Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen vowed yesterday to improve the country’s defense capabilities, but insisted there would be no war with Thailand after a deadly firefight erupted on their disputed border.
The two sides have agreed to a joint border patrol aimed at preventing a repeat of Wednesday’s clashes, which killed two Cambodian soldiers near the ancient Preah Vihear temple.
There was no word on when the joint patrols would start.
Hun Sen said that talks remained the best solution to the dispute over land around Preah Vihear, a UN World Heritage site in Cambodian territory and the focus of months of tensions.
“There will be no large-scale armed conflict because the two countries can still be patient,” Hun Sen told reporters after meeting his Cabinet.
At the weekly meeting, ministers held a moment of silence for the Cambodian soldiers who died. Seven Thais were also wounded in the clashes.
“Today our Cabinet, with the pride we received from protecting our territory, will discuss draft laws [to put the] national defense sector on top [of the agenda],” Hun Sen said, without elaborating on specific steps.
While Thailand has a 300,000-strong armed forces and a well-equipped air force, Cambodia’s much smaller military is badly equipped, badly trained and disorganized, a Western military official in Bangkok said.
Many of their Cold War-era weapons misfired during this week’s shooting, soldiers along the border said.
Hun Sen also rejected the help of mediators — a U-turn from Cambodia’s position earlier this year when officials spoke about bringing the land dispute to the UN Security Council.
Meanwhile, Cambodia’s UN-backed genocide court yesterday denied former Khmer Rouge foreign minister Ieng Sary release from jail before he faces trial for war crimes.
Ieng Sary, 82, who appeared at the court wearing a blue shirt buttoned to the collar, had appealed to be let out of detention on the grounds that he was granted a pardon for a 1979 genocide conviction, and that the jail at the court did not have facilities to care for his frail health.
But Judge Prak Kimsan rejected Ieng Sary’s appeal, saying that his previous amnesty did not apply to the UN-backed court.
“Provisional detention is a necessary measure to ensure the security of the charged person, the presence of the charged person at proceedings and to preserve public order,” Prak Kimsan said.
Ieng Sary is one of five senior leaders scheduled to be tried for crimes committed during the Khmer Rouge regime, which killed 1.7 million people by torture, execution, overwork and starvation during its 1975 to 1979 rule.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
RSS