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Insight Myanmar · Yesterday · 1 hr 24 min

An Unexploded Past

Episode #621: Please note that interview 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 differentcircumstances 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. Aki Ra was about ten years old when the Khmer Rouge forced him into military life, where he learned to plant landmines and survive in Cambodia’s war. After later fighting alongside Vietnamese forces, he eventually turned the same technical knowledge toward removing the explosives left behind. “I wanted to change from bad to be good,” he says. Since 1990, he has spent decades clearing mines and unexploded ordnance from Cambodian farmland and villages. That experience gives his story particular relevance to Myanmar, where landmines are again shaping civilian life and will remain dangerous long after front lines move. The comparison becomes concrete around the small M14 anti-personnel mine, a weapon Aki Ra knows from his own clearance work. Touching upon the difficulty of detecting them in Myanmar, he emphasizes a distinction central to the work he does today: civilians should not search for, touch, or attempt to remove mines themselves. His education sessions instead teach people to recognize danger, mark or remember the location, and contact trained disposal teams. Aki Ra also contrasts the conditions in Myanmar with his own memories of Cambodia. He says soldiers in his units warned villages about mined areas and tried to avoid homes, schools and religious buildings. Yet Cambodia also demonstrates how little protection wartime intentions ultimately provide. Decades after the fighting ended, mines and unexploded ordnance still remain in fields, still injure civilians, and still require organized clearance. Aki Ra now works with trained teams, medics, metal detectors and formal safety procedures, while the Cambodia Landmine Museum near Siem Reap helps finance their work. The war that created Cambodia’s minefields is over; the labor of making the land safe is not. For Myanmar, that is perhaps the hardest part of the comparison: the mine crisis will not necessarily end when the fighting does.

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Episode #621: Please note that interview 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 differentcircumstances 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.

Aki Ra was about ten years old when the Khmer Rouge forced him into military life, where he learned to plant landmines and survive in Cambodia’s war. After later fighting alongside Vietnamese forces, he eventually turned the same technical knowledge toward removing the explosives left behind. “I wanted to change from bad to be good,” he says. Since 1990, he has spent decades clearing mines and unexploded ordnance from Cambodian farmland and villages.

That experience gives his story particular relevance to Myanmar, where landmines are again shaping civilian life and will remain dangerous long after front lines move. The comparison becomes concrete around the small M14 anti-personnel mine, a weapon Aki Ra knows from his own clearance work. Touching upon the difficulty of detecting them in Myanmar, he emphasizes a distinction central to the work he does today: civilians should not search for, touch, or attempt to remove mines themselves. His education sessions instead teach people to recognize danger, mark or remember the location, and contact trained disposal teams.

Aki Ra also contrasts the conditions in Myanmar with his own memories of Cambodia. He says soldiers in his units warned villages about mined areas and tried to avoid homes, schools and religious buildings. Yet Cambodia also demonstrates how little protection wartime intentions ultimately provide. Decades after the fighting ended, mines and unexploded ordnance still remain in fields, still injure civilians, and still require organized clearance.

Aki Ra now works with trained teams, medics, metal detectors and formal safety procedures, while the Cambodia Landmine Museum near Siem Reap helps finance their work. The war that created Cambodia’s minefields is over; the labor of making the land safe is not. For Myanmar, that is perhaps the hardest part of the comparison: the mine crisis will not necessarily end when the fighting does.

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