By Thai Newsroom Reporters
THE BHUMJAITHAI-LED government was today (Oct.6) advised against conducting a public referendum on Thai-Cambodian MoUs due to their being considered a very delicate international issue which may be too complicated for most people to understand.
People’s leader Nattapong Ruengpanyawut suggested that the government reconsider the plan to conduct a public referendum for the people nationwide to decide whether the Thai-Cambodian MoUs should be unilaterally terminated because they may constitute undue disadvantage and potential damage to territorial integrity on the Thai side.
Nattapong said such an international issue may be too complicated and delicate to be publicly unveiled or put on debate at the cost of Thailand’s discreet interests. The People’s leader said most people would not readily have adequate understanding of the delicate, complicated international issue unlike diplomats and officials in charge of national security affairs and quoted a recent NIDA poll as saying as much as 70% of all respondents had hardly grasped the issue at all.
Nattapong insisted that the Bhumjaithai-led government not pass the responsibility onto the people to decide on such an international issue which, he said, warrants technicality and experience.
He was apparently responding to a verbal recommendation earlier made by Deputy Prime Minister Borwornsak Uwanno that a public referendum be held for the people to decide whether the Thai-Cambodian MoUs of 2000 and 2001 signed in the times of former prime ministers Chuan Leekpai and Thaksin Shinawatra respectively should be unilaterally scrapped plus one for the planned rewriting of the constitution alongside a general election for constituency-based and party-listed MPs.
The election is anticipated as soon as some time in the upcoming March after Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul has pledged to dissolve the House of Representatives to call a general election in a four-month period after his government has formally delivered their policy statement and set a groundwork for amendment to the current constitution.
According to the deputy prime minister in charge of the government’s legal affairs, there may be four ballots handed out to the people on a polling date including one for the public referendum on the MoUs, one for the amendment to the coup junta-designed charter and those for the nationwide race to parliament.
The Bhumjaithai-attached prime minister has earlier remarked that the bilateral agreements may not need any public referendum as suggested by the deputy prime minister after an ad hoc House committee has concluded a study on the issue and forwarded it to the government and that they might probably be terminated once and for all because, he said, nothing has been concretely put to work since.
The MoUs have been invariably deemed by government critics to render disadvantages to Thailand with national interests and territorial integrity being at stake if ever implemented.
The bilateral agreements had reportedly set groundwork for a joint, undersea natural resources development scheme between the two neighbouring countries whilst raising a bone of contention over maritime territorial integrity around Kood island off the eastern coastal Thai province of Trat.
They had paved way for profit-sharing natural resources development projects quietly pushed by the de facto Pheu Thai boss-turned-inmate Thaksin who had allegedly reached a hush-hush deal with senior Cambodian leader Hun Sen. A gigantic natural gas reserve was believed to remain untapped undersea in the upper part of the Gulf of Thailand.
In the meantime, Thai-Cambodian conflict has culminated in last July’s five-day armed clashes between armed forces of the two neighbouring countries along the disputed border resulting in many fatalities and injuries on both sides and prompted an end of rule by Thaksin’s daughter Paetongtarn Shinawatra who was impeached and deposed by the Constitutional Court as head of a previous Pheu Thai-led government following exposure of a spontaneous cellphone conversation between Hun Sen and herself pertaining to the unresolved border issue.
CAPTIONS:
Top and Front Page: People’s leader Nattapong Ruengpanyawut. Both photos – Thai Rath
Insert: Map showing the upper part of the Gulf of Thailand. Credit – Amarin TV
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