Government Has Seven Days To Respond To Questions From Parliamentarians About Evidence of Border Encroachment

Original letter in Khmer available at http://tinyurl.com/yjjagoc
Attached documents available at http://tinyurl.com/yeaoxyf
February 16, 2010
Source: SRP

GOVERNMENT HAS SEVEN DAYS TO RESPOND TO QUESTIONS FROM PARLIAMENTARIANS ABOUT EVIDENCE OF BORDER ENCROACHMENT

According to Article 96 of the Constitution, the Government must respond in writing within seven days to any written question from any National Assembly member.

Today, the National Assembly received a letter – to be immediately forwarded to the Government – from four opposition parliamentarians (Son Chhay, Ke Sovannroth, Tioulong Saumura and Men Sothavarin) asking the following questions to Prime Minister Hun Sen :

1- Are (or were) temporary border posts # 184, 185, 186 and 187 in Samraong commune, Chantrea district, Svay Rieng province, planted on the real border line or within Cambodia’s territory?

2- If those posts were planted on the real border line, why then did the Vietnamese authorities dig out or remove posts # 184, 186 and 187 and take them back to Vietnam only a few days after [National Assembly member] Sam Rainsy had pulled out the nearby post # 185 on October 25, 2009 as shown in photos attached herewith as evidence of the Vietnamese reaction?

3- Could the Government specify the geographic coordinates of those posts?

4- What is the difference, if any, between the geographic coordinates of those posts as specified by Sam Rainsy in documents attached herewith, and those as specified in government files [but so far considered as secret and confidential]?

5- Would the Government allow national and international observers to travel to the spot [Svay Rieng province] to make any needed measurements and to collect the geographic coordinates of those controversial posts with a GPS device, so as they could possibly act as independent witnesses in Sam Rainsy’s ongoing prosecution?

6- What is the Government’s assessment of the mapping techniques used by Sam Rainsy [who was assisted by map engineers and cartographers from several countries] showing in a irrefutable way that all those [so-called border] posts were in fact planted inside Cambodia’s territory, at a distance between 250 m and 500 m from the legal border with Vietnam as delineated on the official 1952 1/100,000 map which the Royal Cambodian Government [under then Prince Norodom Sihanouk] deposited at the United Nations in 1964?

We call on national and international observers to monitor the way the Government abides by Article 96 of the Constitution and to judge how relevant its response, if any, will be in the present context.

SRP Members of Parliament