn't, and they dig in.
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