(MENAFN- The Journal Of Turkish Weekly) Guards posted along Cambodia's border with Vietnam have been warned against making arbitrary and informal agreements with their counterparts over where the boundary actually is in certain areas.
Tensions between the two countries have been mounting over the past few months, culminating in talks between representatives from both governments - who are part of a bilateral border committee - in Phnom Penh last week.
The Cambodia Daily reported Wednesday that Cambodia's interior minister, Sar Kheng, issued a set of guidelines by which border guards must abide.
These include ensuring that border officials stop renting properties to Vietnamese nationals and changing the frontier where border markers have yet to be placed.
They must also arrest anyone who tried to cross illegally - an issue that the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) has repeatedly sought to highlight.
"There have been some locals, when their friends come to ask for an agreement, in some places they have done it," Kheng was quoted as saying by the Daily.
He underlined that approval had to be sought at a national level, "otherwise it will impact the relationship" between Cambodia and Vietnam.
"Houses and rice fields and farms need to stay as they are. Do not expand houses or clear forests. Stop building infrastructure and buildings that will affect the situation," Kheng added in the Daily report.
Last week, Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen wrote to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon requesting access to original maps, recognised by the UN in 1964, in order to quell the mounting tensions over the demarcation of the border.
The opposition claims the border has been increasingly encroached upon by the Vietnamese.
As is the case with countless countries over time, the current Cambodian territory has expanded and contracted.
The Vietnamese island of Phu Quoc, as it is now known, was once Cambodia's Koh Tral, until it was handed over in the 1980s. The area known to Cambodians as Kampuchea Krom, which was once part of Cambodia, has been a part of southern Vietnam since it began being annexed by the French in the 1800s € only to be made official in 1949.
But smaller, alleged encroachments have enraged villagers on the Cambodian side of the border, and there have been a number of visits to disputed and unmarked areas by opposition politicians over the past few months.
CNRP spokesperson Yim Sovann and lawmaker Mao Monyvann, who has visited the border to highlight encroachment claims, could not be reached Wednesday.
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