Before leaving Siem Reap, we took a morning’s tuk-tuk ride out to the countryside to visit the Land Mine Museum – set up by a former child soldier, Aki Ra, who has dedicated his adult life to the quest for a land-mine free world.   His is a fascinating story – he thinks he was born in 1970 and lost his parents to the Khmer Rouge’s murderous rampage when he was just five.  He went to exist (it’s not right to say “live”) in the KR camps, and was soon drafted as a child soldier – first with what remained of the the Khmer Rouge forces after the Vietnamese occupation, then as a soldier with the Vietnamese Army.  He would later be drafted to the Cambodian Army.   He says that for the first 20 or so years of his life, he knew nothing but war, and killing, and violence.

During those years, he learned a great deal about land mines – how to set them and defuse them – and about their lethal and tragic consequences.  His expertise brought the attention of the UN – which enlisted his services as a de-miner.   Over the years, he had collected a great deal of memorabilia from the wars – particularly with relation to land mines – and soon hit on the idea of turning his collection into a museum to help educate people on the scourge of this especially cruel tool of war.

Today, Aki Ra’s museum is also a humanitarian enterprise that helps retrain those affected by landmines, including many, many children.  The compound houses an orphanage and school (all completely above board and kosher – unlike so many in Cambodia) and he continues his work with helping to de-mine not only Cambodia, but other trouble-spots throughout the world.   Just nine days before we visited, a 15 year old boy lost both hands when he picked up an unexploded land mine in the province of Battambang – near the Thai/Cambodia border.

While most countries in the world have stopped using land-mines, and have signed an international treaty to that effect (including Australia) the United States is still to put their mark on the treaty.  At the museum, we met an American ex-pat (a former teacher) who began as a donor to the cause, and now lives in Siem Reap and acts as a guide at the museum, and one of the drivers of what is now an extensive humanitarian/educational project.   He told us that “Clinton couldn’t, Bush wouldn’t and Obama hasn’t”.  At first, it was grating and unnerving to hear the broad American accent booming out from one of the museum’s rooms – talking about the horrors of wars and landmines (but hey, drones are okay, no?) – but after speaking with him for quite a while afterwards, we found him an interesting, knowledgeable and very dedicated soul with a good heart and a realistic grasp of both history and the fine balancing act between aid and welfare.

I’m hoping to do an article further down the track – so watch for that – but in the meantime, take a few minutes to google Cambodian Self Help Demining – it’s a worthy, if not exactly uplifting, exercise.