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Dismantling a Dangerous Past Cambodia Grapples with Remnants of War

By Sarah Stuteville March 14, 2006

Siem Reap, CAMBODIA – The landscape is all dust and smoke and heat. In the parched countryside the fields smolder and burn under a brutal sun. March is the height of Cambodia’s dry season and all over the country farmers are clearing and preparing the land for planting rice when the rains come. But here in Chrun, a remote village near the Thai border and a holdout of the Khmer Rouge as late as 1998, the burning land serves another purpose: The farmers hope the flames will detonate the hundreds of thousands of landmines and unexploded ordnance (UXO) that litter their land – before they or their children do.

“This is a dangerous season,” says Aki Ra, a man who has devoted the last 15 years of his life to demining Cambodia. “The farmers are working the land and moving further a field, this is when they are discovering more mines and explosives. They hope that burning the field will also blow up anything, but they don’t know how to do it and it is dangerous for them.”

If anyone knows about the dangers of landmines, it’s Aki Ra. Born in Siem Reap province around 1973, he grew up on war and violence. By the time he was 5, both of his parents had been executed by the Khmer Rouge, and at 10 he was given an AK-47 and became one of the many child soldiers who made up their army.

The Vietnamese Army that liberated Cambodia from the Khmer Rouge reached the northwestern regions much later than the rest of the country, and even then the fighting wasn’t over for Aki Ra, who says that for most of his life he only understood the world as being perpetually at war. As a teenage conscript of the Vietnamese, he did much of the landmine laying in areas he would later commit his life to demining.

Chrun village is one such area. “I lived here as a soldier in 1987,” he says, pointing through the thick underbrush of the Cambodian forest, his quiet voice almost drowned by the screeching of cicadas, “I was 14 and I remember we would have bags on our backs, we could carry sometimes 50, sometimes 100 mines, and we would throw them behind us.” He demonstrates, crouching in the red dust and shuffling backward. “Sometimes the soldiers were so close we couldn’t even bury the mines – we would just put leaves on top and keep going. If we were too slow we would, you know, be shot,” he says as he squints one eye down the barrel of a finger gun and pulls the trigger.

When Aki Ra was here in the mid-'80s, it was an uninhabited swath of Cambodian forest used largely as terrain for war. Twenty years later, the small settlement of Chrun houses 177 extremely poor families who squat this area and hope to create a farming village. But ownership of the land is muddled, and because the endangered timber here catches a hefty price just over the border in Thailand, corrupt army units deployed by the government to protect it see these squatters as a threat to their own illegal logging profits.

Both parties want to push the settlement out of the remote region. Despite this controversy, the farmers are determined to take the land for themselves, and one of the biggest obstacles facing them, they say, is that landmines and UXO are scattered throughout the forest and cause as many as two landmine accidents a month.

Chrun is only one example of how landmines and UXO still wreak havoc on the Cambodian people eight years after total peace was declared in the country. Despite demining campaigns by the United Nations beginning in 1992 and a number of large NGO clearance projects, there are still millions of landmines, booby traps and UXO spread throughout the countryside. These dangerous remnants of war are especially concentrated along the Cambodian-Thai border and can result in as many as three to four accidents or deaths a day countrywide. The majority of today’s landmine victims are children who are sent out to collect firewood and graze livestock and who often play with the mines despite pervasive landmine risk education campaigns.

Poverty and landmine accidents often intersect in this country, which is listed as one of the world’s poorest. Forty percent of Cambodia’s population lives below the poverty line (set at less than 50 cents per day) and 75 supports itself on agriculture while environmental resources rapidly diminish. As a result of this economic desperation, many Cambodians, like the people of Chrun, are trying to cultivate dangerous land known to be mined. Others seek out and attempt to disarm UXO themselves and sell the scrap metal to Thailand.

Aki Ra is hardly the only person involved in de-mining Cambodia. Two well-established NGOs and one government agency, armed with expensive equipment, large staffs, and exhaustive safety procedures, do 33 percent of the country’s de-mining. The nature of their work, while highly organized and targeted for what is referred to as “maximum community impact,” makes it impossible to respond immediately to new landmine discoveries, especially in remote villages like Chrun. The majority of de-mining is done by villagers on the spot, with whatever knowledge they may have.

