Cambodia should not pay for American interference

Sholto Byrnes explains why the United States is seeking an old debt from Cambodia

Cambodia's prime minister Hun Sen attends a meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin at Bocharov Ruchey State Residence in Sochi, Russia. Mikhail Svetlov / Getty Images

In March 1970, a Cambodian army general named Lon Nol overthrew the democratically elected government of prince Sihanouk in a coup that is widely believed to have had the backing of the CIA. Over the next five years, the United States lent the Lon Nol regime $274 billion (Dh1 trillion). It is now asking for that sum, which has increased over the last 42 years to $500 billion, to be repaid. The Cambodian government, as well as many neutral commentators with no affection for Hun Sen, the country’s strongman prime minister, are outraged – and rightly so.

During those five years, the US armed forces also dropped 500,000 tonnes of bombs on the Cambodian countryside in an attempt to knock out the North Vietnamese Ho Chi Minh Trail, killing an estimated half a million non-combatants in the process, and massively increasing popular support for the Maoist rebel opposition.

That opposition, the Khmer Rouge, was then aligned to prince Sihanouk. After it took power in 1975, Sihanouk disowned it, long before the full horrors of the genocide the Khmer Rouge inflicted upon the country – starting again from “year zero” and taking the lives of two million people before being overthrown in 1979 – were known.

The effects of that decade lingered long, not just in the US ordnauce that still claims the limbs of innocent Cambodians but in a civil war that didn’t end until the 1990s.

Could internal strife have been avoided? Arguably not; there had already been several coup attempts before Lon Nol’s successful one, and an insurgency began in 1967. But Sihanouk’s policy of “extreme neutrality” was probably the wisest course to steer in perilous times and may have kept Cambodia stable while the rest of Indochina was wracked by war. The US-backed coup and subsequent funding of an illegal regime, on the other hand, paved the way for the barbarous Khmer Rouge and led to the country having to wait 23 years for a return to democracy.

No wonder Mr Hun Sen is angry. “The US created problems in my country. They dropped bombs on our heads and then ask us to repay.” And the “debt” has serious ramifications. “When we do not repay, they tell the IMF not to lend us money.”

The prime minister is far from alone in his fury. James Pringle, a Reuters journalist who covered the region's conflicts in the 1970s, is just one who agrees. "During the Vietnam War, Americans killed children with abandon over Cambodia," he wrote recently in The Cambodia Daily. "Cambodia does not owe a brass farthing to the US for help in destroying its people, its wild animals, its rice fields and forest cover."

Another journalist and historian goes further. Elizabeth Becker, who interviewed Pol Pot when he was in power, and testified at the Khmer Rouge trials in Cambodia in 2015, argues that such was the damage and the death toll of the American bombing that “the US owes much more in war debts that can’t be repaid in cash”.

But US ambassador William Heidt was firm. According to him, Cambodia – as well as Sudan, Somalia and Zimbabwe – owes a large sum to the US. “I am not sure that’s a group that it’s in Cambodia’s interests to be a member of,” he said. “Until it takes care of its debt with America and its other creditors, it cannot have a normal relationship with the IMF.”

Quite apart from the fact that Mr Hun Sen can hardly be expected to be inclined to pay the debts incurred by a regime he fought to oust (he was a Khmer Rouge commander until he left after a purge in 1977), this is outright blackmail on the part of the United States. And their effrontery in demanding money with menaces is double considering the history behind the loans.

There is some speculation that this is apiece with president Donald Trump’s insistence that US has been getting too many “bad deals” around the world; that America should stop bearing the burdens of others, and should be paid back what it is owed. In some cases, notably the large number of Nato countries that don’t spend anything like the agreed minimum on defence, that is justified.

Cambodia's situation is quite different. Decades after US forces committed what may well have been war crimes, dropping bombs from such a height that the B52 crews could not tell where local villages, as opposed to Viet Cong camps, were, and aiding the rise of the Khmer Rouge, the Americans have never apologised. As The New York Times put it when Barack Obama came to Phnom Penh, the capital – the first visit by a US president – in 2012: "He came not to defend the past, nor to apologise for it. In fact, he made no public mention of it whatsoever."

For a president usually so willing to acknowledge America’s past faults, that was extra­ordinary.

It may well be that US policy has been deliberate in not admitting the catastrophic harm its military campaign caused in Cambodia, on the grounds that it might then be open to a legal claim for reparations. That would be shameful in a nation so quick to claim moral leadership, but understandable (to a degree).

One way out of the current impasse would be for the money to be converted into a US aid programme to benefit the country. There are plenty of precedents for the US doing this, and both parties could then agree that the debt was “settled” with no loss of face.

But to insist on being repaid what is now a huge sum, especially for a developing country, would be unconscionable. The US position must change.

Pick your targets carefully, Mr Trump. Cambodia should not be one of them.

Sholto Byrnes is a senior fellow at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies, Malaysia