I've heard about this quite a lot. I believe in the initial invasion there was a huge amount of looting. Contrary to what you'd be led to believe, a lot of properties were left completely untouched during the Pol Pot years. While there was a fair amount of wanton destruction immediately after the 1975 victory, things got a lot more disciplined soon after when all those troops were sent back to the boonies along with everyone else. Useful equipment was gathered and warehoused by DK troops. So when the Vietnamese arrived, there was a fair amount of booty to be had. A few years later when Cambodians were able to get a few bucks together they went to Vietnamese border towns and were able to buy back all these pre-75 TVs and record players etc.Felgerkarb wrote:
Cambodia didn't develop for 12 years because of the US...,had NOTHING to do with all the resources being trucked away into Vietnam.
I've also heard they did a lot of scrapping, and buildings that had survived the wars (Bokor/Kep/etc) were torn apart for cabling/ copper pipes etc. I think that sort of stuff goes on in any war though, so it's hard to blame any faction.
I don't believe that this was a general policy though and after the first couple of years of chaos the food-security situation here stabilized a lot. What they were doing in the forests I don't know but they weren't very good at it if you compare their efforts to later ones.