The inaugural Decolonizing Southeast Asia Studies Conference at Chiang Mai University in Chiang Mai, Thailand, on July 25 concluded with a timely session on the centuries-old border conflict between Thailand and Cambodia, amid renewed tensions across the region, including in the diaspora. The leaders of both governments signed an immediate and unconditional ceasefire on July 28, 2025.
While the July agreement, later enhanced on Oct. 26, aimed for peace, alleged violations led to continued tensions and sporadic military confrontation along the border provinces, and the information battlefield, especially those echoed across social media.
As mainstream international media gradually shifted their narrative toward the middle of the road, Khmer civilians and their diaspora remained steadfast in their position—peace. Although on a much smaller scale, the patchy antiwar protests for peace in Thailand started to follow suit, even in the face of Thailand’s pro-military/war rallies.
Despite overwhelming rallies by Khmer communities around the globe calling for peace, the centrality of political theater in mainstream media too often overshadows the voices of the masses.
As of Dec. 21, the border conflict had penetrated deeper into Cambodia and escalated in scale, with more than half a million Khmer civilians displaced within Cambodia’s border and nearly half a million civilians displaced within the border of Thailand. Both sides have reported civilian deaths and casualties. In sum, the numbers illuminate the human toll of a political war.
For many Khmer, and arguably more so for the Khmer diaspora who were former refugees in Thailand’s refugee camps, such news opens old, deep wounds. Evidently, for Thai diplomats, the refugee resettlement and repatriation program is hailed as a token of Thailand’s good-neighborly humanitarian efforts; yet, for former Khmer refugees, their experience of the camps encompasses a period of unforgiving conditions.
The Vietnam War, and its spillover into neighboring countries like Laos and Cambodia, is the dominant historical event that the international community recalls when reflecting on U.S. military interventions in mainland Southeast Asia.
If there’s any event linked to the consequences of U.S. imperial sins in the backdrop of the Vietnam War that might come close to securing itself as a household name, it would be the Khmer Rouge genocide.
The Khmer Rouge genocide is often described and even suggested in the name itself, Khmer Rouge genocide, as auto-genocide, as opposed to a consequence of U.S. failed imperial projects in Southeast Asia.
The overriding frame of the Khmer storied 20th century state of affairs limits the timeframe and series of entangled events to the period from 1975 to 1979, namely, the Khmer Rouge regime, and glosses over the start of U.S. bombing in Cambodia from 1965 to 1973, which divided the nation and propelled the Khmer Rouge into power.
By marking 1975 as the start and 1979 as the end of a genocidal epoch, it does not account for the beginning of Operation Menu in 1969 and, more pertinently, the second killing fields experienced by Khmer refugees who sought refuge in Thailand at the start of 1979.
The second killing fields, also known as the Dangrek genocide, occurred in 1979 when the Royal Thai Army forced some 43,000–45,000 Khmer refugees back into Cambodia. Khmer refugees were forced by the Royal Thai Army into buses and driven up the Dangrek mountain ranges. It has been estimated that thousands died there from dehydration and landmines, as noted in the PBS documentary Ghost Mountain, “They gathered together about 42,000 of them, took ’em to this temple on top of a mountain on the border called Preah Vihear, and pushed them down the cliff.”
Amid the precarious fate of Khmer refugees, Thailand benefited economically. To date, the Thai government has not acknowledged the Dangrek genocide. Indeed, as Dr. Khathaleeya Liamdee, an anthropologist of Thailand, mentions in the volume Care in a Time of Humanitarianism, “Various forms of silence operate within Thailand regarding its time as a refugee host country during wartime. Standard education avoids and neglects this particular event in Thailand’s national history… It comes out in ghost stories, in intimate memories, and in photographs, but also in some of their refusal to reengage with the violence caused by the Thai State.”
For Khmer refugees who survived the conditions of refugee camps in Thailand, the abuse they experienced by the Royal Thai Army serves as a cautionary tale.
Although outside observers are inclined to suggest that transnational solidarity for peace is blind nationalism; an inside observer would argue that irrespective of the Khmer diaspora’s political position on Cambodia’s domestic politics, the Khmer diaspora is stupendously proactive in calling for peace at a time when the Royal Thai Army has, intentionally or by default, been directly or indirectly in charge of managing the border conflict.
The ever-changing leadership in the Thai government has repeatedly claimed to be acting in self-defense as the rationale for its bombing of sacred religious sites and civilian infrastructure and the subsequent displacement and death of civilians.
For keen observers, the rationale mirrors Israel’s claims for bombing and invading Gaza, which have resulted in the displacement and the death of thousands of Palestinians and the destruction of civilian infrastructure.
Thailand is a U.S. treaty ally with disproportionate political, economic, social and military advantage over Cambodia, such as the capacity to sign deals for Israel’s Barak MX missile systems, therefore one must ask: What responsibility does the United States have as arguably a historical aggressor and contemporary enabler of regional instability in Southeast Asia? And what are Thailand’s long-term goals for coexisting with Cambodia, and how can that be achieved through peaceful and equitable multilateral cooperation when deeply rooted distrust has persisted from centuries old to as recently as 46 years?
