Royal family cambodia

Royal family cambodia, WITH all the pomp and ceremony befitting god-king of Angkor, Norodom Sihanouk was laid to rest by his subjects on February 4th. So Cambodians said farewell to a deposed monarch who had overshadowed their country’s political life for almost 70 years.

From the early hours of Monday monks painstakingly performed final rituals upon a gilded catafalque, the centrepiece of a Buddhist shrine built adjacent to the royal palace. The king’s casket had been delivered three days earlier, following a procession through the streets of the Phnom Penh.

Sandalwood anointed with ceremonial oils was placed laid in the casket and tended by monks in brown, white and saffron robes. Buddhist chants and Khmer songs could be heard across the shrine and down to the banks of the Mekong river.

As the sun went down the pyre was lit. Hundreds of mourners inside the crematorium grounds, as well as untold thousands who lined the streets outside, wept in silence. They said their farewells as the funerary smoke began to rise from the enclosure’s spire. A 101-gun salute rang out.

It was almost what Sihanouk would have wished for: an abundance of Khmer mourners remembering only the best of a flawed leader. Cambodians will honour the memory of “Samdech Euv”, a regal form of “Grandfather”, while foreigners with good memories might remember him as “Snooks”.

Sihanouk had passed away on October 15th, in Beijing, the end of controversial life played on the world stage. He had reigned during Japanese occupation in the second world war and won independence for his country from France in 1953. But his leadership skills were eventually found wanting, as Cambodia descended into three bitter decades of war and self-inflicted destruction.

By the end of his life, Sihanouk’s vacillating support for the Khmer Rouge had tarnished his image abroad. His role in securing a peace during the 1990s, however, restored a measure of his lost prestige. He abdicated in 2004 and his son, King Sihamoni, has reigned nominally ever since.

But even in death Sihanouk caused a scene. A tight, kilometre-wide security cordon prevented most Cambodians from paying their last respects as they would have preferred. Members of the royal family complained privately that they were sidelined throughout the commemorations by officials loyal to the prime minister, Hun Sen, and his Cambodian People’s Party (CPP).

In the view of Sihanouk’s official biographer, a Chilean-born Australian named Julio Jeldres, the king had enjoyed a special relationship with his people “and for them not to be allowed to attend, not to be allowed to even come to the corner where they could see the funeral was sad.”

Throughout his life Sihanouk had revelled in trips to the countryside where he was often mobbed by villagers who believed that simply touching his garments would bring them good fortune. “This was sad, to see them separated from him at the last moment.”

Mr Jeldres’s sentiments were echoed by a princess. She thought that Western businessmen with political connections had obtained prime seating at the cremation, while members of the royal family itself were forced to wait in queue. Commoners too complained that the security was heavy-handed.

Some persistent critics of the government argue that Hun Sen and the CPP were being mindful of upcoming elections, due in July 2013. They must have been astonished, the thinking goes, by the level of grief and wave of public sympathy which has inundated the royal family following Sihanouk’s death. Palace observers say this prompted politicians—including some of Sihanouk’s former enemies—to seize control of the funeral arrangements, in the hope of ingratiating themselves with the electorate. “It’s a strategy that may have backfired,” says an insider at the palace.

“They ordered hotels and surrounding buildings and the owners of every apartment to black out their windows so people can’t see inside the crematorium. His most loyal subjects could not get close. There were men with guns on rooftops and police were fierce in keeping out ordinary Khmers.”

Royal funerals have not been frequent. The previous one had been for Sihanouk's mother, Queen Sisowath Kossamak, who died in 1975 in Beijing, while Sihanouk was in exile there. Her ashes were returned to Cambodia under an escort sent by the Khmer Rouge. The funeral for Sihanouk's father, King Norodom Suramarit, who died in 1960, was a typically grand affair, with five months of official mourning and a stellar list of foreign dignitaries, including the Chinese premier of the time, Zhou Enlai.

At this weekend’s cremation the top billing among foreign dignitaries went to France’s prime minister, Jean Marc-Ayrault, and Jia Qinglin, the chairman of China’s National Committee. Sihanouk had outlived most of his peers.

The king's ashes were divided into separate urns. One is to be interred at the palace for a year, while on February 5th the ashes from the other were taken to the confluence of the Tonle Sap and the Mekong and Bassac rivers, where Sihanouk had spent many of his happiest moments presiding over seasonal festivals, and scattered .