When my mother visited the UAE last month, we played tourist and went to the top of the Burj Khalifa, where we marvelled at what humans can do when they put their minds to it. The desire to leave a mark on the world can be a powerful force, and there we were, standing on the 124th floor of that desire.
Last week, in Cambodia, I visited Angkor Wat and the surrounding temples, which testify to the same desire, albeit cloaked in the purpose of honouring gods and ancestors, and executed in brick and stone, rather than steel and glass. I dare even the most jaded of travellers to remain unmoved at the sight of the ancient carvings that cover almost every surface of these temples – intricate depictions of religious stories, military battles and royal triumphs. Walking around the temples is to feel history seep up through your feet; time can be measured in the spread of lichen across the statues of elephants standing guard at the corners of a long balcony, or in the weathered cheeks of a Buddha, lips still curved in an implacable smile that has spanned millennia.
Along the road to one of the temples, we stopped at a ramshackle museum that bears witness to the fact that sometimes the human desire to make a mark on the world comes at what should be an intolerable cost. The Cambodian Landmine Museum is the dream of Aki Ra, who was forced to became a child soldier with the Khmer Rouge and then eventually, in the aftermath of the 1967-75 civil war, taught himself how to defuse landmines as a small step towards clearing the Cambodian countryside of the millions of mines that made even something as simple as planting rice a life-threatening activity.
The statistics are mind-boggling: there are millions of landmines in Cambodia and about 15 Cambodians are wounded (or worse) by landmines every month – an astonishingly high number for a country not at war, but nevertheless an improvement on a decade ago when the monthly toll numbered in the hundreds. And Cambodia is not alone. One of the museum’s grim exhibits documents the many other countries where landmines and unexploded military ordnance are still a threat. The wars have ended in Cambodia, but the threat of violence lingers, literally just under the surface.
More than 100 countries have signed the Ottawa Treaty to ban landmines, but the United States has not. It has complied with the treaty insofar as it has agreed to start destroying its stockpiles of mines, but it says that the defence of the 38th parallel between North and South Korea necessitates the use of anti-personnel landmines. It’s hard to imagine, looking at the pictures in the Landmine Museum of children who have had an arm or leg blown off, or who have been orphaned because their parents were killed in an explosion, that mines really create a “defence”. Don’t they simply ensure that violence and uncertainty last into the next generation, and even the next? The museum documented the long-lasting effect of these weapons in an exhibit about the recent death of a girl who stepped on unexploded ordnance from the Second World War.
My children came to the Landmine Museum with me and, in the tuk-tuk back to our hotel afterwards, I realised what enormous privilege they enjoy. Not only the obvious privileges of middle-class affluence but in the fact that they’ve grown up untouched by violence. We’ve read about terrorist attacks and gone through security at airports; we’ve stayed in hotels where security guards hold a mirror under cars to check for bombs. But so far, alhamdulillah, they remain unscathed by violence.
Here’s the thing: the absence of violence in a child’s life should not be remarkable. My children think that buildings such as Burj Khalifa will be our era’s Angkor Wat, but I’m not so sure: a millennium of sand and wind will not be kind to supertowers built of glass and steel. I wonder if our legacy may be large swathes of uninhabitable earth, pocked by a century’s worth of landmines and unexploded bombs.
Deborah Lindsay Williams is a professor of literature at NYU Abu Dhabi