Aki Ra
| Aki Ra | |
|---|---|
Aki Ra
|
|
| Born |
Eoun Yeak unknown (c. 1973) Siem Reap, Cambodia |
| Occupation | Landmine campaigner, museum curator, director of all-Khmer de-mining NGO |
| Spouse(s) | Hourt (deceased, 15 April 2009) |
| Children | Amatak, Mine, Metta |
| Parent(s) | deceased |
Aki Ra (sometimes written Akira) is a former Khmer Rouge conscripted child soldier who works as a deminer and museum curator in Siem Reap, Cambodia. He has devoted his life to removing landmines in Cambodia and to caring for young landmine victims. Aki Ra states that since 1992 he has personally removed and destroyed as many as 50,000 landmines, and is the founder of the Cambodian Landmine Museum.
Aki Ra is unsure of his age, but believes he was born in 1970 or 1973. His parents were killed by the Khmer Rouge. Orphaned in a Khmer Rouge camp, he was taken in by a woman named Yourn who raised him and several other orphaned children. Like many others, he soon became a child soldier once his strength became sufficient to make him useful to local Khmer Rouge military commanders. When the Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia with the intention of toppling the Khmer Rouge political regime, he was taken into the custody of Vietnamese soldiers. Later he enlisted with the Kampuchean People's Revolutionary Armed Forces formed by the new government, the People's Republic of Kampuchea. His duties included placing landmines along the mined area on Cambodia's border with Thailand.
The name "Aki Ra" was given to him by a Japanese acquaintance and is not his birth name. He was born Eoun Yeak, but one of his supervisors once compared his efficiency to AKIRA, a heavy-duty appliance company in Japan.
Having laid thousands of landmines as a soldier, Aki Ra found employment as a deminer with the UN in 1991. After leaving UNMAS in 1992, he continued disarming and removing mines in his community. Having no demining tools, he used a knife, a hoe, a Leatherman and a stick. He would defuse the landmines and UXOs (Unexploded Ordnance) he found in small villages and bring home the empty casings. Sometimes he would sell them as scrap to help fund his work.
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