00:00For more on this story, we're joined by David Kamru, who's a senior researcher and adjunct
00:05professor at Sciences Po University.
00:08Thank you very much for being with us on France 24.
00:11If we could start by just having a little reminder of what all is at the heart of this
00:16conflict.
00:17We know there are territorial disputes, but is there more to it than that?
00:21Well, at the heart of the conflict are historic territorial disputes that go back at least
00:28a century.
00:29We don't even agree on the size of the border.
00:33For the Cambodians, it is 817 kilometers.
00:41For the Thais, it's 798 kilometers.
00:45There are at least a quarter of that border that we don't agree upon.
00:50I'm sorry with the boring statistics, but that kind of irredentist, that kind of feeling about
00:57losing territory and getting it back goes back a century, goes back to the colonial period,
01:03goes back to the agreement between France and the Cambodians.
01:07And remember, at the time, the Cambodian king actually asked the French to intervene, to
01:13make Cambodia a protectorate in order to protect it from whom the Thais, from the Siamese, as they were called at the time, who were seen as kind of upstarts by the Cambodians at the time.
01:29So the conflict goes back a very long time.
01:32Now, more immediately, we know how to solve this problem.
01:38It's, we need an independent, it already exists, an ASEAN Independent Bordery Commission, it exists, it had a first meeting, the second meeting occurred some 15 years later.
01:53So there's no political will, but we know how to do it, it's under ASEAN Auspices with independent observers, and we need to remap the border.
02:04But then there's another disagreement, because the Cambodians insist on using the Mekato scale for measuring borders, whereas the Thais insist on something called the Sina Sudal scale, which is more precise, which is more accurate.
02:23So we don't even agree on how the hell we're going to measure the border, okay?
02:27We could agree on that if there was a political will, and there is not the political will.
02:32Why is there not the political will?
02:33Well, on the 12th of December, the Thais will probably, the Thai Prime Minister, who's under, is very fragile, will declare early elections.
02:46So it's in his interest, there should be a kind of, as we said in Australia, a kind of khaki election, an election, you know, about defending the nation and all that kind of stuff.
02:56Whereas the Cambodian Prime Minister, Hun Manet, son of Hun Sen, here's another political interest, which is to deflect all the growing concerns on the scam centers, on these, in front of the ANAC internet, the scam centers in Cambodia, which have enriched him and his family and that of his party.
03:20The revenues and the scam centers in Cambodia actually exceed that of the revenues from the textile industry, which is the most important industry in Cambodia.
03:36And as far as these most recent clashes go, we know that Thailand obviously has a military advantage.
03:45And from the Thais in particular, we've heard on Monday quite a stern tone that they're not going to back down until territorial sovereignty is secured.
03:54What do you see as their strategy here?
03:56And how do you imagine Cambodia will react?
04:00Well, Cambodia has no air force.
04:02Thailand does.
04:03So it's a very nasty situation for the Cambodians.
04:08But both at the same time have an interest for them to be to sell because they're both, their economies are being incredibly adversely affected.
04:16The revenues sent by Cambodians who work in Thailand, all those Cambodians now return.
04:21That's billions of dollars.
04:24OK, the Thais themselves lack.
04:27They have a population replacement rate at the moment, 1.3 million, 1.3 percent.
04:36So they need people.
04:37So they need those Cambodian workers.
04:40And tourists don't want to go to Thailand.
04:41Who want to go to Thailand when there's a war going on?
04:43So it's a pretty stupid kind of war occurring at the moment where both sides are going to lose out economically.
04:50But the passion of nationalism, instrumentalized by self-serving politicians on both sides, is such that I don't see a – perhaps there will be some less demonstrable kind of sign from the Thai side that they're going to stop.
05:11Both sides at the moment have no interest, rather, in stopping this particular conflict.
05:21Well, what then is the way forward?
05:22I mean, we know that we saw a ceasefire earlier this year in July, and then that signed with the Americans in the U.S. in October.
05:30It kind of underlines how fragile any ceasefire could be.
05:34What needs to happen next for that not to happen again?
05:37Well, what needs to happen is for ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, to put their damn money where their mouth is.
05:47You know, they talk about solving the ability to solve interstate conflict in ASEAN, and they've been very successful, to be frank, in doing that for 50 or 60 years.
05:57So there must be an agreement with ASEAN to put in independent observers with technical assistance, perhaps from countries like France and other Western countries, to really map the border and then present a project.
06:12This is the border.
06:14Let's agree on it, and let's go on with life.
06:17You know, because this, I mean, these kind of, these are recurring kind of incidents of border conflicts that have been going on for decades.
06:28And there's a way of putting forward, putting an end to them.
06:31It's just simply a question of political will.
06:35All right, David Camry from Sciences Po University.
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