Death in the dirt

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Day 2 was a little different, morning time we decided to visit Bantrey Sei, a temple located a fair distance out from the others but it is allegedly one of the best preserved. On the way back we combined the trip to Bantrey with a trip to the landmine museum which is only just down the road. As this is a fair hike out in a tuk tuk, we throw Cameron a some extra dollars and off we go.

This side of Siem Reip is very different from the route to the floating village. The houses here are much more better constructed, some of them resembling villas or small farm houses. Rice farming is the game here and the paddies line each side of the road and populated with the occasional water buffalo, its scene that someone like me hasn't seen outside a Nam era war film and I half expect hueys to fly overhead. Cambodian's at both work and play line the roadside and wave and smile furiously as we drive past.

Bantrey is small but lived up to what we had the read,the temple is in tip top shape with symbols you can barely imagine have been carved so long ago

The next stop was the landmine museum located only about a kilometer away. This was run by a former Khmer Rouge child soldier called Akria. Akira, who was initially conscripted into the bloodthirsty KR eventually changed sides and defected to join the Vietnamese forces who along with opposing cambodians attempted to drive the Khmer Rouge from the country.

While fighting for either group Akiras primary duty was the placing of landmines, not just to defend army positions but in civilian areas to sow terror and hardship for the people who lived there. Once the civil war was winding down the majority of the Kymer rouge driven into the remote areas of the country ,Akira began to see first hand the horror his activities of mine laying inflicted and began dedicating himself to clearing as many of Cambodia mines as possible mainly by disarming them with nearly all with his bare hands.

Its difficult to describe the atmosphere. A wooden sign written in almost childlike paint bearing the "Landmine museum entrance" flanks a more official sign declaring that all exhibits are free of TNT and explosives, gives you the jitters as you walk in.

There's an almost church like deathly silence as you stroll about, the centerpiece is located in the middle of a pond and is a big glass cabinet filled with hundreds of mines stacked as if they were spare parts in a garage. Each cabinet is labeled with a sign announcing the breed of death contained therein be it "Chinese chicoms, Russian tx8's or the almost innocent sounding Bouncing betty.

The silence is broken by the sound of TV static and a short film starts talking about the Cambodia mine problem, Akira himself stares and gives a few works and describes the disarming process, shortly thereafter the children he houses in the orphanage for mine victims in a separate facility nearby begins to roll. I watch the children attempting to cast a fishing rod from a boat with only one leg, others play soccer in the same state, the handball rule being irrelevant as some of them need their only remaining fingers to balance their crutch. Despite it all they are smiling and laughing. Im not, IM furious, sitting in that empty chair staring at the screen, subconscious squeezing my intact lower leg and I can feel something damp dribbling around the bottom of my eye. I stare at the screen for a few seconds after the film ends before I shiver and walk back out to the courtyard.


As akira deactivated mine collection grew, he began to display the deactivated mines in a small museum near his home and then the visitors began to flock in. His museum now displays 1000's of landmines he has personally taken apart with his bare hands as well as dozens of newspaper clippings showing the progress of the civil war and of some of akiras actual war experience as a child soldier. One of these that really turned my bone marrow to slush was when he reminisced about following a day of carrying out orders as a child soldier they would be dismissed by there officers to play in the jungle like children ought to do. While playing on one occasion they came across the child soldiers of the opposing faction and both groups spend the time playing hide and seek and chase and football into the late hour of the night before returning for midnight curfew. The following morning both groups of children would be staring down the iron sights of automatic weapons trying to kill each playing soldiers for real.

The landmines are very simple devices to look at ugly uncomplicated and brutal in their functionality and largely designed to maim rather then kill. The more complicated looking ones are only more so they can carryout a more advanced macabre function. The bouncing betty for example has two charges, one to blow off the foot of the man who stands on it and also to send the second larger charge up in the air at waist level so it can better disembowel or render impotent the unfortunates companions.

During the wet season, the heavy raises displace buried mines casing them to settle in a new location and once the next dry season begins, the vicious little murder boxes new location only heralded when an unfortunate child playing in a field or a farmer trying to put rice on the table has his life irreparably altered by standing on it. Akira reckons there are still 6 million mines in Cambodia and he is still trying his best to clear as many as he can to m make amends for the past. The international community has tried to ban landmines but a number of countries have still refused to sign the land mine charter, the signatories are usually the nations that would't get into the sunway travel brochure, Iraq, North Korea, Burma but tellingly lumped in with the western world's rogues rogue gallery is the United states of America and Russia.

Obviously we stuck to the carefully marked path all the way home.

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Photos

Bantrey Sei Statue
He's coming to get ya!

Bantrey Sei
Yes Its that old!

Akira Himself
A man on a mission

Appartus of death
Just a taster of the 1000's of mines we saw

Big display of pain and suffering
Don't worry its deactivated!