Sihanouk's son named king

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BANGKOK -- Southeast Asia's wiliest political survivor yesterday completed his own intricately scripted exit from the stage. King Norodom Sihanouk, who first took Cambodia's throne when Nazi-backed Vichy France con- trolled Indochina in 1941, stunned his subjects last week by announcing he would voluntarily abdicate and allow his untested son, Prince Norodom Sihamoni, to replace him.

The formal transfer, endorsed in yesterday's unanimous decision by the country's nine-member throne council in Phnom Penh, thrust the 51-year-old prince, a trained classical dancer based in Paris since the 1970s, into the international limelight and ended the reign of the only monarch most Cambodians have ever known.

Reuters news agency reported that Prince Norodom Ranariddh, the new king's half-brother and a member of the throne council as head of the National Assembly, suggested the transfer of power had been choreographed well before the council meeting.

"All nine members of the royal throne council support Sihamoni as the new king," Prince Ranariddh told reporters after a self-declared "mission impossible" to Beijing to try to get his father to change his mind. The council consists of both leading political and Buddhist officials.

The new king, educated in Prague and North Korea, recently served as Cambodia's representative to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and his apolitical background proved a point in his favor when his father sought a successor.

Prince Sihamoni was "a neutral person not engaged in politics, and nonpartisan," the king told the Associated Press.

Sihanouk promised to help his son "fulfill his duty successfully as a king for the nation and the people, like me, his father."

The name Sihamoni unites the first syllables of his parents' names: Sihanouk and the king's wife, Queen Monineath. He is the couple's only surviving son. Sihanouk said his voluntary departure, which took the nation by surprise, was because of ill health.

He has suffered diabetes, heart problems and colon cancer, but his announcement apparently was timed to confirm a successor while he was still able to control the transition.

Cambodia's monarchy does not require direct hereditary succession, but a king must have royal blood.