A fierce war of words keeps Thailand and Cambodia on edge

BBC:

The guns along the forested Thai-Cambodian border have been silent for three weeks now.

But a fierce war of words is still being waged by both countries, as they seek to win international sympathy and shore up public support at home. And a commonly-held view in Thailand is that they are losing.

“The perception is that Cambodia has appeared more agile, more assertive and more media savvy,” said Clare Patchimanon, speaking on the Thai Public Broadcasting System podcast Media Pulse. “Thailand has always been one step behind.”

The century-old border dispute dramatically escalated with a Cambodian rocket barrage into Thailand on the morning of 24 July, followed by Thai air strikes.

Since then an army of Cambodian social media warriors, backed by state-controlled English language media channels, have unleashed a flood of allegations and inflammatory reports, many of which turned out to be false.

They reported that a Thai F16 fighter jet had been shot down, posting images of a plane on fire falling from the sky – it turned out to be from Ukraine. Another unfounded allegation, that Thailand had dropped poison gas, was accompanied by an image of a water bomber dropping pink fire retardant. This was really from a wildfire in California.

Thailand responded with official statements of its own, but often these were just dry presentations of statistics, and they came from multiple sources – the military, local government, health ministry, foreign ministry – which did not always appear to be coordinating with each other.

Bangkok failed to get across its argument that Cambodia, whose rockets marked the first use of artillery and had killed several Thai civilians, was responsible for the escalation.

It is no secret that the elected Thai government, centred on the Pheu Thai party of controversial billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra, has an uneasy relationship with the Thai military.

That was made much worse in June when Hun Sen, the former Cambodian leader and an old friend of Thaksin’s, decided to leak a private phone conversation he had with Thaksin’s daughter, Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra. She had appealed to him to help resolve their differences over the border, and complained that the Thai army general commanding forces there was opposing her.

The leak caused a political uproar in Thailand, prompting the constitutional court to suspend her, and badly weakening the government just as the border crisis escalated.