Cambodia and Vietnam share resort golf course

Golfers will soon be able to tee off in Cambodia and finish their round in Vietnam following the start of construction on a cross border resort, that officials say will be the first of its kind in Asia.

The US$100 million dollar project will include a resort that will be built between Cambodia's Svay Rieng province and Vietnam's border province of Tay Ninh.

Tran Van Hoa, Professorial fellow at Centre for Strategic Economic Studies at Victoria University, has told Radio Australia's Girish Sawlani that he believes that this kind of development will help to improve on the past 200 years of hostilities that has existed between the two countries.

"Cambodia and Vietnam are very anxious to develop their economy and one aspect of this development is to resume development and I think this development golf course across the border between Vietnam and Cambodia will help to fit in with this national development program," he says.

Concerns have emerged however that the project will progress at the expense of displaced Cambodians.

The Svay Rieng province has long been an area where local Cambodians have been forced to sell their land in the name of national development.

Executive director of the Centre for Social Development, Theary Seng says that Svay Rieng has always been a tumultuous province for Cambodia in light of Vietnamese encroachment and out that one reason why Cambodians continue to be displaced from their land in the border districts is due to the imbalance of power that exists between the two goverments.

"This current Cambodian regime and Cambodian government came to power because it had escaped to Vietnam and then came back with the power of the Vietnamese soldiers when it ended the Khmer Rouge years in 1979. And since then their close ties and indebtedness between this current Cambodian regime and the Vietnamese government have not been severed," she says.