Explosive finds
Click. I've just stood on a landmine. It's about the size of a soft-drink can - a container made of the same sort of light-weight plastic as cheap toy soldiers. Thanks to Hollywood, I'd always thought landmines were disc-shaped and that if you could quickly replace the weight pressing on one you might slip away unharmed. 'No,' says my Cambodian guide. 'You hear 'click', you explode.'
Obviously, the landmine I've stepped on is disarmed. It's one of thousands on display at the Landmine Museum outside Siem Reap in Cambodia. The trigger device still works, though, so standing on the lid still has the impact of pulling the trigger of an unloaded gun aimed directly at my head.
As a result of the war that spread from neighbouring Vietnam, the blood-drenched rule of Pol Pot and the decades of civil war that followed, Cambodia is one of the most mined countries on Earth. An estimated six million are still to be found - typically by wandering animals, farmers and children. In the game of war, landmines play dirty. They're cheap to make, easy to camouflage and designed to inflict maximum carnage. And they remain lethal and out of sight long after the war for which they were deployed is over. Built in a variety of shapes and sizes, landmines have no use-by date. As Cambodia rebuilds itself in a new century, the weapons of the past continue to maim the innocent.
Aki Ra's life mission is to put an end to this, one dangerous mine at a time. A former child soldier of the Khmer Rouge and later the Vietnamese army, Aki Ra was laying landmines in the jungle before he reached his teens. He would lay traps, mines and tripwires, all camouflaged with soil and foliage. One mine might trigger others, so that one careless step could wipe out a platoon. Claymore mines, set off by tripwires, are loaded with ball bearings that fire in all directions, causing great harm to anything in the vicinity. Aki Ra was taught to lay all sorts: Chinese pineapples, Russian mines made of wood and salad-bowl anti-tank mines.
Today, his Landmine Museum, a few minutes' drive from Siem Reap and the magnificent ruins of Angkor Wat, is a fascinating glimpse into real-life horror and the human spirit that defies it.
Privately funded, without government aid, Aki Ra makes frequent trips into the jungle to disarm the devices that continue to plague his country. He estimates that he has removed 30,000 mines - an astonishing feat given that he doesn't use modern mine-detecting equipment. Instead he draws on his childhood knowledge of where to hide mines and how best to disarm their fuses. His success rate - and survival - is amazing. It costs about US$500 for an aid organisation to remove a single landmine.
More than 130 countries have banned the use of landmines, but major arms makers such as China, the US and Russia continue to sell them for as little as US$3 each. The human cost is enormous. The US-made Bouncing Betty, for example, has a spring mechanism that shoots it up to head height before it explodes, resulting in maximum loss of life.
Aki Ra's museum has adopted about a dozen young landmine victims, missing arms or legs, who help at the museum. A village has sprung up around the site since Aki Ra cleared it of mines in the early 1990s.
Inside a small hut hundreds of mines are on display, along with information about how they work and where they're found. A video shows Aki Ra walking through thick jungle. The jerky footage is apparently because the cameraman was so scared of taking a wrong step.
Outside, Aki Ra points to a small field about the size of a vegetable patch. 'How many mines can you see?' he asks. I can just make out a tripwire connected to a mortar bomb hanging from a branch. I count four mines. Aki Ra points out dozens - in the ground, behind leaves, attached with wire above my head.
These have had the gunpowder steamed out of them. But across Cambodia, millions of armed mines lie waiting.
