Thai activists oppose Cambodian PM presence at Mekong Summit in Thailand

PHETCHABURI, April 3 (TNA) - More than 200 Thai nationalist activists Saturday issued a statement opposing the participation of Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen in the Mekong River Commission (MRC) summit at Hua Hin, charging that he is an "enemy of Thailand. .. "

Led by Veera Somkwamkid, the radical nationalist activists said in a statement to be given to the MRC secretariat that they opposed the planned visit by Mr Hun Sen who is scheduled to arrive at Hua Hin in Prachuap Khiri Khan province Saturday evening.

Prime Minister Hun Sen will attend the first two-day MRC summit which opens Sunday.

Charging Mr Hun Sen with being an "enemy of Thailand", the activists denounced the Khmer government leader of having overly close relations with fugitive, ousted former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, interfering in the Thai judicial system as well as violating Thailand's sovereignty by "trying to seize Thailand's territory along the common border as well as those in the Gulf of Thailand" by sharing benefits from oil and natural gas deposits in the Gulf with Mr Thaksin.

The statement, submitted to Chavanont Intarakomalyasut, secretary to Thai foreign affairs minister, further said that the activists do not welcome "the enemy of Thailand who has no honour.".

After reading the statement, Mr Veera charged that Cambodian military units had allegedly intruded into Thai territory by posting boundary markers deep inside this country and he and his colleagues would pull them out as activists would "not lose even an inch of territory to Cambodia.".

Meanwhile, Thai Foreign Affairs Minister Kasit Piromya told journalists that the activists could express their displeasure against the Cambodian government leader as they wished, but that it would not be discussed during the MRC summit.

Mr Kasit said he would find other channel to inform the Phnom Penh government.

Thai Nationalism Heats Up

Monday, September 21, 2009
By PAVIN CHACHAVALPONGPUN
The Irrawady

Thailand has not only been plagued by divisive domestic political turmoil. Its relations with neighboring Cambodia have also deteriorated and intensified, resulting in fatal clashes along their common border.

Competing political factions have incessantly used nationalism to legitimize their political activities. The violent confrontation between Thai nationalists and Cambodian villagers in the past few days could further strain this vulnerable bilateral relationship.

Nationalism in Thailand has become a highly destructive force both in domestic and international politics. From late 2007, in their campaign to topple the governments that emerged from the post-coup elections, the People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD), and some elements of the Democrat Party, claimed to represent the true face of Thai nationalism.

In this, they claimed to stand on the side of righteousness by protecting the nation’s territorial integrity, to rid the people of corrupt politicians, and in their duty to challenge an allegedly predatory neighbor.

Former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and successive pro-Thaksin governments were grouped together with alien foreigners, like Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen, who was regarded as a deranged person. These alien characters were represented as having a single objective: selling the country out and tarnishing the good reputation of Thailand built up by past monarchs.

The conflict over the Preah Vihear Temple, to the PAD, was indeed a conflict between those who are true Thais versus Thaksin suporters. It saw its duty as that of protecting Thailand’s national interests, and the best way to do so was to stir up nationalistic feelings.

At first glance, nationalism seemed to serve the political need of both the PAD and the Democrat Party. Both were unable to unseat Thaksin-backed governments of Samak Sundaravej and Somchai Wongsawat and to uproot Thaksin’s influence in politics. The Preah Vihear Temple issue emerged at the right moment when the PAD and also the military that supported anti-Thaksin sentiment were facing a legitimacy crisis themselves.

But little did they know that in employing the Preah Vihear conflict to eliminate Thaksin, the PAD was also jeopardizing its position in politics, and in particular endangering its representation of Thai nationalism. It played along with the theme of lost territories, falsifying historical facts and portraying Thailand as a vulnerable state perpetually victimized by immoral foreigners.

In this paranoid narrative, Thaksin was helping immoral foreigners to take away the country’s sacred assets and pride. The PAD then adopted certain nationalistic tactics against its opponents, such as condemning them for selling out the country and through its own rhetoric provoking military confrontations with the Cambodians.

The reality is that Preah Vihear Temple belongs to Cambodia, according to the International Court of Justice ruling of 1962. But the loss became an unacceptable political reality because it deals with the national pride that has been deeply ingrained in the mindset of Thais.

The outcome of these political tactics has been destructive. Thai domestic politics has become increasingly polarized. Thailand’s relations with Cambodia have reached a critical point, verging on full-blown war. Who has gained what out of this nationalistic crusade?

As a consequence, the issue of overlapping territories returned to the attention of the Thai public. The spirit of nationhood was high. Thaksin was once again labeled as a Thai who betrayed his motherland.

However, the PAD also became a casualty in the game of nationalism. It opened up a Pandora’s box of bewilderment about Thai self-identity. Was the PAD brand of nationalism a reflection of the Thai way to express love for country?

Didn’t its call for war with Cambodia run against its earlier representations of Thainess: of being a peaceful nation, as enunciated in the words of Thailand’s national anthem?

The PAD might have found nationalism an effective way of deposing of the Thaksin-backed regimes in the past, but the nationalist flame has been fanned and the conflagration has shown the potential to rage out of control.

The latest clashes near the Thai-Cambodian border demonstrated that the PAD is not willing to give up its nationalist tactics.

