The legitimate ruler of Cambodia was Prince Norodom Sihanouk. He was replaced in a coup by Lon Nol in 1970. The coup was backed by America, but it's difficult to know how much they were involved. Bombing of Cambodia by America had been going on for years, but became much worse in 1969/1970. Carpet bombing by B-52s was added to more targeted napalming of villages and deployment of cluster bombs. These bombs are still a problem in Cambodia today and still kill and maim people.
Rural Cambodia was destroyed, so Lon Nol asked the Americans to lend them money to buy food (see below). The amount of bombs dropped was more than half a million tons, much of it indiscriminate. That figure is almost as much as the Americans dropped in the Pacific theatre during World War II, but some estimates go well over 2 million tons.
"To put 2,756,941 tons into perspective, the Allies dropped just over 2 million tons of bombs during all of World War II. Cambodia may be the most heavily bombed country in history." Bombs Over Cambodia
It is generally agreed that the bombing helped to strengthen the Khmer Rouge communists, who were then able to conquer the whole country in 1975. The Khmer Rouge killed 1.7 million Cambodians. Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1979 and the Khmer Rouge fled. America encouraged the Chinese to help the Khmer Rouge with military aid and pressured UN relief agencies to feed them. War continued for the Cambodians, the Khmer Rouge fighting the Vietnamese.
America insisted that the Khmer Rouge were still the legitimate government of Cambodia after 1979. They made sure the Khmer Rouge were seated at the United Nations. They tried to protect the Khmer Rouge from criticism of their mass murder. Allies of the Khmer Rouge were given tens of millions of dollars to fight the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese left in 1989.
America wanted to get revenge on Vietnam, they did that with total indifference to the lives of Cambodians.
America put pressure on the Cambodian government to suppress prostitution. They threatened not to give Cambodia millions of dollars in aid unless they did. In 2008 the Cambodian government implemented the Law on Suppression of Human Trafficking and Sexual Exploitation. Sex workers were abducted and imprisoned without charge in large numbers. They were kept in appalling conditions, many denied medication. Beatings and rapes were common and some were killed by guards. America then upgraded Cambodia's compliance status (although they later downgraded it again).
Now America is insisting that Cambodia pays a debt of hundreds of millions of dollars incurred during the Lon Nol regime. Lon Nol was not the legitimate ruler of Cambodia. America might get the International Monetary Fund to downgrade Cambodia's creditworthiness, affecting its capacity to access international capital. "Until it takes care of its debt with America and its other creditors, it cannot have a normal relationship with the IMF," said the US Ambassador to Cambodia William Heidt.
Cambodia: Background and U.S. Relations Congressional Research Service https://crsreports.congress.gov R44037
Below are a couple of paragraphs from a book The Food Programme: 13 Foods that Shape Our World
How Our Hunger has Changed the Past, Present and Future by Alex Renton.
"The sad truth was that Cambodia could have fed itself on its own rice. But the economic reforms forced onto the government by the international financial institutions had closed the state-run rice storage and rice processing facilities, all in the name of free trade. 'It's true that the entire country could feed itself with its paddy rice [raw, unmilled rice]. But what it lacks is the ability to store or process that rice,' Sumie Arima, a trade policy analyst for Oxfam, told me."
"As the prices soared and tumbled on the commodities markets in Chicago and London, someone was getting rich out of Cambodian rice. But it was not Cambodia. When prices eventually stabilised the following year, people became aware that the key factor in the price rises had been the markets themselves. Those markets were not that concerned by the actual supply of rice, or the lack of it - more significant was the way the price could be manipulated."
The final paragraph is from Anti-trafficking saviors: Celebrity, slavery, and branded activism
by Robert Heynen and Emily van der Meulen.
"The elevation of celebrities as rescuers and policy experts is both symptom and cause of the changes wrought by the growth and transformation of the anti-trafficking movement. Mira Sorvino’s anti-sex work approach to trafficking is perhaps the most visible example of the ways in which a victim/rescuer dynamic rooted in racist global geographies enables security-based interventions (De Villiers, 2016), and so it is with that example that we now conclude. The profound racism underlying the witness-savior-expert trajectory is especially evident in one of Sorvino’s much-criticized journal postings of her time in Cambodia for CNN’s influential Freedom Project, which, echoing common anti-trafficking refrains, claims to be “shining a light on modern-day slavery.” Brought to Cambodia by the evangelical anti-trafficking NGO Agape International Missions, Sorvino (2013) encounters a group of men pointed out to her as traffickers. As the CNN cameras approach, the men, Sorvino writes, scatter “like roaches exposed to the light.” She is distressed over her inability to save the victims, lamenting: “we can’t get to them, can’t swoop in like guardian angels and pluck them out of harm’s way.” Setting aside whether or not walking away when confronted by CNN cameras is in fact evidence of being a trafficker, the racist dehumanization of alleged perpetrators as cockroaches and victims as passive and helpless, along with the sanctification of angelic saviors, cements the melodramatic anti-trafficking narrative. This is the narrative in which we are asked to participate, celebrity activism opening the door for much wider consumer and social media participation. Sorvino’s easy assuming of the mantle of abolitionist is increasingly available to any branded activist, the (white) savior defending victims against the evils of an implicitly or explicitly racialized perpetrator."
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