War-era debts a thorny subject
DURING the Vietnam War, even as US B-52s were carpet-bombing the Cambodian countryside, the United States lent hundreds of millions of dollars to Cambodia’s flailing government to feed and clothe refugees fleeing the chaos.
Now the United States wants that money back – with interest.
For decades, Cambodia has refused to repay the debt, which has grown to more than half a billion dollars. It says the United States, if anything, owes Cambodia a moral debt for the devastation it caused.
Washington says a loan is a loan.
But recently Prime Minister Hun Sen, an admirer of President Donald Trump, has appealed to him to forgive the debt.
“Oh, America and US President Donald Trump, how can this be?” Hun Sen said in February, according to the Cambodia Daily. “You attacked us and demand that we give money.”
Between 1965 and 1973, as it fought what would prove to be a losing war in neighbouring Vietnam, the United States dropped an estimated 500,000 tonnes of explosives on eastern Cambodia. The bombardment started covertly as part of an effort to cut off supply routes used by the Viet Cong.
In 1969, under President Richard M Nixon, it expanded into full-fledged carpetbombing, meant to buy time for US troops to pull out of South Vietnam, while halting the advance of CONTINUED
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