Bangkok/Oddar Manchey (Cambodia).- The President of the United States, Donald Trump, has stated that he will call the leaders of Thailand and Cambodia, who have once again clashed on the border, the biggest escalation since July of a historic conflict that now leaves more than a dozen dead and half a million displaced.
“Tomorrow I will have to make a phone call”, Trump said at a political event in the state of Pennsylvania (still being Tuesday in the U.S.), after talking about the new clashes between the Armies of both countries, which began on Sunday and have been worsening until today.
Amid applause from supporters, the president affirmed that he will make calls to the leaders of both countries and will stop a war “between two very powerful countries”, in reference to Thailand and Cambodia, both developing countries and affected by Trump’s protectionist measures.
The territorial conflict between the two nations, which share more than 800 kilometers of a border mapped by France when it occupied what is now Cambodia (then Indochina), affects several Hindu temples that both countries consider a historical part of their nation and emerges sporadically.
Trump boasts of having mediated and put an end -momentary- to the last strong wave of violence last July, when in a few days fifty people died from clashes that both sides accused each other of starting, and which cost the leadership to the then prime minister, Paetongtarn Shinawatra.
While the Republican grandiloquently announced a “Peace Agreement” alongside Cambodian Hun Manet and Shinawatra’s substitute, Anutin Charnvirakul, during a Southeast Asian summit last October in Kuala Lumpur, the vagueness of the agreement and its limited impact on the territorial issues facing the nations already suggested that it would not have a long-term effect.
About two months later, the Armies have clashed again in some of the same border areas as in July, with no clarity as to the trigger and amid mutual accusations of having started the conflict, as both Governments appeal to patriotism while going through credibility crises for different reasons.
Deaths, injuries, and displaced
This Wednesday, the clashes continued, with a balance of at least 13 deaths and more than 100 injured.
In Cambodia, the total number of civilian deaths rose today from seven to nine, with around fifty injured, Information Minister Neth Pheaktra told EFE.
Although Nom Pen does not publish the number of affected military personnel, local media report at least two soldiers dead, a fact not officially confirmed.
In Thailand, the Army confirmed that another of its members died from Cambodian attacks, bringing the total number of deaths in the country to four, all military personnel.
Also, at least 68 people were injured on the Thai side of the border since Sunday, when the clashes began, forcing more than 400,000 citizens to leave their homes in Thailand, and nearly 128,000 in Cambodia.
Touch Run, a 58-year-old retired farmer and soldier, is one of them.
“I don’t know when I will be able to return home,” he told EFE on Wednesday from a temple where he is taking refuge in Oddar Manchey province, which borders Thailand and is part of the area where, since Sunday, battalions from both countries have been clashing.
The man was working in his rice fields, near the border with Thailand, when at dawn on Monday he began to hear the attacks.
“We quickly gathered our belongings and fled. Before the attack, the (Cambodian) authorities had already warned us to be prepared and alert, and that, if something happened, we should retreat to safe areas,” says Touch, who last July had to leave his home due to the border clashes.
On the other side of the divider, in the Thai province of Surin, a Buddhist monk holds in his palm a piece of shrapnel thrown by the impact of a projectile near a temple.
The shrapnel “scattered across the roof (…) At that moment (of the impact) I was sweeping the temple grounds,” recalls the religious man, who assures that the remains also hit some nearby houses.
Sheltered inside a concrete block that serves as a bunker, a Thai villager also retains a fragment of shrapnel after an explosion that occurred on Tuesday morning.
“Fell inside the temple,” he states, while the shots continue nearby.