This is perhaps due to the fact that the PAD recently transformed itself into a legitimate political party—the New Politics Party. It now hopes to exploit the Preah Vihear Temple issue to score political points should elections be called by the current government in the next few months.

It is therefore anticipated that the temple issue will become more intense as Thailand heads into an even more uncertain future.

Dr Pavin Chachavalpongpun is a visiting research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore.

Thai Nationalism

THAILAND/CAMBODIA: Row Over Ancient Temple May Sour ASEAN Spirit

By Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Jul 18 (IPS) - Amornchai Sirisai has been a regular visitor to the Thai-Cambodian border close to where a 10th century Hindu temple sits atop a steep cliff. But it is not tourism that takes the Thai national to the ancient site.

He has been working for two non-governmental organisations (NGOs) engaged in clearing landmines on the Thai side of the border near the temple in the northern Cambodian province of Preah Vihear, where the Khmer Rouge made its last stand before surrendering in 1998.

The area is pockmarked by shell craters and land mines being cleared by the Japan Alliance for Humanitarian Demining Support (JAHDS) and the Mekong Organisation for Mankind (MOM) to make the temple, built by the Khmer kings who ruled Cambodia, more accessible to local and foreign visitors.

But these days it is not the fear of people stepping on landmines that worries the project manager of MOM. The temple has been at the centre of a bitter dispute after Cambodia won international approval this month to recognise Preah Vihear as a World Heritage site. The committee that gave Phnom Penh the nod to list the temple as its own is an affiliate of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO).

by Thursday with hundreds of troops ordered by both countries to maintain vigil near the border. Fuelling this tense environment were hundreds of Thais belonging to an anti-government group who rushed to the spot to chant nationalist slogans, Tension between the two South-east Asian neighbours reached a dangerous leveldeclaring that the Preah Vihear temple belonged to Thailand and had been ‘’stolen’’ by Cambodia.

‘’The situation here is getting bad. It has not been like this before,’’ Amornchai said during a telephone interview from Si Sa Ket, the Thai border province that faces the temple. ‘’Both countries have ordered soldiers near the border. They are facing each other.’’

The growing wave of strident Thai nationalism -- and anti-Cambodian slogans -- has already delivered a sharp blow to the government of Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej.

Foreign Minister Noppadon Pattama was forced to resign after he returned to Bangkok on Jul. 10 following the meeting of the World Heritage committee, which ruled 8-1 in favour of Cambodia getting the ancient temple, dedicated to the Hindu deity Shiva.

Across the border, Prime Minister Hun Sen’s Cambodian People's Party (CPP) has been using the UNESCO approval to list the temple as a World Heritage site to advantage in its campaign for parliamentary elections scheduled for Jul. 27, 2008.

Moderate Thais say nationalists are refusing to accept recent history and facts that strengthen Cambodia’s claims to the temple upheld in 1962 by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague. The Thai government, under a military dictatorship in 1963, accepted the verdict but claimed ownership of a small area of land between the temple and the Thai border which offers the main access route to the historic site.

‘’As a member of the U.N., Thailand had to accept the ruling and hand the temple over to Cambodia. In the decades since, there has been no legal bid to reclaim the site,’’ wrote Supalak Ganjanakhundee in a commentary in Thursday’s edition of ‘The Nation’ newspaper. ‘’In the language of the law, de facto and de jure, the Hindu temple of Preah Vihear belongs to Cambodia.’’

Yet the recent burst of tension at that particular point on the Thai-Cambodian border is not the first. In November 2004 Thai troops were ordered to patrol their side of the border over another disagreement regarding the sliver of no-man’s-land area. And there have been times over the past seven years when locals and foreigners seeking to enter the temple from the Thai side have been denied access by Cambodian officials.

The dispute is seen as a legacy of French colonisation of Indo-China when Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam were under the grip of Paris. Thailand, which was never colonised, remained a buffer between the French colonists, to its east, and the British, to its west and south. The current border that separates Thailand and its two eastern neighbours was drawn up by French officials.

Yet the border that separates Thailand from Cambodia and Laos is dotted with grey areas that have sparked disputes in the past. Towards the end of 1987, Thai and Laotian troops clashed over a territory that Laos claimed was part of its Xaignabouri province, while the Thais claimed the area belonged to its Phitsanulok province. By the time a ceasefire was declared in February 1988, over 1,000 soldiers were killed, most of them Thais.

The current dispute which threatens to sour Thai-Cambodian relations could not have come at a worse time for Bangkok. It is getting ready to take over as the head of the Association of South-east Asian Nations (ASEAN), a 10-member regional bloc of which Thailand and Cambodia are members. The others are Brunei, Burma, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Vietnam.

Last November, ASEAN leaders signed a charter for the regional body aimed at greater integration to create a unified community at the political, economic and social level by 2015. This legally binding document was an attempt to revamp the group’s relevance on the world stage.

ASEAN was created in 1967 to stall the spread of communism in the region and advance free-market policies. But its usefulness began to fade with the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s and the financial crash mid-way in that decade.

Now, a growing wave of nationalism is posing a further challenge to the new chapter on stronger regional unity that ASEAN wants to write. ‘’Bruised nationalism is stimulating feelings of hatred between Thais and Cambodian,’’ says Supalak. ‘’Anti-Cambodian sentiment is growing stronger as Thais -- who consider themselves superior to their south-eastern neighbours -- feel they have lost face (because of the temple).’’