The US was cleaning up its deadly mess in Cambodia – then came Trump’s call​on February 10, 2025 at 8:30 am

The ordnance was one of countless pieces that litter Cambodia; volatile remains from years of civil and externally wrought wars.

The United States, among others, dropped masses of bombs on Cambodia in a campaign to degrade border-hopping communists during the Vietnam War. The Khmer Rouge, among others, planted masses of landmines. Leftovers are believed to have killed more than 60,000 Cambodians.

The US has long funded clean-ups of its deadly mess, spending more than $US200 million ($320 million) since 1993. But Trump’s executive order has pulled hundreds of workers from the field.

“It was like a car at full speed that suddenly stopped,” says Cambodian Mine Action Centre (CMAC) director-general Heng Ratana, a Cambodian government official.

There is no suggestion that Saly would have avoided his injuries had Trump not halted aid, and the provenance of the weapon that hurt him is unknown.

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But his case underscores how the Cambodian wars have never truly ended in the fields and rivers in which explosives came to rest or were planted. Fishermen still drag them up in nets. Farmers still find them while ploughing or digging irrigation.

CMAC has taken more than 50 emergency calls in the past two weeks alone, Ratana says.

The suspended projects cost US taxpayers a modest $US2 million a year (via non-government organisations rather than directly to CMAC) and employed 210 Cambodian specialists, Ratana says. They operated in eight provinces, including where Saly was wounded. Similar programs in Laos and Vietnam have also been affected.

CMAC’s other 27 programs with 800-odd staff attached are funded by other donors, including China, and will continue as normal, Ratana says. So will the emergency response teams, but even these will be affected as their numbers include the specialists no longer at work.

Effect of Trump’s razor gang

Trump has tasked the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, and his tech whizz-kids to run razors through agencies they perceive as bloated, underperforming, woke, or all three. Money for foreigners ($US72 billion in 2023), much of it delivered through the US Agency for International Development (USAID), is the low-hanging fruit.

The decision to target USAID has caused harm to the US that will be difficult to repair, Australian National University senior research officer Cameron Hill says.

“Trust will be very hard to rebuild given the capricious nature of the way this decision has been implemented, and the fact that many smaller organisations that rely on the US in these countries are facing irreversible collapse,” Hill says.

Hill, whose research focuses on development and aid, says that while there are valid criticisms of the aid sector – including tangled bureaucracy and at times poor co-ordination – the need for reform should not be confused with wholesale policy demolition.

“Development is seen by both Democrats and ‘internationalist’ Republicans as a crucial element of America’s ability to compete effectively with China in the global south.”

Mark Cubit from Australian philanthropic organisation Partners for Equity, which works with 80 partners in 30 countries, says the freeze and probable cuts mark the Americans as unreliable partners.

“There’s certainly plenty of talk, even out of the US, that this does open up opportunities for China,” he says. “I’m not a political scientist, but that’s how the philanthropic and aid sector is seeing it play out.”

America accounts for about 40 per cent of global aid, according to Hill, with much of it going to Ukraine, Africa and the Middle East.

In strategic South-East Asia, HIV and tuberculosis programs, maternal care, health clinics (including in war-torn Myanmar), independent media and efforts to stem rampant human trafficking are a sample of those hit.

In the hour before taking this masthead’s call on the weekend, Blue Dragon, a well-established Australian non-government organisation based in Hanoi, secured the rescue of three young Vietnamese men from a Cambodian scam compound.

“[The US] is 10 per cent of our budget, so we’re not going to stop because of this, but we’re having to scale back,” founder and strategic director Michael Brosowski says.

“Their funding in particular has been for these anti-trafficking interventions. But it’s not only what we’ve lost in this freeze – we’re not even talking millions here – but we’ve lost the opportunity to apply for more.

“Other funding opportunities are gone as well. The State Department has been fantastic at funding research, for example, and almost no one else is funding that.”

China looms to fill ‘urgent’ aid gap

Ratana has a giant Cambodia map covering the wall of his Phnom Penh office that marks sites of known and suspected explosives. The red, denoting landmines, is concentrated in the north-west, a former Khmer Rouge stronghold; the yellow of American bombing colours swaths of the map’s opposite side.

CMAC puts the total weight of US-dropped explosives on Cambodia at 2.7 million tonnes. As much as 25 per cent of the cluster munition failed to detonate, Ratana says, though a national survey to be released this year may better quantify this and other numbers.

The agency neutralised 69 large bombs in Cambodia last year alone. A cursory search on Facebook also turns up numerous posts of recent close calls, including a 1000-kilogram monster discovered in the Mekong River opposite the royal palace in 2022.

The work to clear them is painstaking, intergenerational and urgent all at once, and Ratana believes the US has a duty of care to Cambodians.

If the funding does not return, Ratana says he will need to look elsewhere. China, perhaps, which counts Cambodia as its closest friend in South-East Asia and funds so much of its infrastructure – including the hospital treating Saly’s wounds.

On the day the boy tossed the explosive in the rubber plantation, China re-announced $US4.4 million for a third phase of CMAC work.

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“To overreact to the policy of Donald Trump is maybe too early for us,” Ratana says. “But in the next few weeks if they say ‘no more funding, sorry, finished’, then we will have to do something. I will work with other partners.”

Asked for comment by this masthead, the US State Department spokesman did not address Cambodia directly, but said the three-month review period for USAID was to align its work with the “America First agenda”.

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