Cambodia Outraged as US Demands Repayment of ‘Blood-Stained’ War Debt
US fighter jets drop bombs on Cambodia circa 1973 (Photo: Wikimedia Commons/cc)
By Nika Knight | Common Dreams | March 13, 2017
Cambodians are responding with outrage to the U.S. government’s demand that the country repay a nearly 50-year-old loan to Cambodia’s brutal Lon Nol government, which came to power through a U.S.-backed coup and spent much of its foreign funds purchasing arms to kill its own citizens, according to Cambodia’s current prime minister Hun Sen.
While the U.S. was backing the Lon Nol government, it was also strafing the Cambodian countryside with bombs—a carpet-bombing campaign that would eventually see over 500,000 tons of explosives dropped on the small Asian country, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and leaving a legacy of unexploded ordnance.
“[The U.S.] dropped bombs on our heads and then they ask us to repay. When we do not repay, they tell the IMF [International Monetary Fund] not to lend us money,” Hun Sen said at an Asia-Pacific regional conference earlier this month.
“At the same time the U.S. was giving weapons to Lon Nol, it was bombing the Cambodian countryside into oblivion and creating millions of refugees fleeing into Phnom Penh and destroying all political fabric and civil life in the country,” former Australian ambassador to Cambodia Tony Kevin told Australia’s ABC.
“And all of this was simply to stop the supplies coming down to South Vietnam, as it was then, from the north,” Kevin added. “So the United States created a desert in Cambodia in those years, and Americans know this.”
Hun Sen has argued that the U.S. has no right to demand repayment of its “blood-stained” funds.
“Cambodia does not owe even a brass farthing to the U.S. for help in destroying its people, its wild animals, its rice fields, and forest cover,” wrote former Reuters correspondent James Pringle for The Cambodia Daily.
In fact, during his tenure as prime minister Hun Sen has asked the U.S. to drop the “dirty debt” several times, but American leaders have refused.
“[The] U.S. would not drop it. It would have been so easy to forgive the repayment, it would have been easy to refinance it for education like they did in Vietnam,” the reporter Elizabeth Becker, who covered the Cambodian genocide in the 1970s, told Al Jazeera.
“The U.S. intervention in Cambodia was easily the most controversial that we had in that era,” Becker said. “[The U.S.] dragged Cambodia into the Vietnam War for hopes that by expanding it they could win, the complications now are that even 50 years later, the Khmer Rouge legacy is horrible.”
“The U.S. owes Cambodia much more in war debts that can be repaid in cash,” Becker argued to The Cambodia Daily.
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March 15, 2017 - Posted by aletho | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Cambodia, United States
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U.S. Drops Fleas With Bubonic Plague on North Korea
By David Swanson – War Is A Crime – September 5, 2015
This happened some 63 years ago, but as the U.S. government has never stopped lying about it, and it’s generally known only outside the United States, I’m going to treat it as news.
Here in our little U.S. bubble we’ve heard of a couple versions of a film called The Manchurian Candidate. We’ve heard of the general concept of “brainwashing” and may even associate it with something evil that the Chinese supposedly did to U.S. prisoners during the Korean War. And I’d be willing to bet that the majority of people who’ve heard of these things have at least a vague sense that they’re bullshit.
If you didn’t know, I’ll break it to you right now: people cannot actually be programed like the Manchurian candidate, which was a work of fiction. There was never the slightest evidence that China or North Korea had done any such thing. And the CIA spent decades trying to do such a thing, and finally gave up.
I’d also be willing to bet that very few people know what it was that the U.S. government promoted the myth of “brainwashing” to cover up. During the Korean War, the United States bombed virtually all of North Korea and a good bit of the South, killing millions of people. It dropped massive quantities of Napalm. It bombed dams, bridges, villages, houses. This was all-out mass-slaughter. But there was something the U.S. government didn’t want known, something deemed unethical in this genocidal madness.
It is well documented that the United States dropped on China and North Korea insects and feathers carrying anthrax, cholera, encephalitis, and bubonic plague. … continue
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Thanks for this. I appreciate the comments of Ambassador Kevin, James Pringle, and Elizabeth Becker.
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Comment by roberthstiver | March 15, 2017 |
……..”they tell the IMF [International Monetary Fund] not to lend us money,”
The IMF is owned, and is part of the International Banking Cartel(which includes all Central Banks, including the Federal Reserve) that is currently enslaving the World in debt, and Cambodia is one of the poorest countries on Earth.
The USA demanding repayment of loans by a country that the USA Carpet Bombed, is outrageous.
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Comment by Brian Harry, Australia | March 15, 2017 |
“The USA demanding repayment”!
WHO IS DEMANDING THIS REPAYMENT?
We need names, so we can expose these DEMONIC scum!
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Comment by Buddy Silver | December 26, 2017 |
Thanks for re-opening this post and allowing me to be outraged and ashamed once again, Buddy Silver. Here we are almost a year later…I wish Nika Knight would give us a look into current US machinations…and Cambodian reaction. (I did glance at the opening texts of the three “Related” sources above.)
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Comment by roberthstiver | December 26, 2017 |