The Vietnamese congregation sings enthusiastically, maybe unaware a government official is watching them.
The pastor sits at the back of the church. Cambodians, he said “do not deserve another disaster”.One of King Sihamoni’s main concerns has been retrieving and restoring stolen Khmer artefacts; his next task will be to restore the lustre to the monarchy.. Amid the graceful pagodas, temples and French Colonial architecture, the Protestant church in Hanoi is a very ordinary building. “There might be some surprises if people think of him as a soft touch.”Sihanouk once hinted that Sihamoni might spurn the crown but that was before he made an offer that his son could not refuse. Last week Sihanouk went from king to kingmaker.”My abdication allows me to give our country, our nation and our people a serious opportunity to avoid mortal turmoil the day after my death,” Sihanouk wrote. It was feared that without a plan of succession, the monarchy might have collapsed after Sihanouk’s death.Sihamoni’s royal bearing recalls the posture of his father, who became king at the age of 18, after the colonial French rulers passed over his grandfather.

Father and son share a passion for film and music, and can charm a crowd in five languages.”He’s very much an unknown quantity, but he’s certainly no fool,” said one Western diplomat who encountered Sihamoni when he was at Unesco. After serving 11 years as Cambodia’s ambassador to Unesco, last year Sihamoni moved to Beijing to nurse his father, who suffers from a stomach ailment, diabetes, and cancer.Though the royal line stretches back to the 13th-century Angkor empire, the king today is little more than a figurehead, even though traditional Cambodians continue to consider the monarch to be semi-divine.Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge cadre who has held on to power since the Vietnamese placed him in charge of the government, has had a strained relationship with the mercurial Sihanouk.Hun Sen had grown increasingly irritated by Sihanouk’s habit of posting wry political comments on his widely-read website. He studied fine arts abroad in Prague and Pyongyang, and later danced in some of the leading conservatories in Paris. His first name is a romantic combination of theirs.Unlike his brothers, who are active in Cambodia’s royalist Funcinpec party and have waged protracted power struggles with the premier, the bachelor prince has lived abroad most of his life and knows his country through its classical dance rather than its factional politics. Five of his 13 siblings eventually died as the country plunged into chaos and 1.7 million lives were lost during the “killing fields” period.Born in 1953, the year Cambodia won its independence from France, Sihamoni is the favourite son of Sihanouk and his sixth wife, Queen Monineath. The apolitical prince won the approval of Prime Minister Hun Sen, the strongman who actually rules the impoverished kingdom, and the coronation is planned for 29 October.The middle-aged music buff will trade his life of cultured leisure in Paris and Beijing to return to the royal palace in Phnom Penh, where he spent three years under house arrest during the blood-soaked Khmer Rouge regime. Cambodia moved smoothly into a new royal era yesterday as Prince Norodom Sihamoni ascended to the throne surprisingly abdicated by his father King Norodom Sihanouk.

Two more were killed in a second explosion at the caf?a popular attraction for off-duty soldiers and Western civilians, five minutes later. Lieutenant-Colonel James Hutton, of the US army, confirmed that the bombers had been able to carry in their explosive devices.Broken glass, twisted metal and dismembered body parts lay in pools of blood on the caf?loor. A survivor said: “People were screaming, they were stampeding trying to get out.”A member of staff at the American-run Ibn Sena Hospital inside the zone said: “There are body parts everywhere At the moment we have eight dead, but this may rise. Yesterday the US embassy extended the same message to its nationals. Foreign residents in the zone, especially women, have already been advised not to go out by themselves after dark..