Thai-Cambodia: The Backstory of an Asian Dispute
Thailand and Cambodia could blame their hostilities on the French. After all, the French drew up the border behind the century-old dispute. But merely blaming colonialism is the lazy way out. It was King Norodom who had invited the French into Cambodia, with the country eventually joining French Indochina in 1887 for protection against the Siamese (Thai) and the Vietnamese. Again, it was Cambodia’s attempt at registering an 11th-century temple on the border as a UNESCO World Heritage Site that was the first escalation of this century.
Thailand and Cambodia can keep denying casting the first stone in the current round. In the last analysis, it’s irrelevant. About 50 people had died in the July flare-up that US President Donald Trump had triumphantly ‘ended’ with the “Kuala Lumpur peace accord” which Bangkok even refused to call a peace accord.
This week’s clashes, involving Thai air strikes which Phnom Penh said used poison gas and Bangkok denied, as well as Cambodian kamikaze drones and rockets, have seen renewed civilian displacement. While geopolitics cannot be ignored— Thailand a longstanding US partner and Cambodia a close Chinese client-cum-ally—it is in many ways an old Asian conflict that only the affected parties can resolve by talking to each other.