A former Thai ambassador to Phnom Penh said it at a Thammasat seminar on 29 August, with academics from four universities. None of them holds a Thai state office over the boundary. One of the five organisers was the publisher launching three of its own books in the room, and one newspaper carried the afternoon.
Thai goods sent into Cambodia now reach a dead end, Cherdkiat Atthakorn, a former Thai ambassador to Phnom Penh, told a seminar in Bangkok on Saturday 29 August. He said business people he met this month gave him the phrase, and he blamed Thailand’s own closure policy.
The exporters and the border-province traders in that account are Thai. Cherdkiat said the word unpatriotic now lands on Thais who name what the conflict costs. He kept that to business and border-trade voices, and he did not say the Thai state had moved against anyone for speaking.
Nobody telling Bangkok this holds a Thai state office over the boundary. Cherdkiat’s embassy in Phnom Penh is behind him, and he now heads the Thai-Cambodian Friendship Association. The academics came from four universities, on Matichon’s list. On the offices that list gives them, no one in the room could change a Thai state position.
Five bodies put the afternoon on: Matichon Publishing House, the magazine Silpa Wattanatham, Matichon Weekly, the Thai-Cambodian Friendship Association and the Faculty of Political Science at Thammasat University, Tha Phrachan. Entry was free, on a notice posted on 21 July.
Matichon Publishing House launched three new books in that room, sold as a set at 1,206 baht against a full price of 1,470, with three more at 20 percent off until 31 August. Two of the three new books are by speakers on the panels, Thibodi Buakamsri and Puangthong Pawakapan. Among the organisers, the speakers and the moderators named in the accounts reached, all are Thai and no Cambodian body or person appears.
Puangthong Pawakapan, of Chulalongkorn University, said the relationship had gone fully military, and she used the Thai word ทหารภิวัฒน์ for it. She dates the turn to Paetongtarn Shinawatra’s time as prime minister and to the release of a recorded telephone call. She attributes that release to the Hun Sen side and says it wrecked Paetongtarn’s legitimacy. She is describing how Bangkok makes its Cambodia policy, not what Cambodia decided.
She puts it on a civilian government too weak to hold the army off. This desk sets a second cause beside it, which her account does not take up: the two states have not settled the legal questions over the boundary.
On the burning of the Thai embassy in Phnom Penh in 2003, she said the fault was Cambodia’s, that Cambodia used nationalist agitation, and that it apologised and agreed to pay for the rebuilding. She said she had blamed Hun Sen a great deal in earlier years.
Her case for reopening the crossings rests on Thai exporters, Thai border residents and Japanese investors. She said plainly that she is not asking anyone to see Cambodian lives.
Cherdkiat described nationalism as the part of the trouble that shows, with more of it packed underneath. He put the use of it on either or both governments, Cambodia’s named among them. He called false information on social media a problem for both peoples and did not assign it to one side.
Pinitbhand Paribatra, a vice rector at Thammasat, set three crossroads in front of the room. Economic power against sovereignty held for security. National security against human security. And whether the public gets a say in where the state goes. From the third he argued for treating the boundary as a technical matter for a negotiating table, and he named no instrument, no commission and no forum.
He also named criminal networks working across the border as a source of both real trouble and useful pretexts, and did not attribute them to Thailand. He pointed as well to an establishing of sovereignty of a kind that had never appeared before, and he set aside whether it was right or wrong in international law. He named no country, and he conceded nothing to any Cambodian legal position.
Asked whether France drew the boundary to cut Thailand out of the temples, Thibodi Buakamsri, of Chulalongkorn University, refused the strong claim.
All of this stands on one carrier. Matichon published five reports and later edited three of them. The Internet Archive held no copy of any of the five when this desk checked on 30 August, so the text that stood before those edits cannot now be read.
The publisher’s own channel, Matichon Book, streamed the whole afternoon, and that recording runs four hours and eight minutes. Its one caption track is machine-made. No organiser has put out a transcript or a programme naming the speakers, and searches in Thai and English on 30 August found no other outlet reporting the afternoon.
A primary record of that room is public and this desk has not watched it. Nor has it approached the Faculty of Political Science, which hosted the seminar, or Matichon, which helped put it on and then wrote it up.