Increased dialog may lead to a peaceful resolution of the Cambodian war and will provide a boost to our efforts to resolve the MIA/POW issue. For it has been clear to me. ever since I traveled to Vietnam 3 years ago. that any serious effort to end the years of uncertainty for our POW/MIA families will only come from increased discussions with the Vietnamese. We have been bombarded with news reports about the inhumane suffering of the refugees of Cambodia and Vietnam. but have remained paralyzed by our own reluctance to let go of the animosity built up by the Vietnam war. For over a decade we have wrung our hands about the horrible chaos in Cambodia. but our inability to be responsive to a changing world led us into a policy which accepted the Khmer Route as a fact of life. For several decades. in fact. our policy toward Cambodia has been about everything but Cambodia: Our Vietnam war strategy. our foreign relations. even our humanitarian policies have been obsessed with Cambodia only to the extent that Cambodia represented a stretch of land deemed pivotal to whatever cold war policy happened to be popular at the moment.
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refugees