By Sebastian Strangio

Published in the Phnom Penh Post, August 10, 2010

An Thai woman holds a portrait of Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej during a Yellow Shirt rally in Bangkok. (Photo: AFP)

YESTERDAY, Thai media reported that Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva and nationalist Yellow Shirt leaders had reached a “common position” on the 4.6-square kilometre disputed area adjacent to Preah Vihear temple. In a televised debate with the so-called Thai Patriots Network, a fringe group dominated by the yellow-shirted People’s Alliance for Democracy, Abhisit agreed that the disputed area belonged to Thailand, and that Cambodians had “encroached” on Thai land.

During Sunday’s debate, Veera Somkwamkid, leader of the network, called on the government to revoke the memorandum of understanding on border demarcation that Thailand signed with Cambodia in 2000. A day earlier, The Nation newspaper reported, Abhisit told a rally of Yellow Shirts that he would be willing to trash the MoU and openly considered using “military means” in order to safeguard Thai sovereignty.

At the debate, however, he softened his stance, saying that preserving the MoU was in Thailand’s best interests, and that military force was a “last option”.

The fact that Abhisit eventually backed away from the confrontational stance advocated by the Thai Patriots gives little reason to hope for a solution to the border dispute that has captivated the two countries since July 2008, when the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation listed Preah Vihear as a World Heritage site. Indeed, the Thai leader’s prevarications encapsulate Bangkok’s peculiar bind: how to pursue a rational solution to the border dispute while contending with the demands of the PAD demagogues who swept the government to power in 2008.

Pavin Chachavalpongpun, a fellow at Singapore’s Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, said that after using “irrational nationalism” and mass Yellow Shirt protests to unseat former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and his proxies, the government was experiencing great difficulty putting the yellow genie back in the bottle. As a result, he said, Abhisit has “lost legitimacy to deal with the [temple] issue without any political implication”.

“For Thailand, the danger lies in the fact that the Yellow Shirts, taking the same position adopted by the government, can aggravate the situation,” Pavin said. “How will Abhisit make sure that nationalism can be used at the appropriate dose?”

No end in sight

Following another round of sparring over Preah Vihear at the UNESCO World Heritage Committee meeting in Brazil earlier this month, a solution to the temple dispute appears as remote as it did two years ago. With the Thai government now struggling to appease its own nationalist support base, analysts predict that the temple issue will continue to sour relations between Phnom Penh and Bangkok as long as the Thai crisis continues – that is, for the foreseeable future.

Puangthong Pawakapan, a specialist in Thai-Cambodian relations at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University, said that even a handover of power at next year’s Thai elections could be stymied by continuing Yellow Shirt “misinformation” about the Preah Vihear issue. Given that the temple issue was used by the PAD to force the resignation of former foreign minister Noppadon Pattama in 2008, she said, Thai governments of all complexions will be wary of giving ground. “This implies”, she added, “that even in the next election when the pro-Thaksin party might become a government, they will not dare to be friendly … with Cambodia.”

Read the rest of this entry »

As Cambodia and the United States celebrate six decades of diplomatic ties, the Post looks back at a  relationship that has moved from alliance to alienation and back

By Sebastian Strangio & Neth Pheaktra

Published in the Phnom Penh Post, July 16, 2010

Prince Norodom Sihanouk and his wife Monique fete Jacqueline Kennedy at Chamkarmon Palace during her visit to Cambodia in November 1967. (Photo: Private collection of Ambassador Julio A. Jeldres)

WHEN the United States and Cambodia celebrate six decades of diplomatic ties next week, they will look back on a relationship that has seen its fair share of ups and downs. Launched at the beginning of the cold war in 1950, the relationship has been fraught with ideological passions, experiencing periods of intimacy, violent disagreement and chilly silence.

It remains young: Less than two decades have passed since diplomatic ties were re-established at the end of the cold war, and barely 10 years since the end of the ensuing civil war. For 20 years out of 60, there was little or no relationship at all. Observers and officials from both countries, however, say the current bond – which they describe as built on solid foundations and enduring mutual interests – anticipates a long-term US presence in Cambodia.

Koy Kuong, spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said this week that since the re-establishment of relations in November 1991, the two countries had rebuilt strong political, commercial and military ties. “Our diplomatic relations are developing, and we hope that after the 60th anniversary, Cambodia-USA relations will progress again,” he said.

