PUBLISHED: 4 Jun 2024 at 05: 01
According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Thailand and Malaysia appear to be moving forward with their shared borders under the Anglo-Siamese Treaty of 1909.
The Thai- Indonesian borders stretches for 647 kilometres from Thailand’s Satun state and Malaysia’s Perlis position in the west to Thailand’s Narathiwat state and Kelantan status in Malaysia.
A conference to discuss development being done with border delimitation was recently led by Nathapol Khantahiran, lieutenant permanent secretary for international affairs, at the Tak Bai immigration checkpoint in Narathiwat.
Many government agencies, including the Department of Treaties and Legal Affairs and the Royal Thai Survey Department, attended the event.
The United Kingdom and the Kingdom of Siam signed an agreement called the Bangkok Treaty on March 10, 1909 that was also known as the Anglo-Siamese Treaty.
The present Malaysia-Thailand border was established by the agreement. The region around present Pattani, Narathiwat, southern Songkhla, Satun and Yala remained under Thai command. Jahrzehnte after, the southern insurgency may strike the area.
According to Mr. Nathapol, the second border separation shaft was constructed during King Chulalongkorn the Great’s era. A full of 109 poles were constructed between 1910 and 1911, the first step of the Thai-Malaysian border separation assistance.
He said the second phase began in 1973 and ended in 1985, during which 12, 169 borders separation beams were erected. Since then, he claimed, merely damaged poles have been repaired and missing ones have been replaced in a job agreement that was carried out in 1993, and no fresh border demarcation pole has been built.
Eventually, from 2000 until 2009, both flanks made further progress using the Kolok River as a guide line and defining 1, 550 areas to install new separation poles, he said. Floods eventually resulted in considerable adjustments to the surroundings, including the state of the water’s banks, surveyed between 2000 and 2009, which stalled separation work until late, he said.
Mr. Nathapol stated that a new negotiating team would be formed to resume cooperation with Malaysia and finish the demarcation.
The proposal will be first forwarded to the cabinet for approval, he said.
While both countries have changed their governments over the past few years, during which no demarcation progressed, he said, the work needs to restart and be completed in order to improve border security, reduce transboundary crime, and safeguard the interests of Thai and Malaysian citizens, he said.