'A few old men' driving conflict

February 16, 2011
By A. Gaffar Peang-Meth
PACIFIC DAILY NEWS

My e-mail is overflowing with news alerts and reports regarding the recent shooting incidents (Feb. 4-7) between Cambodian and Thai troops involving tanks and a barrage of artillery.

It was reported that at least 8 people have been killed, of whom 5 are Cambodians -- though Bangkok claimed 65 Cambodian soldiers were killed; Phnom Penh claimed 30 Thai losses. Many were wounded (who knows how many, but one can bet more than reported), homes were destroyed and villagers -- more than 10,000 Thais and Cambodians -- on both sides of the border were sent fleeing.

I read and deleted most of the reports in angry frustration. But I saved two.

'Blind obsession'

Thai editor Voranai Vanijaka's "The plague of fanaticism," in the Bangkok Post, told of his encounter with a Thai taxi driver who, like many angry Thais, was ready to go to war. Vanijaka tried "to find the meaning to life" -- as he stared down at the bottomless whiskey bottle at 2 o'clock in the morning in some "god-forsaken nightclub." Then he wrote in his Sunday column about the thoughts that hit him.

He wrote metaphorically about "juveniles quarrelling in a backyard ... bickering children in the playground ... tattletale little punks running to adults (i.e., the United Nations),"and pointing fingers, "You shot first! No, you shot first! ... He's lying! No, he's lying!"

I found I understood Vanijaka well, as he philosophized about what happened when "a few old men" -- Vanijaka mentioned People's Alliance for Democracy leader Maj. Gen. Chamlong Srimuang, Thai Patriot Network leader Chaiwat Sinsuwong and Santi Asoke sect leader Samana Photirak and their Cambodian counterparts -- woke up one morning, looked into the mirror, shocked to realize their benign existences and political irrelevance, and felt the need to justify their reason for living, and then settled for this "irrational, illogical and uncritical zeal for a cause, the extreme and blind obsession, ... it's not nationalism, it's fanaticism. It's stupid."

Vanijaka found the Thais and Cambodians to share two things in common: The first, mentioned above; and the second, they are "rich old men who have the talent for stirring speeches and the willingness to send the young against bullets (rubber or live)."

'High farce'

NBC News correspondent Ian Williams reported from Bangkok: "It's not so much High Noon as High Farce at the Thai-Cambodia border. ... The current border spat would be almost laughable if it were not for the suffering it's inflicting on villagers on both sides of the disputed frontier, thousands of whom have been forced from their homes."

Williams reported that though the Cambodia-Thailand conflict is over ownership of an 11th-century temple -- Preah Vihear in Khmer, Phra Viharn in Thai -- listed as a World Heritage site by the United Nations Economic, Social, and Culture Organization in 2008 over Thai objections -- "in reality it has more to do with the sorry state of Thai politics."

He said, "The spat would probably have remained low key had the issue not been embraced by Thailand's 'yellow-shirt' nationalist movement (the PAD of middle-class denizens and royalist elite, backed by the military, in a country of mostly poor farmers) whose more hard-line members are demanding Thailand take the temple -- and much else -- by force."

Even after the fighting died down, on Feb. 8 yellow-shirt leader Sondhi Limthongkul urged the Thai military to seize Cambodian territories of Battambang, Siemreap, Angkor Wat and Koh Kong, to barter for Preah Vihear. While Cambodia called for international intervention, PAD leaders opposed even bilateral negotiations.

It seems that the Cambodia-Thailand tensions rose after seven Thai nationalists, including a Thai parliamentarian of Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva's Democrat Party, deliberately crossed the border into the disputed area, and were arrested for illegal entry last December.

With two yellow-shirters, Veera Somkwamkid and Ratree Pipatanapaibul, sentenced to lengthy jail terms on spying charges by a Cambodian court, yellow-shirt protesters took to Bangkok streets to denounce the jailing as well as the Vejjajiva administration's impotence in dealing with the border problem with Cambodia.

But Vejjajiva needs the yellow-shirts, the royalist and military elite as elections next year have approached.

Facts unbowed

Many old documents on the temple issue found their way into my e-mail.

Spin events as anyone will, concrete facts stand unbowed that Bangkok had chances but failed to bring the Phra Viharn dispute with Phnom Penh to a mutually beneficial end, and that the June 15, 1962, verdict of the International Court of Justice found the following: A frontier was in fact surveyed and fixed and a map was produced; Bangkok had many opportunities to object to the map until 1958, when Thais and Cambodians met in Bangkok to discuss border problems; Bangkok even filed a map of its own in 1947 with the Franco-Siamese Coalition Commission, showing Preah Vihear to be located in Cambodia; Bangkok accepted the map in question, and Bangkok's subsequent conduct confirmed such acceptance. The court viewed Thailand's May 20, 1950, declaration as that country's acceptance of the court's jurisdiction, and voted 9 to 3 to give sovereignty over Preah Vihear to Cambodia.

A. Gaffar Peang-Meth, Ph.D., is retired from the University of Guam. Contact him at 

peangmeth@yahoo.com.