Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul will have a meeting with US President Donald Trump in Kuala Lumpur on Sunday before a signing ceremony for a ceasefire deal with Cambodia, the government said in a statement.
The agreement the two countries plan to sign will be a ‘declaration’ and not a peace deal, but it will signal that they want to move toward normalising relations, a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Saturday.
The death on Friday of Her Majesty Queen Sirikit The Queen Mother had thrown into doubt the prime minister’s attendance at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) meeting in the Malaysian capital.
Mr Anutin told reporters on Saturday that he would travel on Sunday to Kuala Lumpur for the signing, delaying his trip by one day.
He said the signing would be moved to the morning so he can fly back to Bangkok to attend a ceremony for the Queen Mother in the afternoon.
Trump had been pushing Thailand and Cambodia to sign a peace declaration during his Asia trip, and a spokesman for Mr Anutin said recently that the US president was using his demand for an agreement as a bargaining chip in trade negotiations.
Nikorndej Balankura, the foreign ministry spokesman, said in Malaysia on Saturday that the both the Thai and Cambodian sides were trying to move the signing to noon Sunday, earlier than originally scheduled, to accommodate Mr Anutin.
Mr Nikorndej said the two sides would sign a ‘declaration’, rather than a ‘peace deal’, as it states they are ‘committed to review their relations and work toward the resumption of normalisation and diplomatic relations’.
‘It’s just the beginning, it’s not an end in itself,’ he said, adding that Trump’s support for peace ‘is commendable and we appreciate that’.
The signing of the declaration is expected to be a key feature of Trump’s attendance at the Asean summit. The US president intervened to help secure a fragile ceasefire between the two countries after border tensions erupted into military clashes in July. He threatened at the time to block trade deals with the countries unless they stopped fighting.
Trump said en route to Malaysia that he was travelling to the country because of the role Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim played in helping to halting the fighting.
‘One of the reasons I’m going to Malaysia is they were very, very much involved in the whole thing,’ Trump told reporters on board Air Force One.
‘Thailand and all. I told the leader of Malaysia, who’s a very good man, I said, I think I owe you a trip.’