Only 14 years ago this magnificent temple was a place of death. Tensions are high again

The Age

13 hours ago

Though Cambodia had won an International Court of Justice ruling in 1962 declaring the temple complex to be in its sovereign territory, areas immediately surrounding it remained ambiguous, allowing Thailand to move into some of them.
Another ruling by the ICJ in 2013 about the surrounding areas again went in favour of Cambodia, bringing the Preah Vihear Temple disaster to a formal close. Still, close to 200 kilometres of Thai-Cambodia border remain in dispute to this day.
Skip forward along this long continuum of border bad-blood, and it brings us to the extraordinary events of the past five weeks, which reached a high point on Tuesday when Thailand's Constitutional Court suspended Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra.
In short, a border skirmish – the first for some time – broke out on the morning of May 28 in an area known as the Emerald Triangle, near the adjoining territories of Cambodia, Thailand and Laos. Thai troops killed a Cambodian soldier. Governments then traded border closures and ardent declarations of sovereignty.
Seeking to talk it through, Paetongtarn phoned Cambodian strongman Hun Sen, who recorded the conversation and, by his own admission, sent it to about 80 people.
When patriotic Thais heard the contents of that call, which were inevitably leaked to media, they were outraged: their prime minister had both slandered a top Thai army man and took a fawning, deferential tone to old Hun Sen, who is distrusted by Thais – and almost everyone else.
It was too much, and so a group of senators referred her to the court, which will now consider if she is constitutionally fit to resume her duties amid the backdrop of political protests, intrigue and manoeuvring.
The Preah Vihear Temple, a seven-hour drive north from Cambodia's capital Phnom Penh, is about 100 kilometres from the scene of the recent fighting in the Emerald Triangle. While there is no suggestion Thailand has any appetite for trouble at the sacred site, rising tensions have the Cambodians on alert.
Border police and military men, all of them welcoming to us, vastly outnumber visitors here. One of them is Corporal Dy Song Heng, who is stationed on a jungle boardwalk at the base of the temple complex just a few hundred metres from Thailand. He uses binoculars, but Thai roads, buildings and a distant flag are easily visible without them.
'We chased them out in 2008, and they moved to that rock,' he tells us, pointing to a few cars dotting what he claims is a No Man's Land between the borders. 'We don't do anything, even though they are not supposed to be there, because we don't want trouble. But they have to stay there.
'If they try to expand, we will stop them.'
As we walk out of the complex, we jump as someone pokes a rocket launcher uncomfortably close to our legs from the base of a roadside bunker. It is getting late, and the Cambodian soldiers are taking their night positions.