Starved of Truth

The most haunting image of war is often not its violence but its silence – the silence of a child’s hollow eyes, a mother’s outstretched hand, or a truck loaded with food that never arrives.

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The sudden ceasefire between Thailand and Cambodia is a welcome relief – but it is, at best, a temporary pause in a volatile, deeply rooted border conflict. With over 30 lives lost and nearly 275,000 civilians displaced in under a week, the scale and intensity of the fighting underscored how quickly a dormant territorial grievance can spiral into open war. What began as localized military skirmishes quickly escalated into full-fledged hostilities, involving artillery barrages, drone over-flights and airstrikes. It is a sobering reminder that even in an increasingly interconnected region, 20th-century disputes can still fuel 21st-century crises. At the heart of this renewed conflict lies an unresolved border demarcation that dates back more than a century. The disputed area, rich in nationalist symbolism and strategic value, has often been the flashpoint for periodic clashes. This time, however, the stakes were higher. The use of heavy weaponry by Thai forces and Cambodian retaliatory rocket fire marked a significant military escalation – one that blurred the line between deterrence and aggression. For civilians on both sides of the border, particularly those old enough to remember the Cambodian Civil War, the trauma has been all too familiar. The ceasefire, hastily brokered with the help of a neighboring mediator and spurred on by economic pressure from a global superpower, exposes the uncomfortable truth that peace was not born of mutual understanding but of external compulsion. With both countries heavily reliant on export markets – especially in sectors vulnerable to tariffs – the threat of economic isolation succeeded where diplomacy alone had stalled. The human cost has been staggering. Families have fled ancestral h