[Editor’s note: The dispute with Thailand over the Preah Vihear temple (and access) gets taken to another level. Lucky for me, doesn’t register as a pixel in Natural Earth due to the scale. Thanks Craig!]
Republished from AFP.
PHNOM PENH — Cambodia has accused Internet giant Google of being “professionally irresponsible” over its map of an ancient temple at the centre of a border dispute with Thailand, a letter seen by AFP Saturday showed.
The Google map “places almost half of the Khmer (Preah Vihear) temple in Thailand and is not an internationally recognised map,” said the letter written by the secretary of state of the Cambodian Council of Ministers, Svay Sitha.
He described the map as “radically misleading”.
“We, therefore, request that you withdraw the already disseminated, very wrong and not internationally recognised map and replace it,” Svay Sitha wrote.
The complaint was made as Cambodia’s Prime Minister Hun Sen was Saturday making his first visit to the 11th century Preah Vihear temple.
Cambodia and Thailand have been at loggerheads over their border for decades. Nationalist tensions spilled over into violence in July 2008, when the Preah Vihear temple was granted UNESCO World Heritage status.
