A God's Children in the Dock

IT was a scene befitting a bad Khmer operetta. There in the dock were the children of the deposed god-king, on trial for their lives. The judge, a rotund man given to spasmodic eyeball rolling, was the same judge who a year earlier had condemned their father to death in absentia. At the end of each day's session, scores of the curious spectators who filled the drab, stifling courtroom would nervously make their way to the two defendants, many prayerfully clasping their hands before their faces in the traditional Cambodian gesture of respect.

The frightened young man and woman on trial in Phnom-Penh last week were two of the eight children of deposed Premier Norodom Sihanouk. They were Prince Norodom Naradipo, 26, a quiet-living bachelor and connoisseur of traditional Khmer theater who was once thought to be a likely successor to his father; and his half sister Princess Botum Bopha, 20, who is the mother of a young child. They stood accused, along with 18 other defendants, of espionage and propaganda activities in behalf of the Communist and Sihanouk cause, an act punishable by death.

A Cambodian attorney said the trial was one more effort on the part of the Lon Nol regime "to get at Sihanouk [in exile in Peking] by getting at his children." All things considered, however, the outcome was not so tragic as it might have been. The military jury freed the princess and nine of the other defendants but sentenced her brother to five years at hard labor. Still to be tried is another Sihanouk son, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, who is charged with espionage.

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