No. 42 of 108
July 25, 2025
A border dispute between Cambodia and Thailand enters its second day, with about seventeen killed and 4,000 displaced citizens. “Both sides, Cambodians and Thais, feel resentful of history,” said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, a professor of political science at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. “Thais think that the French took some land from Thailand, gave it to Cambodia. Cambodians think that this is their civilization from a long, long time ago, and ultimately this is their land.” Thailand’s military is three times the size of Cambodia’s.
Few statements more truth than this: “Both sides… feel resentful of history.” So unsatisfactory, so unresolved that which happened in the past, no matter how short or long ago. A win can be pyrrhic if it continues to reverberate through history as righteous on one hand and forcibly extracted on another. More often than not, peoples and countries continue to actively fight over what they were forced to do and what they resent having to continuously defend and justify. For countries to mend, people need to mend. For people to mend, they need to feel and see and hear and believe their combined future depends upon it, will flourish with it, will perish without. And then and only then will the heavy lifting be possible.