Former child soldier undoes past, one landmine at a time

November 6, 2009
By Miranda Leitsinger

Hong Kong, China (CNN) -- Aki Ra was forced to be a child soldier in the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia in the early 1980s, taught to shoot a gun and plant deadly landmines.

He was later seized by the Cambodian army and the Vietnamese, who were fighting together against the ultra-Maoist Khmer Rouge, and he again planted explosives in the ground as war raged in the Southeast Asian nation.

Years later, when the United Nations came in to help restore peace to Cambodia, Aki Ra decided he needed to undo the damage he and others had done, so he began demining on his own after spending a year training with U.N. deminers.

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