Thailand’s Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul will sign a peace accord over a border dispute with Cambodia during the Asean summit in Kuala Lumpur on Sunday, in a ceremony to be presided over by US President Donald Trump.
Advertisement
US officials have been pressing both members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to sign the deal, officially called the Declaration on Thai-Cambodian Relations, but dubbed the ‘Kuala Lumpur Accords’ during Trump’s one-day stop in Malaysia.
The American leader is seeking to emboss his credentials as a global peacemaker-in-chief, after sealing a fragile truce between Israel and Hamas and helping to soothe tensions between India and Pakistan.
A brief, bloody border row between Thailand and Cambodia in July left dozens dead on both sides of their contested frontier, one that is based on disputed French colonial-era maps.
Anutin will be in the Malaysian capital to sign the agreement, according to Thai Defence Minister General Nattaphon Narkpanit. Nattaphon’s comment to reporters on Saturday ended days of uncertainty over whether Bangkok and Phnom Penh could put the deadly squabble behind them in time for Trump’s visit.
Trump has claimed full credit for driving the peace deal through, using trade deals and high tariffs as a threat to get the two countries to the negotiating table in August.