Aki Ra is a former child soldier. When he was just a toddler, he was forced to serve in Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge. Gimundo reports that Ra was taught to plant deadly land mines at the age of five, and continued doing so until Cambodia was liberated from the Khmer Rouge by the Vietnamese army when he was a teenager. In 2006, Ra told the Common Language Project, “ ‘I remember we would have bags on our backs, we could carry sometimes 50, sometimes 100 mines, and we would throw them behind us. . . . Sometimes the soldiers were so close we couldn’t even bury the mines, we would just put leaves on top and keep going, if we were too slow we would, you know, be shot.’ ” After Cambodia was liberated, Gimundo writes that “thousands of active landmines still littered the ground, killing and maiming hundreds of people every year.” Ra, regretting his actions under the Khmer Rouge, has vowed to spend the rest of his life giving back to Cambodia. He remembers where he buried many of the landmines, and, “armed only with a metal detector, a small pocketknife, and several other small tools,” has spent over 20 years disarming thousands of active landmines by hand.
Reconciliation and Reparation
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February 26, 2010
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January 22, 2010
Several international corporations such as General Motors, Ford Motor Company, and IBM, have been accused of aiding the apartheid regime in South Africa. The Khulumani Support Group is filing a lawsuit in an attempt to attain justice for apartheid survivors. The case is “grounded on the US Alien Tort Claims Act, which allows foreigners to sue US-based entities for violations of international law,” Legalbrief Today writes. The international law violation the corporations are accused of is complicity with apartheid, since “apartheid is considered a crime against humanity.” As Times Live states, “lawyers for those participating in the class action claim that . . . [these corporations] co-operated in human rights abuses committed by the apartheid regime.” Michael Osborne notes in the Cape Times, “plaintiffs say the multinational corporations provided military hardware and computer technology, and that they collaborated with security forces to put down anti-apartheid and labour protests.” The main question in this case, according to Legalbrief Today, is “whether major multinational giants can be held responsible for the atrocities committed under apartheid.”
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November 17, 2009
Fifty years after they graduated high school, the formerly segregated classes of 1959 in Macon, Georgia gathered together. CNN.com reports “they returned for a one-of-a-kind 50th high school gathering. The classes of 1959, once segregated by race as well as gender, sat down together for the first time in history.” The idea for such a meeting was generated four years ago “when a son told his father: ‘Dad, think about how many friends you missed getting to know.’ ” The father, former head of CNN Tom Johnson, wrote to graduates of the white boys’ school, Lanier, the white girls’ school, Miller, and the black school, Ballard-Hudson, saying, “ ‘It is a different world today. We no longer are separated, except by personal choice.’ ” Participants felt a common need to come together to “discuss the past, while moving forward in the present.” They hoped to set an example for future generations as well as for the elderly in other Southern cities.
