Bangkok - Thailand's embattled Prime Minister Somchai Wongsawat departed Thursday to attend the two-day Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) Summit in Beijing where the soft-spoken leader can look forward to a busy visit. Somchai and his entourage departed at 10:40 am (0340 GMT) to Beijing, which will host the seventh ASEM Summit on Friday and Saturday.
The diminutive Somchai, who has been Thailand's prime minister for only 35 days, will be a key player at ASEM, especially on the sidelines of the summit.
He is scheduled to hold bilateral talks with Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen on the two countries' joint claims to a contested 4.6 square kilometres of land adjacent to the 11th century Preah Vihear temple, the source of a sovereignty dispute for more than five decades between Thailand and its neighbour.
"We are hoping the meeting will create more understanding," said Thai Foreign ministry spokesman Tharit Charungvat. "Already the situation has improved, and we are hoping we can come back to the track we were following all along that this issue should be settled by bilateral talks," said Tharit.
On October 15, Thai and Cambodian troops opened fire on one another in the disputed zone near the temple in a confrontation that reportedly claimed two Cambodian dead and five Thais wounded, one of whom died in hospital earlier this week.
Preah Vihear, a Hindu temple perched on the Dongrak mountain range that vaguely defines the Thai-Cambodian border, has been a source of nationalistic breast-beating on both sides since the late 1950s.
The temple was awarded to Cambodia by the International Court of Justice in the Hague in 1962, although many Thais still dispute the ruling, which was based on a French-drawn border map.
The court failed to rule on where the common border lay in the area surrounding the temple complex, which is still subject to joint claims that turned into a military spat in July this year shortly after temple was named a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.
Somchai will also be tasked to explain to his ASEM partners what the political situation is in Thailand.
Since being named prime minister last month, Somchai has been under constant pressure to resign and dissolve his cabinet by the People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD), a loose collation of conservative groups fanatically opposed to former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra and his political allies.
Somchai is Thaksin's brother-in-law and a senior member of the People Power Power (PPP) that won the most seats in the December 23, 2007, general election on a pro-Thaksin platform and leads the current coalition government.
The PPP is deemed a proxy party for Thaksin, a billionaire former telecommunications tycoon who was toppled by a coup in September, 2006, and currently lives in self-exile in London with his family.
Thailand's ongoing political instability is a worry for the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) which will hold its annual summit in the kingdom in mid-December.
In light of the ongoing unrest in Bangkok, where the PAD has seized Government House - the seat of the executive - and continues to hold protests, the government is mulling moving the ASEAN summit to the northern Thai city Chiang Mai.
"It's a possibility," confirmed Foreign Ministry spokesman Tharit.
