Keystone-SDA
Border clashes of rare intensity opposed Thailand and Cambodia on Thursday: Thai fighting planes struck Cambodian military targets and artillery fire attributed to the opposite camp have left at least 9 dead, according to Bangkok.
(Keystone-ATS) The two kingdoms of Southeast Asia have long been tearing themselves off on the layout of their common border, defined during French Indochina, but clashes at this level of violence had not shaken the region for almost fifteen years.
China, which traditionally maintains good relations with the two countries, has urged them to solve their border dispute through dialogue, saying to itself “deeply concerned”, according to a spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Guo Jiakun.
Cambodian strikes killed nine people, including an eight-year-old child, and was 14 injured, said the Thai army, citing strikes in the province of Sisaket (North-East), Northeast (Northeast), and in that of Ubon Rathathani (North-East).
Thailand has deployed six F-16 combat aircraft to strike “two Cambodian military targets on the ground,” said assistant spokesman for the armed forces, Ritcha Suksuwanon. Cambodia did not communicate a balance sheet following these strikes.
The Thai Embassy in Cambodia called its fellow citizens to leave the country “as soon as possible”.
The acting Thai Prime Minister Phumtham Wechayachai said that “the situation required prudent management” and “to act in accordance with international law”. “We will do our best to protect our sovereignty,” he said.
The Cambodian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for its part condemned the “Military Aggression” Thai and Phnom Penh announced that it has downgraded diplomatic relations with its neighbor to the “lower level”.
Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet shared on Facebook a letter he sent to the President of the UN Security Council in which he denounces the “unprofequed, premeditated and deliberate” attacks of Thailand, demanding a “emergency” meeting of the Security Council.
“Emerald triangle”
Bangkok and Phnom Penh have been engaged in a Bras-de-Fer since the death of a Khmer soldier at the end of May, during an exchange of night fire in a disputed area nicknamed the “emerald triangle”.
But the tensions accumulated during weeks of provocations and reprisals, which affected the economy and the fate of many inhabitants of the regions concerned, culminated Thursday morning, after a new exchange of gunshots near old temples disputed, at the level of the Thai province of Surin (northeast) and that Cambodian of Oddar Meanchey (northwest).
The two armies mutually accused themselves of firing first.
The Thai army said that its opponents had pulled first around 8:20 am (03:20 in Switzerland) about 200 meters from the Thai base, after a drone had flown in the disputed area and that six armed Cambodian soldiers had approached a barbed closure.
For his part, the spokesperson for the Cambodian Ministry of Defense, Maly Socheata, accused the Thai army of having “violated the territorial integrity of Cambodia by launching an armed attack on the Cambodian forces”.
“The Cambodian armed forces have exercised their right of self-defense, in full compliance with international law, to repel the Thai incursion,” she said.
“Wars of the past”
On Wednesday, Bangkok recalled his ambassador in place in Phnom Penh and expelled from his territory the Cambodian ambassador, after a Thai soldier lost a leg while walking on a mine on the border.
An investigation by the Thai army made it possible to determine that Cambodia had posed new terrestrial mines on the border, the Thai authorities said.
Cambodia rejected these accusations, and indicated that border areas remain infested with active mines dating from “wars of the past”.
Tensions have led Cambodia to suspend the imports of certain Thai products, and Thailand to restrict trips to the crossing points to the border.
They also indirectly provoked the suspension of Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra, following a scandal caused by the leak, on the Cambodian side, of a telephone call made in Hun Sen, who governed Cambodia for almost forty years.
The most violent modern episode linked to the border dates back to clashes around the Preah Vihear temple between 2008 and 2011, which had left at least 28 dead and tens of thousands of displaced.