Thailand and Cambodia agreed to a ceasefire on Thursday after a week of clashes that killed at least 15 people, wounded scores and sent more than 60,000 into evacuation shelters in Southeast Asia’s deadliest border dispute in years.
The agreement caps seven days of sporadic clashes with guns, heavy artillery and small-rocket fire that fanned nationalist passions in both countries, threatened to overshadow elections in Thailand and reinforced doubts over Southeast Asia’s ambitions to form an E.U.-style community by 2015.
Cambodia’s Defence Ministry said both sides agreed to keep troops in the area, hold regular meetings between field commanders and leave their long-festering territorial disputes to a Thai-Cambodian Joint Commission on Demarcation for Land Boundary set up a decade ago.
They also agreed to open a border checkpoint near two disputed 12th-century Hindu temples at the heart of the fighting, although it was unclear when villagers would be allowed back to their remote, ravaged towns.