“Often the people, they discover landmines and they call the NGO, the NGO sends people and they put up a sign saying there are landmines here, and then they don’t come back for months and months,” says Aki Ra, expressing the difference between his work and that of the larger NGOs. “They call me and I go as soon as I can.” It’s true that Aki Ra’s approach is low-tech and immediate. Armed with only a stick, a hatchet, a crude tool he fashioned for unscrewing the mines, and a pair of pliers for disarming them, Aki Ra takes off in his beat-up Toyota. He travels with candy and ramen for villagers and beer and cigarettes for bribes, and can be on-site and de-mining within hours. It often takes months or years for larger NGOs to mobilize a new demining project. Their approach is to destroy mines in situ instead of disarming them. While they argue that this technique is a safer one, avoiding any direct handling of mines or UXO, it also makes the process more expensive and laborious.

Where the large NGOs can have multimillion dollar operating budgets, Aki Ra works from a donation box that collects $20 to $50 a day. He estimates that it costs him $1 for every mine he disarms, and by his calculation he could demine the entire country in five years for less than $200,000.

Aki Ra came to Chrun today not only to de-mine, but to talk with the villagers about training and paying them to do the demining themselves under his tutelage. This is a controversial prospect, as many of the larger NGOs feel it is unsafe to demine without accreditation and argue that the choice of areas to demine must be made through careful analysis of planned post-clearance land use. Cambodian law prohibits the handling or dismantling of UXO and landmines by individuals without proper accreditation.

“You have accidents because the standard operating procedure was not followed,” says Rupert Leighton, country program manager for Mines Advisory Group (MAG). “There is a wrong and a right way to do this … we need to make sure that everyone is doing it as the rulebook is written,” continues Leighton, whose organization succeeds in clearing 4.5 million square meters a year. MAG also trains villagers to demine their own land, but believes it should be done in a standardized and approved manner.

But for Aki Ra, the reality is that people are getting hurt every day because they don’t have the knowledge he does. He is aware of the limitations of the larger NGOs, having worked as a deminer with the U.N., but wants to help people stay safe wherever possible. “They will handle the mines regardless,” he says, referring to the people of Chrun. “They have to – they don’t have a choice. I just want to show them how to do it safely.” In 20 years of handling and disarming mines, he has never had an accident.

Aki Ra's hands-on, man-with-a-plan approach is not limited to de-mining. The Aki Ra Land Mine Action Museum, founded in 1999 on squatted land near the temples of Angkor in Siem Reap, uses photos, statistics, collected landmines and other war memorabilia to raise both landmine awareness and money for Aki Ra's projects. Through tourists’ donations he and his wife, Hourt, raise just enough money to keep his demining going and manage to house 20 adopted landmine victims and their own two children. Occasionally he receives a generous individual donation, which he uses to build and fund rudimentary schools in the villages he's demined.

What Aki Ra does is hard to replicate. He is one man with specific knowledge, drive and talent. Many argue that his willingness to demine any place at any time is short-sighted. Larger NGOs prioritize high-traffic areas and ensure through their research that their work will not inadvertently serve renegades seeking to illegally deforest, or the army looking to set up a new base. Still, Aki Ra says, a mine is a mine, and it shouldn't be in the land anywhere.

The source of Aki Ra’s urgency is painfully visible. The human cost of landmines is evident throughout Cambodia, from one-legged vendors along the chaotic avenues of Phnom Penh to the armless teenagers haunting the ragged alleys of Siem Reap City. There are 27,000 victims of landmines in Siem Reap province alone.

These images, along with his love of demining – so consuming that he has even named his youngest son Mine – have brought Aki Ra to Chrun today. They are the reason why he is now kneeling on the ground in a known minefield, perhaps one he laid himself, intently scratching at the hardened clay earth with a hatchet.

It takes Aki Ra 20 minutes to locate the first mine, lying casually on the forest floor roughly 200 feet from Chrun’s only source of water. It looks like a small, army-green plastic toy, and it's hard to imagine that contained within it is the power to kill or maim. The forest buzzes and chirps as Aki Ra silently prepares his tools.

When ready he deftly picks up the mine, identified as Russian made, turns it over and pries it open. He pulls the detonators out with his pliers, tosses the mine on the ground in front of him and slaps the top jubilantly with an open palm demonstrating that it is safe. The entire process is over in less than a minute.

With the location of the first mine, Aki Ra seems to understand the pattern of how they were laid. The sun-dappled forest floor turns toxic as mine after mine is revealed just feet away, thoroughly camouflaged by leaves, dust and shade. "Many thousands of mines in this area," says Aki Ra, looking up from his work. After dismantling a handful of mines, Aki Ra has to turn back, though he brags that if given a full day he could disarm as many as 100. As he begins packing up in the fading light, the high, soft singing of women washing laundry just paces away rises up into the dusky sky.

