Word: merchant
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...remaining government-controlled zones of Cambodia, the morale of the civilian population has never been lower. At the provincial capital of Battambang, for instance, students protesting the rising price of rice rioted for two days against the Chinese population, which forms the bulk of the merchant class and is an easy scapegoat. When 20 of their number were then arrested in a military crackdown, the students seized an airport commander and held him until Premier Long Beret flew over from Phnom-Penh and worked out a mutual release. By week's end the anti-Chinese feeling seemed...
...easily the world's largest arms merchant, with $86 billion in "transfers" since 1950.* America offers, it sometimes seems, a weapon for every need and pocketbook, and keeps developing new products (see SCIENCE page 58). Last year, after processing nearly 14,000 export-license applications from private firms, Washington's Office of Munitions Control approved sales to 136 countries totaling $8.3 billion. (Actual deliveries, of course, lag considerably behind sales.) This represents 46% of total world sales. Included were rifles and mortars to Guatemala and Paraguay, supersonic jet fighters to West Germany and Brazil, Sidewinder air-to-air missiles...
...Canada, with about $100 million in annual exports, is also an important arms merchant. Most of its sales, however, are of U.S.-designed weapons (i.e., military transport and fighter planes), which are shipped to either the U.S. or other NATO states...
...Chinese) to North Viet Nam, North Korea, Pakistan and a few revolutionary movements in Africa. Poland is a major outlet for the Warsaw Pact's surplus tanks. Czechoslovakia, whose famed Bren gun as well as the Skoda Works' howitzers made the country second only to Britain as a weapons merchant in the 1930s, has dropped from the big leagues. It sells some jet trainers to other Communist states and Syria, and mortars to Cuba; normally, however, Prague serves as a front for Moscow in politically sensitive transfers like the 1955 arms sale to Egypt?the first Communist penetration into...
...deal in original sin," says a European arms trader. That somewhat mystical remark typifies the reputation of the arms trade, both within and without its own ranks. Arms salesmen apparently can never quite get over the fact that they are the heirs of Sir Basil Zaharoff, the archetypal death merchant who gave the trade its bad name. Bribing, cheating, lying fluently in eight languages and playing upon nations' fears of their neighbors, Zaharoff-as chief salesman for Britain's Vickers company-amassed a huge fortune by selling weapons to both sides in the Boer War, Balkan conflicts...