The Cambodia’s government lodged a against opposition leader Sam Rainsy on Friday, by accusing him of publishing and disseminating a fake document of a Vietnam border map on his party’s website. The Sam Rainsy Party on website the Cambodia has lost land to Vietnamese encroachment.

The government attorney Ky Tech filed the complaint with the Phnom Penh Municipality by telling reporters that opposition leader Sam Rainsy could serve 15 years in jail if he is found guilty.

Mr. Rainsy is in self-imposed exile in France before he was sentenced in absentia to two years in prison for uprooting 6 border posts in a Svay Rieng’s rice paddy.

The VOA Khmer quoted Mr. Rainsy as saying that the map on his website, depicting the Cambodia-Vietnam border in 1952, is correct. He added that “the court can sentence me to prison, but Cambodia cannot lose its land.”

Phay Siphan, the Councils of Ministers spokesman, was quoted by the Cambodia Daily as saying that “first of all, Sam Rainsy accused the government of putting the border markers on Cambodian farmer’s land, and then he went to post a map that he falsified.”

The government “should not think about complaints against the opposition leader, because Cambodia is facing a border dispute with Thailand. So the government and the opposition should unite to protect Cambodian sovereignty and the borders with all the neighbors,” Am Sam Ath, head of investigations for the right group Adhoc, quoted by the VOA Khmer as saying.

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