Anutin Charnvirakul told Thai media on 27 May, on the sidelines of a trade exhibition at Impact Muang Thong Thani, that the 1:200,000-scale Franco-Siamese map Cambodia cites for its border claims no longer counts for his government, and that any party meaning to rely on that scale need not come to the table at all. He told The Nation the older scale “no longer exists” for Thailand, while allowing that his government would accept transparent technical verification of the line.
The scale Anutin set aside is not the term on which the governing instruments turn. The Memorandum of Understanding the two governments signed on 14 June 2000, and which Thailand registered with the United Nations in 2011, commits them in its first article to survey and demarcate the land boundary in accordance with the 1904 Franco-Siamese Convention, the 1907 Treaty and its annexed delimitation Protocol, and the maps that resulted from the Commissions of Delimitation. The article lists those documents and fixes no scale. That framework is still running: under its Joint Boundary Commission the two sides have located most of the 73 colonial-era markers, leaving the contested segments where the present argument sits.
Scale was not what gave the Dangrek sheet its standing in 1962 either. The map Cambodia later attached to its pleadings as the Annex I map came out of the Mixed Commission’s work and placed Prasat Preah Vihear on the Cambodian side of the watershed. Thailand argued before the International Court of Justice that the map carried no binding character. The Court found that the Commission maps had been communicated to the Siamese authorities in 1908, that Siam raised no objection then or for years afterward, and that its silence amounted to acquiescence. When a senior Siamese prince toured the temple in 1930 and was received there by the French Resident with the French flag flying, Siam again said nothing. The map bound Thailand because Siam received it and let it stand, not because of the resolution at which it was drawn.
The 2013 interpretation of that judgment marks how far the map reaches. The Court confined the 1962 ruling to the promontory of Prasat Preah Vihear, found that Phnom Trap lay outside the area then in dispute, and declined to decide whether Phnom Trap was Thai or Cambodian. It held that the good-faith obligation to carry out the judgment “does not permit either party to impose a unilateral solution.” The sentence that shuts the door on a Thai map drawn alone shuts it equally on any attempt to settle the remaining line by the 1:200,000 sheet.
On 31 May the demarcation maps reached the prime minister again from inside the Thai press. Surachart Bamrungsuk, professor emeritus at Chulalongkorn University who has written on the boundary and the Preah Vihear case for four decades, addressed an open letter to Anutin in Matichon Weekly arguing that a boundary forum admits only ratified maps, that the commission maps bind both governments whatever their scale, and that Thailand’s 1:50,000 military sheets cannot found a claim because they carry a disclaimer at the margin, “Boundary representation is not necessarily authoritative.” He treated the finer scale as a false advantage in law, pressed the prime minister to read the treaties as binding the whole eastern frontier rather than as a one-sided colonial loss, and held that rejecting the ratified treaties outright would give Cambodia grounds to return the matter to the International Court of Justice, which in his reading has already ruled against Thailand twice.
Anutin’s position here rests on his own public remarks, and his stated readiness to accept technical verification stands as his answer to the charge that he is refusing the agreed process. The mechanism for that verification already exists in the Joint Boundary Commission the 2000 Memorandum created, bound to the commission maps whatever the scale of either side’s national survey.
What the instruments ask is narrow. They ask which maps the two governments agreed to be bound by, and whether, once those maps were received, either side objected while there was still time. On the Thailand-Cambodia land boundary the second answer was recorded in 1908, and the first was signed in 2000.
