AFP
BANGKOK — Thailand on Thursday admitted using controversial weapons during a border clash with neighbouring Cambodia in February but insisted it did not classify them as cluster munitions.
Responding to accusations from campaigners, the Thai army said it had used Dual Purpose Improved Conventional Munitions (DPICM) during the recent heavy fighting on the shared border.
Thailand's foreign ministry also confirmed that the country had used the weapons but said they were "deployed on the basis of necessity, proportionality and strict code of conduct".
DPICMs burst into bomblets which are designed for both anti-armour and anti-personnel attack, according to GlobalSecurity.org, a US-based public policy organisation focusing on defence intelligence.
They are defined as cluster munitions by the global campaign group Cluster Munition Coalition (CMC), which on Wednesday slammed Thailand's use of the arms.
The group, which campaigns against the bombs, said the Thai-Cambodian conflict was the first confirmed use of cluster munitions anywhere in the world since the Convention on Cluster Munitions became international law.
The convention came into effect in August last year, requiring signatories to stop the use of the weapons, but neither Thailand nor Cambodia have signed the treaty.
CMC said the munitions have "caused large numbers of civilian casualties" when used by the United States in Afghanistan in 2001-2 and Iraq in 2003, as well as by Israel in Lebanon in 2006. Neither Israel or the US are listed as signatories of the convention.
The group detailed its own investigation of Cambodian government claims that the deadly munitions had landed on its territory in four days of unrest between the neighbours in early February.
The Thai ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva had confirmed the use of DPICMs "in self-defence" in a meeting with CMC on Tuesday, CMC said in a statement.
"It's appalling that any country would resort to using cluster munitions after the international community banned them," added CMC director Laura Cheeseman.
CMC said a cluster bomb had killed two Cambodian policemen during the February clashes and warned that thousands of people remained at risk from unexploded bomblets in several villages along the northern border.
Launched from the ground or dropped from the air, cluster bombs split open before impact to scatter multiple bomblets over a wide area. Many fail to explode and can lie hidden for decades.
6 comments:
Those thais devil diabolic tries to kill innocent civilians: women and children in the coming days!!!!!
You ought to be shameful to be born as thai and live in this world!!!
Go to hell, all thais!!!!
Get the nuclear bomb from North Korea and turn Bang Cock to ash!
Hun xen/manet need to make ah siam or thai pay for the damages they caused to khmer people. Don't be stupid!!!
a cluster bomb by any other name is still a cluster bomb, really!
That is the evil word of Thai army chef, are you shame when your country is trying to speak lie with the whole world? If you said that it was necessary to use it, then Cambodia can say and use the atomic bomb against Thailand because it is necessary for our small country to protect itself.
Khmer
In reply to Ms. Rattana Keo about her Topic " Koh Tral must not be forgotten "
The island's history is as old as any Asian mainland. An 1856 record mentions the island: "... King Ang Duong (of Cambodia) apprise Mr. de Montigny, French envoy in visit to Bangkok, through the intermediary of Bishop Miche, his intention to yield Koh Tral to France (cf. “The Second [French] Empire of IndoChina”)". Such a proposition aimed to create a military alliance with France to avoid the threat of Vietnam on Cambodia. The proposal did not receive an answer from the French.
While the war between Annam, France, and Spain was about to begin, Ang Duong sent another letter to Napoleon III to warn him on Cambodian claims on the lower Cochinchina region: the Cambodian king listed provinces and islands, including Koh Tral, under Vietnamese occupation since several years or decades (in the case of Saigon, some 200 years according to this letter). Ang Duong asked the French emperor to not annex any part of these territories because, as he wrote, despite this relatively long Vietnamese occupation, they remain Cambodian lands. In 1867, Phu Quoc's Vietnamese authorities pledge allegiance to French troops just conquering HaTien.
After Cambodia gained independence from France, sovereignty disputes over the island were raised since there was no colonial decision on the island's fate. Dating back to 1939, the Governor-general of French Indochina, Jules Brévié had drawn a line to delimiting the administrative boundaries for islands in the Gulf of Thailand: those north of the line were placed under the Cambodian protectorate; those south of the line were managed by the colony of Cochinchina. Brévié made the point that the decision merely addressed police and administrative task, and that no sovereignty decision had been made. As a result, Phu Quoc remains under Cochinchina administration.
Phu Quoc has been a sleepy historical backwater most of its life. The temple on Cau rock was built in 1937. During the Vietnam War the island housed South Vietnam's largest prisoner camp (40000 in 1973, cf. Ngo Cong Duc, deputy of the Vinh Binh province, quoted in "Le régime de Nguyen Van Thieu à travers l'épreuve", Etude Vietnamienne, 1974, pp. 99–131).
After Mainland China fell under the control of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949, General Huang Chieh led 30,000 Republic of China Army soldiers to Vietnam and they were stationed at Phu Quoc Island. Later, the army moved to Taiwan in June 1953. There is currently a small island in Kaohsiung, Taiwan's Chengcing Lake that was constructed in November 1955 and named Phu Quoc Island in memory of the fleeing Chinese soldiers in 1949.
In 1967, during the Sangkum Reastr Niyum, Norodom Sihanouk aimed to make the border internationally recognized; in particular, in 1967, the North Vietnamese government recognize theses borders. As written in an article from Kambudja magazine in 1968 (and quoted in the Sihanouk website), entitled "border questions", this border definition recognize that Phu Quoc island is in Vietnamese territory, even if Cambodian claims have been made later.
On May 1, 1975, a squad of Khmer Rouge soldiers raided and took Phu Quoc Island, but Vietnam soon recaptured it. This was to be the first of a series of incursions and counter-incursions that would escalate to the Cambodian–Vietnamese War in 1979.
By Dr. Hun Manet,
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