Prime Minister of Cambodia Hun Manet said that Cambodia is not afraid to use force if Thai soldiers violate the country’s sovereignty near a temple on the border between the two nations.
Friday, in a speech at Cambodia Tycoon Association, the Cambodian chief referred to the recent dispute with the Thai nationalists on the temple of TA Moan, which is on the border between the province of Surin in Thailand and the province of Oddchey Oddchey of Cambodia.
“As a government, our priority is to respect peaceful resolution, using the basis of law and negotiation and our diplomacy, international law,” he said in a radio report Free Asia.
“But we will be ready at any time if there is the use of the armed force to invade the Cambodian territory,” he added. “Cambodia reserves the right to defend its sovereignty, using all means, including armed force.”
Your Moan Thom Temple has been a subject of discord since last month, when a group of Cambodian soldiers visited the temple and began to sing the Cambodian national anthem. This prompted the Thai army to send a complaint letter to the Cambodia 4 military region on February 18 for what it described as “inappropriate behavior”. The Thai government says that the temple is on Thai territory, even if the adjacent border has not yet been completely delimited. He said that it allows Cambodians to visit the Temple for worship “provided that they do not engage in any action that could be interpreted as a territorial affirmation,” reported the nation.
Since then, the dispute has become the subject of cry matches between Cambodians and the Thai nationalists on social networks.
The conflict on the temple of your moan appeared due to incomplete border demarcations near the temple, which is perched on the Dangrek escarpment. The border was set by a treaty signed between Siam and French Indochina in March 1907, but it was never entirely delimited and was disputed periodically by the governments of independent Cambodia, Laos and Thailand.
The most explosive dispute between Cambodia and Thailand took place on the Preah Vihear temple, an Angkorian temple from the 12th century at around 140 kilometers east of the temple of your Moan Thom. In 1962, the International Court of Justice judged that the temple belonged to Cambodia, but that did not prevent the site from becoming the deadly information center between 2008 and 2011 – clashes that also spread to your Gloan Thom in April 2011.
Your moaning The Thom Temple has again become a subject of discord in the context of developments in Thai policy – in particular, the efforts of the government led by Pheu Thai to reopen negotiations with Phnom Penh on the area of assertions of overlap of the two nations (OCA) in the Gulf of Thailand. This provoked accusations by Thai nationalists that this could force Thailand to give in Koh Kut, an island that has long been claimed by Cambodian nationalists.
For the moment, an armed confrontation on one or the other dispute seems unlikely. From 2008 to 2011, Thailand was led by a royalist government which was faced with the pressure of its “yellow shirt” nationalist foot pipes to take a hard line on the pre-vihear problem. The same goes for now, and the government of Prime Minister Paetongtarn has remained relatively good with Hun Manet and his father Hun Sen, who remains in many ways the real place of power in Cambodia.
Nevertheless, recent tensions remind us that nationalism remains a powerful force in a large part of Southeast Asia, so that even the search for demarcating waves of good faith opens governments to the accusation that they “sell” the national interest. For this reason, such disputes are not likely not to solve and derive and get out of the political debate in the two countries for an indefinite future.