Prime Minister Hun Manet said Phnom Penh wanted de-escalation and a peaceful resolution to its border conflict with Thailand, after Bangkok this week accused its neighbour of violating a December truce.
The South-East Asian nations’ decades-long border dispute erupted into several rounds of clashes last year, killing dozens of people and displacing more than a million in July and December.
“We are not escalating. We want de-escalation. We want peaceful coexistence,” Hun Manet said in Brussels, in a rare international media interview.
Thailand’s military accused Cambodian forces of firing a grenade round near a Thai patrol on Tuesday, prompting return fire – something Phnom Penh has denied.
Cambodia says Thai forces captured several areas in border provinces and has demanded their withdrawal, while Bangkok insists it has merely reclaimed land that was part of Thailand and had been occupied by Cambodians for years.
Hun Manet declined to say how much land Thai forces had captured, but said they had ventured “well over beyond” what even Bangkok says is the frontier between the two countries.
Asked whether Cambodian forces would fight to regain lost territory, he said: “We always stick to the de-escalation, peaceful solutions.”
The century-old border conflict stems from a dispute over the French colonial-era demarcation of their 800km frontier.
Phnom Penh has asked France for assistance and access to historical documents and maps in a bid to resolve the issue, and called for a joint border commission to resume work on it.
“Whatever the result” of that process, Cambodia was ready to “accept it”, Hun Manet said, adding he hoped “that Thailand accepts the same”.
The 48-year-old, who took over as prime minister from his father Hun Sen in 2023, said he was worried about the current border situation describing it as “not stable” and “fragile”.
The prime minister was in the Belgian and EU capital as part of a trip to shore up diplomatic support that also took him to Washington and Geneva.
In Brussels, he met with European Council chief Antonio Costa and the EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas.
In the United States, he attended the inaugural meeting of President Donald Trump’s Board of Peace, which Cambodia has joined and critics see as an instrument intended to rival the United Nations.
Hun Manet said that while the US leader’s efforts to broker the ceasefire with Thailand played a role in Phnom Penh’s decision to join, Cambodia believed in the new body’s goal of promoting peace and was not simply seeking to “keep president Trump happy”. — AFP
