NO MONARCH in modern times has embodied the life and fate of his country as completely as Norodom Sihanouk, who died in Beijing on Monday. He was king, then prince, then king again of Cambodia, amending his royal role according to the needs of the hour and his own volatile will. He was also a film-maker, journalist, editor and impresario as well as a leading, and often dominant, politician for more than 60 years.

Sihanouk, born on Oct 31, 1922, began adult life in 1941 as a young king chosen by the French as a puppet. But, aided by the upsets of the Second World War, he outfoxed the colonial power and led his country to independence in 1953. The epic tale continued as the prince protector shielded his people from the worst of the Vietnam wars, then as he held on through the dark years of usurpation and Khmer Rouge rule during the 1970s.

Cambodia returned to something resembling normal life, with Sihanouk once again on the throne. But his country’s rehabilitation was terribly flawed, and until his abdication in 2004 he found himself presiding over a poor, corrupt and divided nation, ruled by a bizarre duopoly of enemies. Over the years he sometimes succeeded in using his power and influence to avert the worst. But this domineering, mischievous and hyperactive man was undoubtedly the part-author of his own and his country’s misfortunes.

Sihanouk managed to keep his country out of the conflict between the Americans and the Vietnamese for many years. But he must also bear some of the responsibility for the tragedies that then overtook Cambodia as it was drawn into the war, suffered from massive American bombing, and fell under Khmer Rouge rule.

How much responsibility is the great question raised by his life. Some would say that he dominated Cambodian politics because the political class was untalented, short-sighted and faction-ridden, and, as far as the left was concerned, too influenced by inexperienced and mediocre intellectuals. When Sihanouk was removed in the 1970 coup, these vices came into full play, at first in the incompetent, corrupt and unrealistic rightwing regime of Lon Nol and then, devastatingly, in the incompetent, ruthless and even more unrealistic leftwing regime of Pol Pot.

Others have argued that the failings of the political class, left and right, were in part Sihanouk’s handiwork, since he undermined every development that might have led to multi-party politics. In abandoning his policy of balance, he forced many of those on the left, who would otherwise have continued in conventional politics, into the jungle, where they joined the Khmer Rouge. And although he joined forces with the Khmer Rouge after the coup, he proved wholly unable to influence them or to protect his people from them.

Sihanouk was a man of eccentric charm. Journalists who visited Cambodia in the difficult final years of his personal rule, when he was trying to manipulate both the US and North Vietnam, came to relish his extraordinary performances at press conferences. He would read out press clippings in his high voice and follow up with a stream of jokes and imprecations. He was a great talker, but his assumption of expertise was often false.

Born into the royal family in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, Sihanouk received his early schooling at the main French school in the Vietnamese capital of Saigon. But he received no significant further formal training in political or military affairs, or in the artistic and scholarly pursuits in which he dabbled throughout his life, and for which he had some talent.

Never subject to any discipline and never facing any serious criticism in his artistic endeavours, he remained, as some would say he did in politics, an egotistical if gifted amateur.

The French - representing the Nazi-puppet Vichy regime - placed Sihanouk on the throne in 1941, setting aside more qualified candidates, including his own father. Sihanouk was 18, interested in football, jazz, riding, movies and girls. But an early sign that the French were mistaken about his pliability came after the Japanese ousted them in early 1945. Sihanouk followed the unavoidable, Japanese-managed proclamation of independence with laws reinstating the Khmer alphabet and calendar.

The French were soon back in charge and gave Cambodia a democratic constitution in 1947, reserving most power, however, for themselves. Sihanouk sometimes played the French game, as they had expected, but increasingly came to use French techniques of political manipulation on his own behalf rather than theirs.

He took the independence card from Cambodia’s embryonic middle-class politicians, launching, in 1952, his own “royal crusade for independence”. Aided by events in Vietnam, he effectively showed the French the door. In 1955 he abdicated, putting his father on the throne. This shrewd move enabled him to avoid the constitutional problems of trying to be king and the country’s leading politician at the same time. Yet as “monseigneur” - the head of state - he never lost his monarchical aura, and indeed continued to exploit it in full.

The great loss was that between 1947 and 1958 pluralist politics could have emerged in Cambodia around the middle-class Democratic party, but Sihanouk, with the French egging him on in the early years, seized every opportunity to undermine that party and eventually destroy it. Cambodia became a quasi-dictatorship and one-party state under Sihanouk and the Sangkum Reastr Niyum (Popular Socialist Community).

Nor were his hands as clean as he liked to maintain. His regime killed, imprisoned and intimidated opponents - admittedly on a scale dwarfed by later excesses.

Sihanouk’s peak years came between 1955 and 1962, when his touch was sure and his dominance nearly absolute. He picked the candidates for the national assembly in 1958 and 1962, and expertly managed the country’s cabinets. By sudden changes of direction, he threw rivals and allies off balance. As soon as a cabinet was formed or an assembly had gathered, even though he had chosen them himself, he immediately began to undercut the strongest groups and individuals. He had a sharp sense of the peasantry’s needs and aspirations and continually played these off against the urban elite. On the radio, he endeared himself to rural folk with his jokes and rough language. He also gained popularity by a programme of school, road and factory building, although many of these ventures were ill-conceived.

In the 1960s Cambodia’s international position deteriorated. Sihanouk resisted pressures from South Vietnam and Thailand, including at least one serious plot, which he characteristically used as the basis for a film, Storm Over Angkor. He tried to keep in with communist and western states and to play them off against each other.

But such tactics were less effective with outside powers than they were domestically. In 1963 he ended US military and economic aid. For the rest of that decade a gradual loss of his control was apparent.

In Phnom Penh, a restive, rightwing elite was becoming impatient with his foreign manoeuvrings and resentful of his restrictions on their economic and political privileges. In the jungle, the North Vietnamese were more heavily ensconced, and a Khmer communist movement was growing up under their protection. Internationally, Sihanouk was never able to repair the rift with the US, despite efforts at the end of the decade. He grew visibly disheartened, turning for distraction to film-making and the entertainment of foreign guests.

“It is almost as if he despaired of governing the country,” David Chandler wrote in The Tragedy of Cambodian History (1991).

When the plot against him took shape in 1970, he was in France. He did not rush home, as he had done on other occasions when his position was threatened, but seemed to dawdle in Russia and China. The coup brought Cambodia into the Vietnam war, a conflict for which, in spite of the boasts of Lon Nol, the new leader, it was wholly unprepared. Sihanouk, encouraged by the Chinese, went into a united front with the Khmer communists.

He spent the five years of war that followed mainly in Beijing and the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, both governments providing him with lavish accommodation. He did make one trip to the Khmer Rouge zone of Cambodia with his wife, who wrote happily of the pleasant chalets prepared for them.

But it was an alliance without warmth. After the Khmer Rouge took power in 1975, they discarded the united front, and Sihanouk was soon a prisoner in the royal palace. He could do nothing about the Khmer Rouge’s terrible mismanagement of the country, with its hideous human consequences. Five of his children died during this period, and he was probably lucky to escape execution himself.

By arrangement with the Guardian