I'm writing to cover my impression of the conflict between Thailand and Cambodia. This won't relate to setting the record straight in terms of history, or unpacking all the layers and different relevant perspectives. This covers what I think is happening, related to hearing similar news relatively regularly over the past 17 years while living here (in Bangkok, abroad for parts of that time, but not much of it).
It's an ongoing conflict. The root cause seemed to be that ownership of a temple area was always contested, and never completely clarified by final divisions between the countries back when the colonial era ended. Thailand never was a colony of a foreign empire, but land division changed a bit in relation to neighboring areas that were. When French rule ended, or their colonial oversight did, maps were re-drawn to reflect the modern status of country divisions, and that didn't always relate to as clear a status everywhere as it might. I think the contention over an area between Malaysia and Thailand is slightly different, more about some groups in the South not wanting to be a part of Thailand, with the official border area well-defined and accepted, by most. In this one case it's just about ownership of a small temple area.
I'm not sure how many times open conflict has erupted over this issue, but if memory serves--which is not a given--this may be the third round, or more. It has involved actual fighting before, limited military conflict. I'd know better what serves as a trigger if I followed the news more closely than I do. But the underlying cause seems to be the same: conflict over ownership of a very small area, and an old temple.
In other countries people might apply a different perspective and paradigm about how local land ownership issues work out. In the US you can find clear markers for map lines of all kinds, and people know where they are in relation to these. In some cases main divisions might go right through a town or city, and then it's clearly known where that division lies, often down to a few feet. In rural areas things are different, even in the US, but perhaps all the more so in countries like Thailand.
Some rural groups, not of the Thai majority group background, lack clear citizenship designation, per my understanding, so people could be not officially a citizen of Thailand in spite of being born here, to parents also born here. People can also move between different countries in rural areas, especially indigenous groups, known as hill tribes, through less controlled routes. This was said to be a main cause of Covid entering the country when people passed back and forth from Myanmar.
None of this leads to this conflict making perfect sense, but it can be a normal state of affairs, in an unusual way. It leads on to considering if Thai people have negative feelings towards people from Cambodia (or Myanmar, or anywhere else). Not really, but to a very limited extent perhaps. Thais favor the best interests of Thailand and other Thais, but they seem to accept that people mix in this region. People from Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia often work in Bangkok, I suppose with or without legal rights to do so. Probably more often without that. The borders are generally a bit open to people moving back and forth, accepting this status, building it into policy enforcement.
To be sure this is where things get a bit hazy to me. I'm not sure how formal process works, and how exceptions do. I've known of people working in Thailand from other places, probably most often without the right paperwork, but I can't really draw a parallel in relation to how that is the same or different than migrant farm workers from Mexico working in the US (or from anywhere else).
Then in this one case it's especially odd how Thailand and Cambodia enter the status of officially being at war, when the conflict doesn't seem like one resembling a war (or had; it seems to be officially and in practice generally resolved now). There is no intention of full-blown military engagement, on either side, it doesn't seem. So what is the point? Why start conflict, and what is the desired goal, for both countries? Again this is where my understanding leaves off.
I've visited Cambodia, quite a number of times. The border is quite open to Thais traveling to there, as I'm sure also works in the other direction. The land border has a strange feel to it, versus entering by air, which is just like entering any other country by air. The enforcement practices related to foreigners--people from other countries--coming and going has kept changing over the past 17 years, but then that's a completely different subject.
People in the US ask if I'm worried about the conflict, when it "heats up," if I feel like we are in danger in Bangkok. Not at all. Apparently four people were killed in minor conflict that somehow connected back to that theme, in Bangkok, but in a sense four people dying in a city of a dozen million doesn't feel like a high risk level status. Also we have no connection to this issue, of any kind.
People died at that border area, and that's different. Risk level in the close proximity to that border location was significant, and people died there, civilians. I'm not sure what to make of that. It's a tragedy, but an all-too familiar one for lots of people in other types of conflict zones. People die in the South in Thailand regularly, I think. It's not even an atypical news story, I don't think. It's nothing like in Gaza, in former Palestine, but a limited number of deaths is also a tragedy, even those four. Hundreds of people dying in a different kind of conflict is just more of one.
It might sound like I'm claiming that Thais are familiar with death and tragedy, and ok with it, but really the opposite is more true. They don't have the terrible public shootings here (a couple, and a bombing, but that's it for the country's recent history, that 17 years). It's not at all that "life is cheap." Accidents might kill people for what seem like the wrong reasons from time to time, like a boat sinking, but Thais respond appropriately, with empathy and serious regret, and with varying degrees of preventative resolution. People are less protected from themselves than in the US, restricted from hiking on a dangerous trail, for example, but that's essentially another different subject.
That said I can think of an example that contradicts the last point, and our impressions are made up of these bits of experiences. We went out hiking on a national park trail once and it was required that we be accompanied by a park employed ranger. We learned on the hike that this requirement came from the risk of wild elephant contact, and that a ranger had been killed by an aggressive wild elephant earlier in the year in that area. Such a happening is rare, per my understanding, but male elephants do undergo a radical change of personality at one point in the breeding season, when some hormones are active, and are aggressive and dangerous then. At one point the ranger with us saw elephant sign, and we ran out of that area.
It's probably clear already, but the point is that Thai park policies and restrictions are put in place to protect people while hiking, at times. They could have just informed us of the risk and sent us off, and everything probably would've been fine, but the extra step made for extra protection. There was some limited fee related to this, if I remember, but it would've seem trivial back in the US, since in some contexts under $10 goes a long way. It might seem odd that I'm claiming that people are less protected by regulations and restrictions here, given I've just cited a counter-example. It's that the US is heavily into regulations and restrictions, which aren't always effective, but in some cases these would actually protect people.
Of course I can't project the future of Thailand and Cambodia's ongoing conflict; I can't even fully place what has happened in the past month. But open war seems unlikely. This sort of very limited scale conflict makes no sense at all to me, but then not everything does, especially when foreign culture perspectives and government directions are folded in. What my family members say about perspective on neighboring countries and peoples can be a bit contradictory, but that's also how this works, that people hold varying opinions, and even any one person's full perspective may not be completely consistent.
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