Two Excellent Articles on Preah Vihear

James Pringle’s new piece in the International Herald Tribune makes some excellent points. Among them, he characterizes the differences between the Thai and Cambodian troops in terms of hardware, attitude, and militancy (you can guess how those play out, I suppose).

The soldiers here are armed with an eclectic mix of weapons. Thais have state-of-the-art American rifles; the Cambodians are using the stuff of past conflicts, especially Chinese-made B40 rocket-launchers from the Vietnam War era. The B40s were unstable then, so what are they like now?

…

The Thai soldiers seem to have an unspoken sense that they are pawns in a political game between the Thai government and its domestic opposition.

The Cambodians are more bitter: Many say that they have been invaded.

Pringle does make at least one factual error: the landmines were not placed in the area during a conflict with “Vietnam,” unless he means the Vietnamese-supported People’s Republic of Kampuchea, which ran the country from 1979-1989. Those landmines were placed by both the remnants of the “Khmer Rouge,” and the PRK during the conflict that re-emerged in the early 1980s.

He also pulls out the canard about “Former Khmer Rouge” shock troops, which I’ve attempted previously to complicate. (See also Bronwyn Sloan’s comments on one of those previous posts, which points out that some of the troops themselves refer to themselves as “Former Khmer Rouge,” a locution which is definitely something that happened long after 1979, and cannot therefore comfortably be directly connected with the “Killing Fields,” (neither, however, can they be comfortably divorced without further information) since they were recruiting throughout the eighties and nineties.

The second great – even better – article is from the redoubtable Awzar Thi (who was just promoted to that adjective from ‘excellent’ this morning), the writer for Rule Of Lords, which focuses primarily on Burma and Thailand. In his (his?) article for UPI Asia Online, titled “Thailand’s Human Rights Chief Must Resign.”

This article follows on directly from the hilarious and deeply benighted declaration from Thailand’s Human Rights Commission, that the inscription of  Preah Vihear temple in the rolls of the World Heritage Commission’s list of World Heritage sites was a ‘blatant violation of human rights.’ I mentioned yesterday that Andrew Walker had already given the smackdown on this one. Walker’s remains the most succinct response I’ve read thus far; but Awzar Thi’s is a wonderful adjunct, exploring in depth why this is so unbelievably crazy and stupid.

But its chairman’s time is well and truly up. Saneh Chamarik’s letter to the United Nations is an alert not to a human rights crisis in Thailand but to one in his own agency. It is an advert for how far off the track he has taken it since September 2006, and a warning of what more may come if he is allowed to remain in the post until a replacement is appointed.

The only thing now is for Saneh to resign. His role as head of the National Human Rights Commission is not as a foreign policy propagandist but to uphold and defend human rights. As that role is now untenable, he must get out.