Tens of thousands of Cambodians took to the streets of Phnom Penh today for an official rally to support the government’s actions in its ongoing border dispute with Thailand. According to the AFP news agency, a large crowd assembled and marched to the Independence Monument in central Phnom Penh, waving Cambodian flags and portraits of Prime Minister Hun Manet, his father, former PM Hun Sen, and Queen Mother Norodom Monineath.
The “solidarity march,” intended to show support for the government and Cambodian troops stationed along the border with Thailand, was led by Hun Many, Manet’s younger brother, who is a parliamentarian and deputy prime minister.
The protest march is the first of its kind to be staged in Cambodia since Thai and Cambodian soldiers engaged in a brief firefight at a disputed stretch of the border near the junction with the border of Laos on May 28. The clash resulted in the death of one Cambodian soldier, and prompted both sides to reinforce their military presence along the eastern stretch of their shared border.
It also came a day after the Cambodian government halted the import of fruits and vegetables from Thailand, the latest in a series of tit-for-tat moves that have followed the clash in late May
Sok Veasna, director-general of the General Department of Immigration, told the Phnom Penh Post that the import ban was introduced at 9 a.m. yesterday. He explained that it “applies only to fruit and vegetables, while other goods and human travel remain unaffected,” in the Post’s paraphrase.
The move followed an ultimatum made by former Prime Minister Hun Sen on Monday, after the Thai military restricted hours at 10 border crossings with Cambodia, citing a “threat to Thailand’s sovereignty and security.”
“If Thailand does not fully reopen all its border checkpoints with Cambodia from tomorrow onwards, we will impose bans on Thai fruit and vegetables from entering all our border checkpoints,” Hun Sen told a Senate meeting, as per the Khmer Times. The ban will continue until further notice or until Thailand reverts to the original border opening hours, Veasna said. Over the past two weeks, Cambodia has also banned the screening of Thai films and cut internet connections with Thailand.
The Thai-Cambodian border has been a point of contention between the two neighbors for decades. Set by treaties between Siam and French Indochina in 1904 and 1907, subsequent delimitation efforts left a significant stretch of the border undemarcated. This issue has periodically flared up, often in close connection with domestic politics in both nations. In 2008, Thailand and Cambodia skirmished over Preah Vihear temple, an eleventh-century Angkorian ruin perched on the border between Cambodia’s Preah Vihear province and Thailand’s Sisaket province, after UNESCO added the temple to its World Heritage List.
A major point of contention now concerns Cambodia’s attempts to internationalize the dispute by requesting the involvement of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which ruled in Cambodia’s favor in the dispute over Preah Vihear temple in 1962 and 2013. Earlier this week, Phnom Penh wrote to the ICJ requesting its intervention in resolving claims to four disputed areas, including the region where last month’s clash took place. Thailand has rejected the Cambodian proposal, saying that the disputes should only be resolved via bilateral channels, namely, the Joint Border Commission (JBC) that the two sides established in 2000 to handle border issues. The JBC met on Saturday, albeit inconclusively, and the next meeting will not take place until September.
In any event, ability to negotiate a settlement is complicated by the fact that nationalist constituencies have now been mobilized on both sides of the border, restricting both governments’ room for maneuver.
For Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra’s Pheu Thai-led government, the border dispute couldn’t have come at a worse time. The unwieldy coalition government that Pheu Thai established after the 2023 election is currently under strain due to the continuing legal pressure on former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra (Paetongtarn’s father) and growing frictions between Pheu Thai and the conservative Bhumjaithai Party, an important member of its coalition. In this context, zealous conservative and royalist activists are seizing on the border issue in order to delegitimize the government – much as they did during past phases of Shinawatra rule.
In Cambodia, Hun Manet’s Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) is more secure from direct political challenge, having eliminated most major sources of political opposition. Indeed, whether or not Phnom Penh fomented the border dispute purposefully, as some in Thailand claim, it is clear that the CPP is using the tensions to fortify the CPP’s nationalist credentials – an important consideration in light of its past association with Vietnam, a nation that many Cambodians view with suspicion. It is also a handy distraction from other challenges facing the country, from corruption and economic inequalities to the malignant criminal scam operations that continue to operate across the country.
However, now that the CPP has committed itself to a strong stance on the Thai border issue, it would face political risks of its own if it were seen to capitulate to its stronger neighbor. The exiled opposition figure Sam Rainsy has already accused Hun Manet of being “hesitant to face Thailand directly,” and called on the Cambodian government to include the island of Koh Kood (Koh Tral in Khmer) in its application to the ICJ.