Former King Norodom Sihanouk will celebrate his 84th birthday at the end of the month, but has asked for a hold-off on the hoopla.
HIs official website has posted the message seen here, as well as other information if you’re feeling the need to keep up with the doings of Cambodian royalty.
In fact, if you’d like to follow the daily goings-on of the present monarch, King Norodom Sihamoni, son of Sihanouk, he has a website, too. The link for the English version is here.
It’s not the newish king that has relations between Cambodia and the US warming up dramatically. Nope. Nothing noble like change at the top would prompt something so drastic. That takes OIL. Black gold. Texas tea. (Okay, they don’t grow tea in Texas, but they do in Cambodia and it’s not made one bit of difference to the country until this connotation came along.)
America has been quick to point the finger at corruption, lawlessness, blah, blah, blah in the Kingdom ever since it dropped more than 100,000 tons of bombs on the country (denying, of course, that it was doing so), causing chaos and political disorder (also US-driven) that led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge.
You’d think the Cambodia people would still be ticked off about all this dirty history, but you’d be wrong:
Most Cambodians, 95 percent of whom are Buddhist, never held America’s bombing or its support of the Khmer Rouge against the United States. America, China, and Thailand continued to tolerate the Khmer Rouge because the Vietnamese opposed them, a truly appalling U.S. policy example of “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
And now that there appears to more than 700 million barrels of offshore oil up for the grabbing, everyone want to be Cambodia’s friend.
The American giant Chevron-Texaco has the concession for the main bloc in the Gulf of Thailand, where the company has already drilled exploratory wells. More may be found.
One astonishing aspect of the development is that Chevron-Texaco appears to have stolen the initiative from the oil-hungry Chinese, the strongest economic power in the region. The corporation’s mastery of the complex technology needed for this sort of field three to five years ago gave it a leg up on competitors.
.
I don’t think the Chinese and the Indonesians would agree with that, as they’re there big time and planning to fuel their own economies, as well as they carbon-producing machines, with any Cambodian windfall, but I’m sure the US will give them a run for their money.
