A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE LANDMINE MUSEUM

Aki Ra is the founder of the Cambodia Landmine Museum and National Project Manager for the CLMMRF (NGO). He began his life as a child living in the countryside prior to the Khmer Rouge Revolution.  His mother and father were killed during the Pol Pot regime and he soon found himself living in a Khmer Rouge camp for children. By the age of ten he was given his first rifle and would spend the next two decades at war fighting with each of the various factions. During that time, landmines became his best friend; they protected him, helped him to catch food and even helped to save his life on a number of occasions when the war was at its fiercest.

In 1994, Aki Ra joined UNTAC (United Nations Transitional Authority of Cambodia) and received training as a de-miner. He had already known much about landmines and ordnance having laid hundreds of mines and booby traps as a soldier. When UNTAC transferred security to the Government of Cambodia and ended its mission, he continued to clear mines on his own in communities where he had previously spent fighting. It wasn’t long before Aki Ra began receiving requests from villagers around the country, and he has been working to help clear mines ever since.

Aki Ra purchased a small parcel of land along the river just outside Siem Reap in 1997. He built a series of shacks to store his growing collection of shell casings and decommissioned mines, and built a military-style watchtower to call home. His living quarters were humble and coincidentally resembled a soldiers dwelling.

By 1998, Aki Ra had opened his doors to show his collection to the hundreds of tourists who had come to Siem Reap to visit Angkor Wat. His home quickly evolved to become the Cambodia Land Mine Museum. One of the most compelling aspects of the museum was that it served as a rescue center for a number of landmine amputee children that Aki Ra had brought off Phnom Penh’s streets
or from extremely impoverished rural communities. As the museum grew bigger, so did the number of children that came to live at the museum with Aki Ra and his wife, Hourt.

Soon journalists, filmmakers and TV crews were coming from all over the world to document his work as news spread about the museum. TIME Magazine, CNN, BBC, NTV (Japan), CBC (Canada), have all done feature pieces on Aki Ra’s work. There have been over 75 documentaries and hundreds of international news stories on the land mine museum since 2000.


Cambodia At War:

The Rise of the Khmer Rouge
Cambodia attained full independence from France in 1953. By 1960 Prince Norodom Sihanouk was elected as Cambodia’s head of state. From 1964, the Sihanouk government faced an underground Marxist insurgent movement called the Khmer Rouge who threatened the country’s stability. He was deposed in a right-wing coup in 1970 led by Lt-Gen Lon Nol, whose government pledged to remove foreign communist forces and appealed to the United States, engaged in the war in neighbouring Vietnam, for military aid. The prince left the country and formed a government in exile, which was supported by the Khmer Rouge. In 1972 Lon Nol was elected president of a newly-proclaimed Khmer Republic, but his government's control became limited to a few enclaves.

The Khmer Rouge Revolution
Forces loyal to Prince Sihanouk, comprising mainly of Khmer Rouge fighters, gained control of Phnom Penh in April,1975. Cambodia was renamed Democratic Kampuchea and, under the Khmer Rouge, the country was subjected to a radical attempt at social re-engineering. Towns were evacuated, intellectuals were rounded up and killed and the rest of the population was subjected to forced labour in the countryside. More than a million people died from torture, disease and starvation. In 1977, it was officially acknowledged that the country was being run by the Communist Party of Kampuchea, led by Pol Pot. Prince Sihanouk had been placed under house arrest.

Vietnamese Invasion
After a campaign of cross-border raids by the Khmer Rouge into Vietnam, the Vietnamese army launched an invasion of Cambodia in 1978, capturing Phnom Penh in January,1979. Under Heng Samrin, a People's Revolutionary Council pledged to restore basic freedoms, and the country was renamed again, as the People's Republic of Kampuchea. But the Khmer Rouge remained active, especially in the west of the country, near the Thai border. The Vietnam-backed Phnom Penh government sentenced Pol Pot to death in absentia, saying he was responsible for the deaths of three million people. Vietnam launched offensives against a coalition of anti-Vietnamese resistance groups formed in 1982 by Prince Sihanouk, his son Prince Norodom Ranariddh and former premier Son Sann. These had the backing of the Chinese government. Thousands of Cambodian refugees fled into Thailand.

