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| Thai residents who fled homes following clashes between Thai and Cambodian soldiers sleep at an evacuation center in Surin province. (Photo: AP) |
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
By ALEX ELLGEE
The Irrawaddy
SURIN, Thailand—While relations between Thailand and its western neighbor, Burma, have seemingly been improving with regard to issues at the Thai-Burmese border, things have taking a turn for the worse on Thailand’s eastern front.
Sitting in a crowded hall at Koke Klang temporary refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border, La Aui Mutumachanan, an 80-year-old woman, recalled the moment that fighting broke out near her village.
“I was sleeping in my bed when it started. It was deafening,” she told The Irrawaddy while folding up the straw mat she has been sleeping on with the rest of her family for the past week. “My family helped me to take cover and the next day we came to this refugee camp.”
Entering its ninth day, the fighting is the worst that the previously sleepy Surin province has ever seen. The recent clashes stem from a demarcation carried out in the 1950s, which awarded the land around 12th-century Ta Moan and Ta Krabey temples to Cambodia. Thailand continues to dispute this.
Tens of thousands of Thai and Cambodian villagers returned on Monday to homes they fled after fierce military clashes flared on the border more than a week ago.
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