Cambodia yesterday confirmed that work is almost complete on a naval base Washington fears is intended for Chinese military use, after satellite images showed a major pier had been built.
US officials suspect the Ream base is being converted for use by China, a close ally of Cambodia, as Beijing seeks to buttress its international heft with a network of naval and military outposts.
Cambodia has long denied the base on the Gulf of Thailand is for use by any foreign power — despite Beijing funding the revamp — but the row has been a festering sore in ties with the US for years.
Photo: AP
“It is near completion. We will inaugurate it soon,” Cambodian Ministry of National Defense spokesman Chhum Socheat said.
“We already declared that there is no Chinese military base there — we are just modernizing our military to reach a capable level in order to protect our territorial integrity,” he said.
New satellite images from BlackSky, a US commercial imagery company, show rapid progress in building work at the site over the past two years.
The pictures show a pier 363m in length jutting into the sea, an expert quoted by BlackSky said.
“There is a near-exact similarity between an angled deep-water pier located on the western shore of the Ream base and another military pier at the [Chinese] People’s Liberation Army Support Base in Djibouti,” said the expert, Craig Singleton of the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
Chhum Socheat rejected the claims about the pier being built to berth aircraft carriers.
US fears about the base go back as far as 2019, when the Wall Street Journal reported on a deal allowing Beijing to dock warships at Ream.
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