Sebastian Strangio
On the morning of July 24, in circumstances that remain the subject of dispute, fighting erupted between Thai and Cambodian soldiers close to Ta Moan Thom, an eleventh-century Khmer-Hindu temple perched on the border between the two countries. Within hours, the fighting had spread to other parts of the border, where both armies deployed heavy weaponry, including multiple-launch rocket systems, artillery, and tanks. Cambodia fired batteries of Russia-made BM-21 rockets and artillery shells into Thailand while the Thai air force scrambled F-16 jets to bomb Cambodian military targets. As of press time, the conflict had killed more than 30 people, including 13 civilians in Thailand and eight in Cambodia, and more than 200,000 people had been evacuated from border areas.
The outbreak of the conflict, which followed months of growing tensions over the nations’ land and maritime boundaries, has confused many international observers. This hasn’t been helped by the fact that both nations have adopted the position of victim, accusing the other of a campaign of premeditated aggression. Thailand claims that Cambodian soldiers fired the first shots at Ta Moan Thom, while Cambodia’s government asserts that its troops retaliated after an “unprovoked incursion” by Thai forces and “acted strictly within the bounds of self-defense.” Both claim that the other has targeted civilian populations and violated international law. The two governments’ views have been dishearteningly echoed by many media outlets in both countries, as well as (less surprisingly) by Thai and Cambodian netizens, who have deployed to defend their nations’ honor and innocence on the battlefields of social media.
As some observers have noted, the conflict involves much more than the few square kilometers of rugged terrain that are in dispute. Indeed, it is hard to understand why the conflict has broken out, and its timing, without understanding the weight of nationalist sentiments that lie behind it, as well as the ways that these have been exploited and instrumentalized by politicians on both sides of the border.Like so much else, the Thailand-Cambodia border conflict is a vestige of Western colonialism – in particular, of a treaty signed between Siam and French Indo-China in 1904, which set the land border between the two polities. This treaty, which was modified by a subsequent treaty in 1907, charged a Mixed Delimitation Commission, made up of French and Siamese officials, with “setting the new boundaries” within four months of the treaty’s ratification.
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