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.