The administration of US President Barack Obama has identified Southeast Asia as a focal point of a foreign policy that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in a speech last year, described as “neither impulsive nor ideological”. Instead, that policy was geared towards creating “dynamic and productive partnerships that can address both the challenge and the promise of this new century”.

US Ambassador Carol Rodley said last week that since 1950, Phnom Penh and Washington have oscillated between close cooperation and periods in which they “were seriously at odds” with each other. “For some significant amount of time”, she said, “we looked past each other or we saw each other through lenses that confused rather than clarified the picture for both sides.”

Rodley, who first served in Cambodia as US deputy head of mission between 1997 and 2000, said that “dramatic” changes during her first posting, including the end of the decade-long civil war and Cambodia’s entry into ASEAN, had fostered a more lasting relationship. “We’ve come to a more mature relationship and a more mature understanding of each other, which I think is a good thing,” she said.

Past troubles

At the time Ambassador Donald Heath, a career foreign serviceman, presented his credentials to then-King Norodom Sihanouk on July 11, 1950, US policymakers saw Cambodia as both a potential ally and a potential threat. A bastion of Western influence, the country – like the remaining French territories in Indochina – was also seen as a domino teetering on the edge of a red abyss. Sihanouk, who skillfully courted all sides of the growing Indochina conflagration from 1955 until his overthrow 15 years later, was perhaps the prime embodiment of this relationship. In the mid-1960s, he broke off and then restored diplomatic relations with the US as part of his delicate dance between the cold war superpowers.

On March 18, 1970, it became clear, however, that Sihanouk had overplayed his hand. Amid increasing anger over what many viewed as the prince’s tacit approval of Vietcong encroachments into Cambodian territory, he was overthrown by a US-supported general and close adviser, Lon Nol, in a right-wing coup d’etat. For the next five years US-Cambodia relations during the Cold War era reached their high-water mark.

This period of cooperation was premised on a relationship of patronage with the US government, which provided military, economic and political support to the government. But this relationship also came at a steep price. As it poured military and economic aid into the country in a bid to stave off a communist victory, the US also executed a bombing campaign that some historians say aided the Khmer Rouge in their rise from a ragtag jungle insurgency to the country’s iron-fisted rulers.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Defense Services Technological Academy at Pyin U Lwin, home of Burma’s nascent nuclear program. (Photo: DVB)

The Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) reports that the Burmese military government is attempting to acquire nuclear weapons technology as a deterrent against Western military actions. The allegations have been substantiated by Sai Thein Win, a former major in the Burmese army who served as a defence engineer and missile expert.  According to DVB, he worked “in special factories, built to house modern European machining tools, to build prototypes for missile and nuclear activities”. After defecting from the government, he granted DVB a treasure-trove of photographs and documentation of what he believes is Naypyidaw’s attempt to acquire a nuclear capability.

In the 30-page analysis of DVB’s research and Sai Thein Win’s documentation (available here), Robert Kelley, a former Los Alamos weapons scientist, concludes that Burma is “mining uranium, converting it to uranium compounds for reactors and bombs, and is trying to build a reactor and or an enrichment plant that could only be useful for a bomb.  There is no chance that these activities are directed at a reactor to produce electricity in Burma”. He notes that the country is far from having the level of technical expertise to actually detonate a nuke, but the prospect of a nuclear-armed junta should give everybody pause — especially US policymakers who have recently promoted a softly-softly policy of limited engagement with the junta. (It was this that pushed US Senator Jim Webb to cancel his planned visit to the country this month).

North Korea’s invisible hand has also been seen behind the recent Burmese developments. Pyongyang has previously been linked to the construction of underground bunkers and tunnel systems for the Burmese military and has reportedly given support to the junta’s ballistic missile programs. But DVB suggests the relationship may extend beyond mere technical support, arguing that the generals in Naypyidaw are looking to Pyongyang as a model for long-term autarky and isolationism. “Like their model, North Korea, the junta hopes to remain safe from foreign interference by being too dangerous to invade,” the report states. “Nuclear weapons contribute to that immunity.” (Swedish journalist Bertil Lintner has more on the North Korea-Burma axis here).