Government Seeks New Border Map From France
Cambodia Daily | 25 November 2016
Cambodia and Vietnam plan to ask France to draw up a new version of a
map the countries’ governments have been using to demarcate their
long-disputed border, casting fresh doubts on the work that has been
done with the map currently in use.
Cambodia’s Constitution
demands that the so-called Bonne map, drawn at a scale of 1:100,000, be
used to demarcate the border, a political tinderbox that has landed two
opposition lawmakers lengthy prison sentences in the past few months.
In
a speech last year, Prime Minister Hun Sen acknowledged that the
government was actually demarcating the border with a 1:50,000-scale map
that Cambodia created with Vietnam based on the Bonne map, but using
the more modern Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) method.
Cambodia
now wants France to make its own version of a 1:50,000-scale map—the
same scale as the current UTM map—for the neighbors to use.
The
prime minister announced the decision in a post to his Facebook page on
Wednesday evening after a meeting with his Vietnamese counterpart,
Nguyen Xuan Phuc, in Siem Reap City earlier in the day.
“Regarding
border affairs, the two prime ministers agreed with each other to
prepare a joint letter to France in order to request that experts
transfer [the map] from 1:100,000 to 1:50,000,” the post says.
It
adds that the prime minister assigned Long Visalo, a secretary of state
at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to work with Vietnam on drafting the
request.
The post did not explain why the countries were making the request now, after using their own UTM map for years.
Mr.
Visalo could not be reached. Var Kimhong, who co-chairs the
Cambodia-Vietnam joint border committee and has been heavily involved in
the controversy over the maps, referred questions back to the Foreign
Affairs Ministry. A spokesman for the ministry did not reply to a
request for comment.
The French Embassy in Phnom Penh said it had no comment on the matter.
In
his speech last year, Mr. Hun Sen insisted that its UTM map was
carefully copied from the Bonne map and complied with the Constitution
because it was part of a 2005 supplemental treaty with Vietnam approved
by the National Assembly and signed by the king. But the supplement was
based on a 1985 treaty that many consider illegal because it was signed
during Vietnam’s decadelong occupation of Cambodia.
The CNRP has
often stoked fears that the government is conceding swaths of land along
the border to Vietnam in the shadows of an opaque demarcation process,
accusations to which the government has proven especially sensitive.
Opposition
lawmaker Um Sam An, who called the government’s use of the UTM map
unconstitutional, was convicted of incitement earlier this year and
handed a two-and-a-half-year jail sentence. Hong Sok Hour, an opposition
senator, was sentenced to seven years in prison earlier this month for
claiming to have a treaty showing that the 1980s government wanted to
dissolve the border with Vietnam.
CNRP President Sam Rainsy,
speaking by telephone on Thursday from France, where he is living in
exile, said the government’s request for France’s help was a tacit
admission that the map it had been using was not good enough and liable
to lead to mistakes.
“If you read between the lines, this is a
confession,” he said. “They implicitly recognize that what the
opposition raised…that what the opposition lawmakers raised, Um Sam An
and Hong Sok Hour, that they were right.”
Opposition lawmaker Mao
Monyvann, one of the party’s lead critics of the government’s border
demarcation, agreed that the government’s turn to France for a new map
suggested it recognized the problems pointed out by the CNRP.
“The
1:50,000 one is still controversial, meaning it does not have national
consensus, so they want to take the one kept by the United Nations and
have it transferred by a French technical team,” he said.
“If the transfer is technically correct and can maintain the national benefit, congratulations.”
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