Peace
A series of subsequent meetings resulted in the withdrawal of Vietnamese forces from Cambodia in 1989. It was agreed to change the name of the country back to Cambodia, introduce a new flag and reintroduce Buddhism as the state religion. But fighting continued between forces of the resistance
coalition, and the Phnom-Penh government. In 1990 the UN Security Council endorsed a framework for a comprehensive peace settlement in Cambodia, with a UN supervised interim government and free elections. Cambodian factions signed the UN peace accord in Paris in October 1991. A United Nations Transitional Authority of Cambodia (UNTAC) began operating in 1992. It was rejected by the Khmer Rouge, who launched attacks on its operations. By 1999 the Khmer Rouge had been defeated and peace was restored. In the jungle of northern Cambodia, Pol Pot was denounced by his former Khmer Rouge comrades in a show trial in July 1997, and sentenced to house arrest for life. He died in April, 1998. Film footage of his cremation was shown around the world.


The Killers Beneath:

A Dark History Of Landmines
“The landmine is eternally prepared to take victims. It is the perfect soldier.”
-Jody Williams, 1997 Nobel peace prize winner & founding coordinator of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines

Background
Antipersonnel mines were first used on a wide scale in World War II. Since then they have been used in many conflicts, including in the Vietnam War, the Korean War, and the first Gulf War. Precursors of the weapon are said to have first been used in the American Civil War in the 1800s. Today, the weapons are still being used in a handful of conflicts and produced in more than a dozen countries.

Antipersonnel mines were initially developed to protect anti-tank mines from being removed by enemy soldiers. They were used defensively, to protect strategic areas such as borders, camps or important bridges and to restrict the movement of enemy forces. A key characteristic of the weapon is that it’s designed to maim rather than kill an enemy soldier. The logic being that more resources are exhausted caring for an injured soldier than on the battlefield. According to military strategy a dead soldier is less expensive than a maimed one.

After a while, antipersonnel landmines began to be deployed on a wider scale, often in internal conflicts where civilians began to be targeted. They were used to terrorize communities, deny access to farming land, and restrict population movement. The practice of marking and mapping minefields was no longer followed strictly. As a result, civilians, peacekeepers, aid workers and soldiers alike had no way of knowing if they entered a minefield. Time and weather have a tendency to shift mines so without clear records clearing up the mess after a conflict became even harder.

Developments
Technological developments saw the production of systems for delivering mines from the air. These were then used in much larger numbers and mapping and marking became almost impossible. Then the so-called “smart” mines were developed. These self-destructing and self–deactivating mines are meant to destroy or deactivate themselves after a designated period of time. However, like "dumb" or long-lived mines, these so-called “smart” varieties are indiscriminate and inhumane weapons when armed. Many fail to self-destruct or self-deactivate and so may remain live indefinitely. These tend to be dropped by air, often in larger numbers than ground delivered mines, and are not fenced, marked or monitored thus posing the same long-term risk to life and limbs as long-lived mines.

Production
In the past, many countries have produced antipersonnel mines, both for their own stocks and to supply others. Cheap and easy to make, it was said that producing one antipersonnel mine costs $1, yet once in the ground it can cost more than $1,000 to find and destroy. Now, at least 38 nations have stopped production and global trade has almost halted completely. Unfortunately, 13 countries continue to produce (or have not foresworn the production of) antipersonnel mines, according to the ICBL’s Landmine Monitor Report of 2005. 9 of the 13 mine producers are in Asia (Burma, China, India, Nepal, North Korea, South Korea, Pakistan, Singapore, and Vietnam), one in
the Middle East (Iran), two in the Americas (Cuba and United States), and one in Europe (Russia). At the same time some armed non-state actors or rebel groups still produce homemade landmines such as improvised explosive devices.