A Landmine Survivor ’s Story
By Jessica Partnow
When Aki Ra met Chet, he was living on the streets of Phnom Penh, shining shoes to earn money and sniffing glue because a friend had told him it would make him feel full. He’d lost his left leg in a land mine accident 3 years earlier and hadn’t yet gotten the prosthesis he now happily shows off.
Even before losing his leg, Chet’s life was never easy. He was born in a village in Kampong Cham Province, about 75 km north of Phnom Penh. He doesn’t remember what his parents did, but his family was poor enough that he left at about age 10 for Phnom Penh in search of more money for food.
He knows his father died of an unknown illness in 2000. He thinks his mother is still alive, but he hasn’t seen her since 2002.
Chet’s accident came a year after his father’s death, while he was tending cows near his village. He didn’t see the landmine because it was already dark.
An hour after it exploded he walked alone to a hospital, where his left leg was amputated just below the knee. Because he was able to walk to the hospital it’s hard to say whether the injury might have been slight enough to allow him to keep his leg, but amputation is the automatic response in Cambodia, and Chet’s case is just one of the thousands of landmine injuries that have occurred in Cambodia.
Now at 15 or 16 with a barbed wire tattoo and a street kid’s demeanor, his tough guy posturing is belied by his open smile.
Self-Portrait, Chet.
When asked how long he lived on the streets cleaning shoes in Phnom Penh, he says “about ten years.” A quick calculation – his accident happened five years ago, in 2001, and he only went to the city after losing his leg – reveals this timeframe as impossible. When this was pointed out he shrugged and said simply, “it seemed like 10 years.”
Aki Ra met Chet during a trip to Phnom Penh and invited him to live in the safety and shelter of the land mine museum, on the condition that he stop sniffing glue and enroll in school. Chet agreed right away.
Chet is one of 20 children who live with Aki Ra and his wife at the Land Mine Museum, all victims of landmine accidents that either took a limb or left them orphans. Aki Ra sees his taking them in as a chance for them to change their lives, and hopes he can help give them opportunities they might not otherwise have.
“If I can help eight or nine out of every ten children, it’s better than nothing,” he says. But with his limited funds he often has little more to offer them than what he can hunt in the jungle, a hammock in the museum and encouragement to attend school. Still it’s better than life of the street.
Just on the other side of Siem Reap’s Red Light District, affectionately termed “Boom Boom Village,” the museum offers a sanctuary for many village children as well as Aki Ra’s adoptees.
Here, all of the kids get the chance to practice their English and Japanese on the tourists that flock through daily, take language lessons from volunteers, or kick a soccer ball around the dusty makeshift tour bus parking lot across the road.
Chet is now off glue and in school. He is slated to receive one of the first college scholarships Aki Ra’s organization has fundraised for victims of landmines. He says he likes to go to school because Aki Ra tells him it will be good for his future, but his sheepish shrug reveals some ambivalence.
“All I really like to do is draw and make music.”
Click here to listen to Chet’s song, “Beggar’s Life,” which he wrote about his life story. You can also read a translation of the lyrics, and view some of his artwork.
Former soldiers make up many of Cambodia’s 61,328 landmine victims. Photo by Alex Stonehill.
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Click play to listen to the sounds of demining while you read.
Aki Ra will train residents of the remote village of Chrun to
de-mine their own land. Photo By Alex Stonehill.
Dismantling a Dangerous Past
Cambodia Grapples with Remnants of War
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 peasants 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 dangerous purpose. These farmers hope the flames will detonate the hundreds of thousands of landmines and unexploded ordnance (UXO) that litter their land--before one of them or their children does.
“This is a dangerous season,” says Aki Ra, a man who has devoted the last fifteen years of his life to de-mining 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 age of five both of his parents had been executed by the Khmer Rouge, and at ten he was given an AK-47 and became one of the many child soldiers that 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 would do much of the landmine laying in areas he would later commit his life to de-mining.
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 backwards. “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-eighties it was an uninhabited swath of Cambodian forest used largely as terrain for war. Twenty years later the small settlement of Chrun houses 177 families of extremely poor landless peasants 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 these peasants 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 in the area.
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 de-mining campaigns on the part of The UN beginning in ‘92 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% support themselves by 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 in an attempt to feed their families.
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% of the country’s de-mining. The nature of their work, while extremely well organized and targeted for what is referred to as “maximum community impact,” makes it impossible to respond to new landmine discoveries immediately, especially in remote villages like Chrun. The majority of de-mining is done by villagers on the spot, with whatever knowledge they may or may not have.
Unexploded mortar rounds found 100
yards from a Chrun village home.
Photo By Alex Stonehill.
“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 onsite and de-mining within hours. It often takes months or years for larger NGOs to mobilize a new de-mining 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 from $20 to $50 a day. He estimates that it costs him one dollar for every mine he disarms, and by his calculation could de-mine the entire country in a span of five years, for under $200,000 US.
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 de-mining themselves under his tutelage. This is a controversial prospect as many of the larger NGOs feel that it is unsafe to de-mine without accreditation and argue that the choice of areas to de-mine 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 de-mine their own land, but believes that it should be done in a standardized and approved manner.
But for Aki Ra the reality is that people are getting hurt everyday because they don’t have the knowledge that he does. He is aware of the limitations of the larger NGOs, having worked as a de-miner with the UN, 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 twenty 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 de-mining going and manage to house twenty 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 de-mined.
What Aki Ra does is hard to replicate. He is one man with specific knowledge, drive and talent. Many argue that his willingness to de-mine 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 de-mining – 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 twenty minutes to locate the first mine, laying 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 under a minute.
With the location of the first mine, Aki Ra seems to understand the pattern of how they were laid, suddenly 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 a sustainable and eco-friendly farming villages for all the street people in Siem Reap.
But right now de-mining 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 that 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."
Aki Ra demining.
Photo by Alex Stonehill
Despite the violence landmines wreak on civilian populations both during wartime and long after wars are over, The UN Land Mine Ban Treaty has yet to be signed by forty countries, including the US. To learn more about the Land Mine Ban Treaty visit www.icbl.org; to sign a petition encouraging non-signing countries to join the treaty: www.icbl.org/treaty/people
For more information on NGOs de-mining in Cambodia please visit: www.halotrust.org/cambodia.html, www.magclearsmines.org , and www.cmac.org/kh
For additional information on landmines: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_mines
For general information on Cambodia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodia and http://www.commonlanguageproject.net/?page_id=41#Cambodia
For the full story of Aki Ra’s life and work: www.akiramineaction.com
If you wish to make a donation to or volunteer at The Akira Land Mine Museum e-mail: akiramineaction@gmail.com
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 capitol 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- PM 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 their suicidal but unrelenting guerrilla attacks and cooperative organization of villages are 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. Over 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 Nixon halts the bombing.
1975- The Khmer Rouge take Phnom Penh, evacuate the city, abolish private property and begin an absolutist program to reorganize Cambodian society by creating a single, uniform class of peasant workers, on the backs of which they believe they can completely modernize the country in a matter of years, in complete isolation from the outside world. Their ideology is nominally communist, but is heavily influenced by their leaders' nationalism and long- standing racial animosities in the country. They start by purging foreign and intellectual elements, but when their ill-conceived policies fail, they react with indiscriminate massacres of "disloyal" Cambodians. During this period Cambodia has the highest mortality rate in recorded human history. More than a million people out of a population of 8 million die from starvation, disease and execution.
1979- The Vietnamese Communist army invades 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 continue 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.
© 2007 The Common Language Project