Aki Ra’s vision for his country doesn’t end with de-mining. In addition to his villager training program, he also hopes to hire the underemployed and often poverty-stricken soldiers of the area to de-mine as well (a program that is currently mired in unsigned permits and low-level corruption). Aki Ra also eventually plans to petition the government for unused land to start up sustainable and eco-friendly farming villages for all the street people in Siem Reap.

But right now demining takes priority, a goal that is easily communicated in Aki Ra's simple slogan, "I want to make my country safe for my people," or perhaps even more poignantly by the poor villager of Chrun who simply said, "When the mines are cleared we can make a village for the people and then we can all make a living as farmers."

Timeline of Modern Cambodian History Compiled by Alex Stonehill

1954 – King Norodom Sihanouk secures Cambodia's independence from France.

1963 – Sihanouk, attempting to maintain Cambodian neutrality in the Vietnam War, but growing increasingly paranoid about opposition from the Left, compiles a list of enemies pegged for assassination, including Pol Pot and many other future Khmer Rouge leaders. They flee the capital for the mountains of northeastern Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge shift their focus to building revolution amongst the rural peasantry. Their efforts are later inadvertently aided by mismanagement of Cambodia's rice crops by Sihanouk's government, and the indiscriminate devastation of American bombing missions targeting the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Cambodia.

1970 – Prime Minister Lon Nol overthrows Sihanouk in an unexpected coup from the Right. Sihanouk nominally joins forces with the Khmer Rouge to oppose the new government, though Pol Pot remains the true leader. Cambodia is drawn into the Vietnam War, with the North Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge united against Lon Nol and his allies, South Vietnam and the United States.

1973 – The conclusion of the Vietnam War ends Vietnamese involvement in Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge, with its suicidal but unrelenting guerrilla attacks and cooperative organization of villages, is now pitted directly against Lon Nol's forces, which are crippled by his own hapless military leadership. Disengaged from Vietnam, the U.S. briefly turns the full force of its bombing campaigns to Cambodia in support of Lon Nol's army. More than 500,000 tons of U.S. bombs (much of the UXO remaining in the country today) are dropped on Cambodia before the impeachment of President Richard Nixon halts the bombing.

1975 – The Khmer Rouge takes Phnom Penh, evacuates the city, abolishes private property and begins an absolutist program to reorganize Cambodian society by creating a single, uniform class of workers, on the backs of which it believes it can completely modernize the country in a matter of years, in complete isolation from the outside world. The Khmer Rouge's ideology is nominally communist, but is heavily influenced by its leaders' nationalism and long-standing racial animosities in the country. It starts by purging foreign and intellectual elements, but when its ill-conceived policies fail, it reacts with indiscriminate massacres of "disloyal" Cambodians. During this period, Cambodia has the highest mortality rate in recorded human history. More than 1 million people out of a population of 8 million die of starvation and disease, or are executed.

1979 – The Vietnamese invade Cambodia, driving the Khmer Rouge into the northwest and across the border into Thailand. Because of their anti-Vietnamese stance, the U.S., Thailand, China and the United Nations refuse to send aid to the devastated people of Cambodia, instead aiding and rearming the Khmer Rouge. Border skirmishes between the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese army continue for the next decade, including the laying of hundreds of thousands of land mines in the area.

1989 – The Vietnamese, having lost financial support from the crumbling Soviet Union, withdraw from Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge continues attacks from Thailand, retaking large sections of Cambodia, but the U.S. and China finally withdraw their support.

1992 – The United Nations mounts a huge operation to stabilize Cambodia and monitor elections, with moderate success, but little input from within Cambodia.

1997 – Hun Sen, himself a former Khmer Rouge soldier, overthrows his partners in an elected power sharing government and takes over full control. He remains in power today in a nominally democratic parliamentary system mired by corruption.

1998 – Pol Pot dies in a final Khmer Rouge stronghold in northwestern Cambodia. Almost all Khmer Rouge leaders and troops have already defected to the government side or been captured. Many are re-employed by the Cambodian Army. The Khmer Rouge era is over, but Cambodia continues to suffer from this legacy of war, plagued by poverty, lack of infrastructure, upheavals over land rights and corruption.