Demarcation

The opposition Sam Rainsy Party is urging the government to halt border-demarcation plans in a Takeo province commune after villagers there said they had lost farmland as a result of Vietnamese “encroachment”. Party spokesman Yim Sovann said the SRP sent a letter to Prime Minister Hun Sen on Thursday requesting that the government suspend planting posts in Borei Cholsa district’s Chey Chok commune. Posts were planted, the letter read, “on a farmer’s rice field ... not on the borderline”. Seventeen families from the area have complained that they lost land, though authorities insisted officials have only surveyed the area. The SRP also said it plans to visit the families. Also Thursday, the Norway-based Cambodian Watchdog Council International accused the Cambodian and Vietnamese governments of colluding “to plant a border post that encroached into Cambodian territory”. But Var Kimhong, head of the government’s border committee, disagreed. “I don’t know these persons, and I do not want to know them,” he added.