Thailand, Cambodia Dispute Status of Border Ceasefire

The Diplomat

4 days ago

Uncertainty surrounds the status of a ceasefire agreed by Thailand and Cambodia yesterday, with the two nations seemingly at odds as to whether their agreement was still in effect.
Yesterday, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet and Thailand's acting Prime Minister Phumtham Wechayachai agreed to an 'immediate and unconditional' ceasefire after more than two hours of talks hosted by Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim in Malaysia. The agreement came into effect at midnight last night.
However, just as world leaders were expressing their relief at the cessation of hostilities, the Thai army alleged this morning that Cambodia had launched attacks in multiple areas after the ceasefire was supposed to take effect, and that Thai soldiers had responded with defensive actions. 'Such actions represent a deliberate violation of the ceasefire and a serious breach of trust,' Maj. Gen. Vithai Laithomya said in a statement quoted by the Associated Press.
Cambodia's government said there had been 'no armed conflict on all front lines' and that the ceasefire continued to hold. A Thai government spokesperson later said that it was gathering evidence of the Cambodian violations and would submit them in due course to Malaysia, the United States, and China, the nations that attended yesterday's meeting in Putrajaya.
As the AP reported from the Thai side of the border, 'it was unclear if fighting was continuing but signs of calm returned in places. Some families displaced by the fighting began returning to their homes.'
The ceasefire agreement was intended to end five days of intense fighting, which began on the morning of July 24, when fighting broke out between Cambodian and Thai soldiers close to Ta Moan Thom, an Angkorian temple close to the border between Thailand's Surin province and Cambodia's Oddar Meanchey province. Clashes then erupted along other parts of the border, involving heavy weaponry, including rockets, artillery, and in the case of the Royal Thai Air Force, F-16 fighter jets. As of yesterday, the fighting had killed at least 34 people and displaced more than 270,000, as per Nikkei Asia.
In a press conference yesterday announcing the agreement, Anwar said that in order to stabilize the situation, military commanders from both sides had agreed to meet at 7 a.m. today and that there will be a meeting of the bilateral General Border Committee Cambodia on August 4. Anwar said that Malaysia, as the current chair of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), 'stands ready to coordinate an observer team to verify and ensure its implementation.'
The two governments also appeared to diverge on the question of whether the scheduled meeting of military commanders would take place as scheduled today. Cambodia's Defense Ministry spokesperson said that military leaders held meetings at 7 a.m. and 10 a.m. this morning, while Thai media reports suggested that the meetings were pushed back to 10 a.m. and then 'postponed indefinitely,' which one report put down to the unavailability of two Cambodian generals.
Both things obviously can't be true, and by the time this article is published, the situation will likely have become clear, for better or worse. But even if the ceasefire holds, the uncertainty points to the dearth of trust and poor lines of communications between the two sides – something that poses serious challenges to the stabilization of the border region.
It also suggests that a conclusive resolution of the long-running border dispute, which has its origins in disagreements over Franco-Siamese border treaties signed in 1904 and 1907, remains an extremely remote prospect. As I noted in a lengthy article yesterday, the dispute touches on deep questions of national identity that have infused contested tracts of border territory with an almost sacred status. In this context, the loss of territory, however insignificant in strategic or economic terms, is something that neither government can countenance if it wants to retain a shred of domestic legitimacy.
Any final resolution of the dispute would require both Thai and Cambodian leaders to restore the mutual trust that has been all but destroyed by the conflict. It would then require them to muster the political will to initiate border demarcation efforts and the political capital to make compromises on core nationalist demands. In the absence of any of these conditions, the two governments may well find that there is more political utility in an unsettled border than in a conclusively demarcated one.