Myanmar: An Unexploded Past
Insight Myanmar
Aki Ra spent his childhood learning how to plant landmines and much of his adult life trying to remove what war left behind, reports the Insight Myanmar Podcast. Forced into the Khmer Rouge as a boy of about ten, he later fought alongside Vietnamese forces, continuing to lay mines even after changing sides. After the fighting receded, the same knowledge that had made him useful as a soldier became the basis of another vocation: clearing farmland, teaching villagers how to recognize explosives, and building a museum around the weapons he recovered. “I want to change from bad to be good,” he says. The reversal is simple in his telling, but the work has lasted more than three decades.
As a child soldier in 1980, Aki Ra had little framework for judging what was happening around him. “I didn’t understand what’s wrong, what’s right, what happened,” he recalls. The Khmer Rouge trained boys and girls to handle weapons, lay and defuse mines, construct booby traps, survive alone in the jungle, and find food and water. Military life also offered things civilian life often did not: food, authority, and a measure of security. After Vietnamese troops captured him during fighting near Siem Reap, tied his hands and feet, and held him for about a week, he told them what they needed to hear in order to survive. He joined their forces, hunted for food, and resumed mine warfare. “At that time, I liked landmine.”
Mines served a practical military purpose. Camps could be surrounded with explosives that would detonate if enemy soldiers approached at night, turning the blast itself into an alarm. Vast numbers were also placed along the Thai border as Vietnamese forces tried to contain the Khmer Rouge and Thai forces feared further Vietnamese movement. Aki Ra estimates that millions of mines were laid during Cambodia’s decades of war. The soldiers planting them were solving immediate battlefield problems; farmers and children would inherit the consequences long after the armies moved on.
Please note that this interview, which is part of our Navigating A Minefield series, is intended solely as a record of Aki Ra’s personal experiences and historical demining work in Cambodia. His descriptions of past methods reflect what he personally did under very different circumstances and should not be understood as instructions, training, or advice for handling landmines, unexploded ordnance, or other explosives. Such devices are extremely dangerous and should only be approached, identified, or removed by properly trained and authorized professionals following current safety procedures.
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