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.
War
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February 26, 2010
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February 8, 2010
In his recent New York Times op-ed column, “The World Capital of Killing,” Nicholas Kristof takes a close look at the war in eastern Congo, and compares it to the Holocaust. He states that an estimated 6.9 million people have been murdered in the Congo’s war. The war “in eastern Congo has not only lasted longer than the Holocaust but also appears to have claimed more lives,” Kristof writes. But, he goes on to explain, “what those numbers don’t capture is the way Congo has become the world capital of rape, torture and mutilation, in ways that sear survivors.” What can be done to stop this genocide? “Unless we see some leadership here,” Kristof writes, “the fighting in Congo—fueled by profits from mineral exports—will continue indefinitely.”
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December 18, 2009
The Guatemala Times reports that there has been a new development in the Guatemala Genocide Case—a case that began in 1999, arising from “a period in that country’s long civil war where violence against non-combatant, indigenous Mayans rose to the level of genocide” with over 200,000 Guatemalans disappearing or being murdered in the 1960-1996 internal conflict. The case began when “victims filed a criminal complaint in Spain against senior Guatemalan government officials charging them with terrorism, genocide and systematic torture”—charges that were made “in the wake of the arrest in London of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.” Though arrest warrants were issued in 2006, the Guatemalan Constitutional Court reversed its decision in 2007, saying that the extradition requests and arrest warrants were invalid. In response, witnesses were brought to Spain in 2008—“the first time a national court had heard evidence from Mayan survivors on one of the largest genocides of the last century.” In the latest development, a set of internal records on “Operation Sofía”—what The Guatemala Times describes as “an alleged ‘scorched earth operation’ which targeted Mayan communities in the Quiché region during July and August, 1982”—have been presented to the Spanish National Court as evidence. This is the first time prosecutors in a human rights case have had “original Guatemalan military records about a specific operation” made available to them. The original records have been posted on the National Security Archive’s website.
