Son Ngoc Thanh was one of the earliest exponents of Cambodian nationalism but fell foul of Norodom Sihanouk, who treated him as a political outcast. Son Ngoc Thanh was a member of the Cambodian minority in southern Vietnam, where he was born in Travinh in 1908 into a family of prosperous landowners.
He trained as a teacher as well as studying law for a year in France. He then joined the colonial administration in Indochina and in the early 1939s was working as a magistrate in Cambodia. In 1935 he became the secretary of the Buddhist Institute in Phnom Penh and in he following year jointly founded a Cambodian language newspaper Nagaravatta (Angkor Wat (Temple)).
France's failure to resist Japanese intimidation in Indochina encouraged Thanh's anti-colonial orientation and he became involved in a demonstration in July 1942 in protest at attempts to romanize the Khmer language and to introduce the Gregorian calendar. He fled to Thailand, where the Japanese
mission arranged fro him to travel to Tokyo, where he spent the remainder of the war. When the Japanese overturned the French administration in Indochina in March 1945, Son Ngoc
He trained as a teacher as well as studying law for a year in France. He then joined the colonial administration in Indochina and in the early 1939s was working as a magistrate in Cambodia. In 1935 he became the secretary of the Buddhist Institute in Phnom Penh and in he following year jointly founded a Cambodian language newspaper Nagaravatta (Angkor Wat (Temple)).
France's failure to resist Japanese intimidation in Indochina encouraged Thanh's anti-colonial orientation and he became involved in a demonstration in July 1942 in protest at attempts to romanize the Khmer language and to introduce the Gregorian calendar. He fled to Thailand, where the Japanese
mission arranged fro him to travel to Tokyo, where he spent the remainder of the war. When the Japanese overturned the French administration in Indochina in March 1945, Son Ngoc
Thanh returned to Cambodia tooccupy the post of foreign minister, making no secret of his republican sympathies. He assumed the office of prime minister on Japan's surrender but was arrested in September 1945 by British forces and taken to Saigon, where he was sentenced to detention in France for collaboration.He was released in October 1951 and returned to Phnom Penh to receive a rapturous public welcome which offended Sihanouk. Thanh adopted a vigorous anti-French position which he expressed in a newspaper called Khmer Krok (Cambodians Awake). When the newspaper was suspended in February 1952, he fled the capital and fomented a republican rebellion again French rule, which provoked Sihanouk to take the lead in the independence movement. Sihanouk then succeeded in marginalizing Son
Ngoc Thanh, who remained in the jungle after Cambodia's independence had been conceded by France. Son Ngoc Thanh spent the next decade and a half leading a feckless resistance against Sihanouk's rule with Thai, South Vietnamese and US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) support , while living in Saigon.
After Prince Sihanouk was overthrown by a right-wing coup in March 1970, Thanh returned again to Cambodia in August to become an adviser to president Cheng Heng. In March 1972 he was appointed to the nominal post of First prime minister by Lon Nol, who had become executive president. When he was asked to resign by Lon Nol after fraudulent elections in September 1972, Son Ngoc Thanh left Cambodia in some despair to live again in South Vietnam in retirement, where he is believed to have died shortly after the Communists seized power in 1975.
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