Consider the airport lounge. It is a non-place, a zone of transit and waiting. On March 18, 1970, Prince Norodom Sihanouk occupied such a space at Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport. He was en route home from medical treatment in France, with a stop in the Soviet capital. He was still, in his mind, the Chief of State of Cambodia, the man who had navigated his country through the tempests of the Cold War with a policy of brittle neutrality.
While he waited, the National Assembly and the Council of the Kingdom in Phnom Penh convened in a joint session. They voted unanimously to remove him from office. The vote was orchestrated by his Prime Minister, General Lon Nol, and his cousin, Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak. The justification was Sihanouk's perceived tolerance of North Vietnamese sanctuaries within Cambodia's borders, which had drawn American wrath.
The news reached the prince in the lounge. His authority, which had seemed as solid as the palace in Phnom Penh, dissolved into a bulletin over a wire service. He was now a man without a country, his return route severed. He did not board his flight to Phnom Penh. Instead, he flew to Beijing, where he would begin a government-in-exile. The coup did not bring stability. It unleashed a five-year civil war, drew Cambodia fully into the Vietnam War, and paved the way for the genocidal Khmer Rouge. The entire trajectory of a nation pivoted on a vote taken in the absence of its central figure, who learned his fate in the fluorescent limbo of an airport.