President of the Cambodian Senate Hun Sen has called on Cambodian people to stay calm over the issue of Kut Island which he said will be settled through negotiations with Thailand.
He also chastised what he described as an “extremist group” which is inciting protests to demand the Cambodian government to take the case to the International Court of Justice, according to the Khmer Times.
Hun Sen said Cambodia and Thailand will settle their overlapping claims area through negotiations.
“The settlement will continue, but through negotiations,” he said. “We have not yet used all the possibilities of bilateral negotiations.”
Hun Sen also threatened to have lawmakers introduce a law to classify those who he said are using the Kut Island issue to provoke an armed conflict between Cambodia and Thailand as terrorists.
“What is this? What is the act that repeatedly pushes the people not to get any peace […]?” he said of the “extremist group”
According to the Khmer Times, Hun Sen recalled that he and late Thai prime minister Chatichai Choonhavan had negotiated on joint oil drilling at Kut Island but there has been no progress so far.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Hun Manet said yesterday that the Cambodian government has been calm over the issue “because it has political maturity and responsibility to the nation and the people in defending territorial integrity and national sovereignty.”
The Khmer Times said Hun Manet explained that the Cambodian government has been settling the border issue based on an official mechanism, not on the Facebook platform or through the media.
Several groups of Thai people have in the past several weeks come out to demand the government of Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra to scrap the Memorandum of Understanding reached in 2001 between the two countries to serve as the basis for negotiations to settle their overlapping claims in the
Gulf of Thailand.
They fear that the MOU would lead to Kut Island, a tourist island in the Trat province, being conceded to Cambodia.
The Thai government has insisted that the status of the island has never been an issue for negotiations. It said Thailand has had territorial sovereignty over the island since 1907 under the Franco-Siamese Treaty.
