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All party-task force (parliamentary group) should be set up to investigate and verify any alleged land encroachment on the Eastern front if the Cambodian authorities are adamant that such allegations are unfounded or cynically exploited for political capital making or, to create a second Preah Vihear in the East.

Just because there has been official silence from both sides regarding shifting border posts along the eastern border, this does not follow that there has been no instance of actual territorial offences occurring there. Indeed, if one is true to one's patriotic conscience as some figures within the CPP would proclaim themselves to be, one should be encouraged that some of our compatriots have gone to some length to be eyes and ears for our aggrieved farmers on the spot instead of preparing legal measures with which to silence their voice and ostracise their will.

It would be a great comfort to us all if it were to be the case as some of us secretly hope and as Hanoi and PP rhetoric tirelessly reinforces that the two 'fraternal' countries are bound together by mutual regard; that Cambodia's past territorial losses (constituting virtually half of present-day Vietnam)were mere legacies of past diplomacy; that VN has learned the hard way about what it means to be living under the yoke of Chinese and more recently European/American hegemony and that she has truly established her esteem and stature among civilised nations in the 21st century. Alas, this has not been supported by firm 'historical' evidence. If anything, the nation of Vietnam (which according to some writers literally means South-Bound) has long exhausted its course to the South and has begun, particularly, since the end of the 2nd Indochina War, to cast its voracious glance at its Western neighbours instead.

Some observers have viewed the absence of natural barriers along Cambodia's eastern frontier as rendering her ever more vulnerable to a State attuned in the art of piece-meal absorption of foreign domains and making them irreversibly its own. Thus, unlike mountainous Laos or the Dangrek Range on which sat the
sacred Khmer temple of Preah Vihea in the West, there is hardly a dung hill between Wat Phnom and Ho Chi Minh City.

If Cambodians are united before what really stands before them rather than what misguided minds and treacherous propaganda have allowed them to believe, all present and prospective demarcation lines can be redrawn along their due locations without violating either nation's sovereignty or integrity.

Otherwise, those border stakes may one day find themselves erected outside the Royal Palace itself, by which time no amount of 'theatrical stunt' will be enough to remove them.

MP