Vietnam, Cambodia to hold border talk

Vietnam, Cambodia to hold border talk

HANOI (Reuter): Vietnam said yesterday it had agreed to
Cambodia's request for a top-level meeting to tackle the two
countries' frontier dispute, but played down reports of
heightened tension on their ill-defined common border.

The Nhan Dan party mouthpiece said Prime Minister Vo Van Kiet
was ready to meet Cambodian co-premier Prince Norodom Ranariddh,
who had asked for talks to be held early this month in Vientiane,
the capital of Laos.

Kiet, apparently playing down the issue, asked Ranariddh if
they could meet in Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh City or somewhere else
in southern Vietnam because he had a busy schedule.

If Ranariddh insisted on Vientiane as a venue, he was ready to
meet him there at a convenient time, Nhan Dan said.

Vietnam has stonewalled various allegations, made by
Ranariddh, of border encroachments and a "full invasion" of three
provinces in southeastern Cambodia.

"Regarding the situation along border areas, as far as we know
there has been no tension recently," a foreign ministry spokesman
told Reuters yesterday.

Ranariddh accused Vietnam in January of moving border markers
hundreds of metres into Cambodia and said a Cambodian policeman
and two Vietnamese farmers had been killed in skirmishes. He said
the Vietnamese had substituted troops for policemen in a bid to
enforce the encroachment.

A week later Vietnamese border commanders countered that
Cambodia was the aggressor.

The Hanoi government has insisted that such disputes should be
settled in a climate of peace and friendship by local to central-
level joint border committees.

Nhan Dan said the two sides had agreed to set up working
groups at an expert level to discuss border demarcation and
measures needed to make frontier areas safe and stable.

It said the Vietnamese side had asked for the first meeting of
these groups to be held in Phnom Penh in 10 days, but was still
awaiting a reply.

Ranariddh's unexpected broadside against Vietnam interrupted a
thaw in relations between the two countries, which fell out in
the years following the fall of Phnom Penh to the xenophobic
Khmer Rouge in 1975 and Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia three
years later.

Several bilateral issues remain to be resolved. These include
the illegal migration in recent years by Vietnamese to Cambodia
seeking better work opportunities, and the future of ethnic
Vietnamese who fled Cambodia in 1993 after massacres blamed on
Khmer Rouge guerrillas.

Vietnam is also increasingly concerned about large-scale
smuggling of consumer goods across the border from Cambodia,
which it sees as a threat to its economy.