At a Glance
Cambodian Landmine Museum, Siem Reap. Directions: The museum is located 6 kilometers south of Banteay Srey Temple on the main road leading from Siem Reap. It is on the right-hand side of the road if you are travelling north towards the temple. Admission to the museum is a donation of $1.
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The tiny room is filled with bombs, rockets, bullets, and of course, land mines.
“This one is a Vietnamese mine,” says 14-year-old Em Boreath, holding up the shell of a disarmed landmine in his left hand. His right arm, from the shoulder down, is missing.
“Seven years ago I was playing, digging in the woods, when I hit a mortar bomb,” Em says, explaining the accident that took his arm. “The hospital didn’t want to help me because my family had no money.”
These days Em lives at the Cambodian Landmine Museum in Siem Reap along with 20 or so other children, all survivors of landmine accidents. Under the fatherly gaze of Cambodian demining legend Aki Ra, the children, all of them from extremely disadvantaged backgrounds, many of them orphans, receive health care and rehabilitation, a place to live and schooling, and a chance to escape the dangerous prospects of Cambodia’s landmine-strewn countryside.
The Man Behind It All
Considered by many a hero, Aki Ra is an extraordinary product of Cambodia’s brutal past. Born in the early 1970s, his first memories are of slaving in the rice fields under the Khmer Rouge. Like nearly two million others, Aki Ra’s parents both perished at the hands of the communist regime.
At the age of 10, Khmer Rouge soldiers handed Aki Ra his first weapon, an AK-47 as tall as he was, and began teaching him to lay landmines.
Only months later, after a pitched battle with Vietnamese forces near Siem Reap, Aki Ra was captured and taken prisoner. Now a conscript in the Vietnamese army, he was again forced to put mines in the ground, this time fighting against the Khmer Rouge.
When Vietnamese troops left Cambodia in 1989, Aki Ra was conscripted yet once more, this time by the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces, who continued to use his skills in the battle against remaining Khmer Rouge forces.
Aki Ra stayed with the army until the mid-1990s, when the United Nations arrived in Siem Reap. He joined the U.N. demining teams soon after, and for the first time in his life, Aki Ra began removing land mines from Cambodian soil, not laying them.
A Uneasy Peace
Working for the U.N., Aki Ra learned to use metal detectors and other tools of the demining trade, as well as English and Japanese. But by the late 1990s, with the Khmer Rouge defeated and a shaky peace finally taking hold, the U.N. also left Cambodia.
Undeterred, Aki Ra continued to pull landmines from the playgrounds and farmlands surrounding his home, often using makeshift equipment and foregoing expensive safety gear he could not afford.
In 1998, with a growing collection of landmines and other unexploded ordinance, Aki Ra opened the Cambodian Landmine Museum in Siem Reap. He wanted the world to know about the horrors of Cambodia’s genocide, and the dirty remnants of war that continued to haunt his homeland.
The Cambodian government, however, wasn’t nearly so keen.
The government questioned the safety of do-it-yourself demining and openly feared that Aki Ra might injure himself or worse. The growing stockpile of weapons quickly filling every available inch of Aki Ra’s house only added to the government’s unease.
So too did the commercial consequences. The government had its own war museum in Siem Reap, and in those early days, the number of tourists visiting Angkor Wat numbered in the low thousands, not the millions counted today. As a result, Aki Ra and the government were often at odds.
Over the years Aki Ra has at times tried to get right with the government, applying for this or that permit or license, never to much success. The government, it always seemed, had little use or interest for the lone deminer.
The New Cambodian Landmine Museum
In March, Aki Ra officially gave up his wildcat demining days and came in to the government fold. He started an NGO, the Cambodia Landmine Museum and Relief Fund, which overseas the museum’s orphanage and other humanitarian efforts.
The new Cambodian Landmine Museum opened its doors on April 21, and several prominent government officials and diplomats attended the grand opening party.
But Aki Ra’s work is far from done. Stuart Cochlin, a volunteer architect, is helping Aki Ra expand the new center. “The museum is already opened, but we are still finishing the rest of the complex,” says Cochlin. “There will be a school, a clinic, dormitories, and a shower block for the kids. There will be a house for Aki Ra and his family, and dormitories for the volunteer teachers.”
Currently, the nearest primary school is seven kilometers away, the high school even further. Seven kilometers is a long distance for anyone to walk, but it’s particularly difficult for a child who is missing a leg.
The creation of the Relief Fund also officially separates Aki Ra’s demining activities from the museum’s humanitarian work.
“This is a real, legal NGO, with transparency and proper licensing and papers,” explains Cochlin. “Now that we have the NGO, all of Aki Ra’s demining efforts are his private affair, outside of the NGO. We have nothing to do with that.”
As for Aki Ra’s obsession for clearing his country of landmines, the government now appears eager to have his skills and dedication, and it is likely that Aki Ra will once again join the Cambodian armed forces, this time as the country’s chief demining technician.