Dith Pran; Activist Brought Attention to Cambodian Genocide

New York Times photographer Dith Pran sits with his wife Meoun Ser on the lawn outside the Beverly Hills Hotel, in this Tuesday, March 26, 1985, file photo in Beverly Hills, Calif. Dith Pran's death from pancreatic cancer was confirmed Sunday, March 30, 2008, by journalist Sydney Schanberg, his former colleague at The New York Times. Pran was 65. (Lennox Mclendon - AP)

Obituaries

Monday, March 31, 2008
By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer

Dith Pran, 65, a journalist and human rights advocate who became a public face of the horrors in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and whose life was portrayed in the influential movie "The Killing Fields," died March 30 of pancreatic cancer at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, N.J. He was a resident of Woodbridge, N.J.

For much of the early 1970s, Mr. Dith was a resourceful guide and interpreter in Cambodia for Sydney H. Schanberg of the New York Times, whose reporting on the country's civil war and the rise of the Khmer Rouge won a Pulitzer Prize. Schanberg accepted the award on behalf of himself and Mr. Dith, whom he credited with saving his life.

Schanberg's partnership with Mr. Dith became the basis for "The Killing Fields" (1984), which conveyed in personal terms the brutality of the Khmer Rouge under the despot Pol Pot from 1975 to 1979. Nearly 2 million Cambodians died during those years.

"The Killing Fields" had a major effect on public opinion, said Ben Kiernan, who directs Yale University's Genocide Studies Program. "A mass audience saw the story of what happened in a way that had never been done before, a dramatic and accurate depiction of a horrifying experience for millions of people," he said.

"Pran was one of the major figures in the United States in bringing the issue of justice for Cambodian genocide to public attention, and in pushing the U.S. government to support the accountability of the Khmer Rouge," Kiernan said.

In speeches and lectures, Mr. Dith gave vivid and compelling accounts of the genocide, including the death of more than 50 members of his family. During a famine, he said, he was nearly beaten to death for stealing more than the daily ration of a spoonful of rice. He was told that one of his brothers, who served in the Cambodian army, was thrown to crocodiles.

The Khmer Rouge, which followed a radical communist path of social engineering, tried to remake the country by killing anyone who had political opinions or seemed educated. Mr. Dith spent four years disguising his middle-class background by dressing as a peasant and working in rice fields.

Of the killing fields, or mass graves in the countryside, he once told Schanberg: "In the water wells, the bodies were like soup bones in broth. And you could always tell the killing grounds because the grass grew taller and greener where the bodies were buried."

Peter Cleveland, a foreign affairs expert then working for Sen. Charles S. Robb (D-Va.), said Mr. Dith worked to help influence passage of the Cambodian Genocide Justice Act of 1994.

The act, which Robb sponsored, created the State Department's Office of Cambodian Genocide Investigations, which gathered evidence against Pol Pot and his deputies for crimes against humanity.

Pol Pot died in Thailand in 1998 without answering to an international tribunal. U.N.-backed trials began last year, after years of resistance from Khmer Rouge supporters in China, Thailand and the United States.

The United States had supported the Khmer Rouge because it fought the communist Vietnamese, who invaded Cambodia and occupied it in the 1980s. The Khmer Rouge held Cambodia's seat at the United Nations until the early 1990s.

Mr. Dith founded an organization to collect personal stories about Khmer Rouge crimes and compiled a book of survivors' memories, "Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields" (1997).

"There is no doctor who can heal me," he told the Los Angeles Times in 1991, when Pol Pot was protected in Thailand. "But I know that a man like Pol Pot, he is even sicker than I am. He is crazy in the head, because he believed in killing people. He believed in starving children. We both have the horror in our heads."

Mr. Dith, whose father was a public works official, was born in 1942 in Siem Reap, in northern Cambodia near the ancient temples at Angkor Wat.

He learned French and English, and his language skills brought him work as a translator of Khmer, the Cambodian language, for the U.S. military and visiting film crews. He was a receptionist at a hotel near Angkor Wat when the escalation of the Vietnam War dried up tourism.

The subsequent U.S. bombing of Cambodia, the militarist coup led by Western-backed Cambodian Gen. Lon Nol and an erupting civil war led Mr. Dith, his wife, Meoun Ser, and their four children to flee to the capital city of Phnom Penh.

There, Mr. Dith became a favorite of the visiting press corps. He gained a reputation for adeptness at obtaining hotel rooms and bribing teletype operators to get stories out. He also knew how to bribe officials to win access to parts of the country otherwise closed to reporters.

He formed his closest working relationship with Schanberg, who said he came to regard Mr. Dith as his brother. "He got hooked on this story in the same way I did," Schanberg said. "Cambodia was ignored. The Western press corps was in Saigon. People only came in when things heated up. . . .

"He wanted the story of what was happening to get out," Schanberg said. "People in such a Third World country who are suffering did not know if anyone in the outside world understood what they were going through -- crude Chinese-made rockets landing in hospitals, schoolyards, people's back yards."

Mr. Dith's wife and children were able to leave Cambodia through Schanberg's connections at the U.S. Embassy. At great peril, the two men remained in the capital after the Khmer Rouge entered the city in April 1975.

At one point, bullying Khmer Rouge soldiers robbed Schanberg and two English-speaking colleagues of their equipment and forced them aboard a truck likely bound for their execution.

Schanberg credited Mr. Dith with their survival: Mr. Dith pleaded to board the truck and persuaded the driver that the reporters were French and were there to cover the Khmer Rouge victory with sympathy.

In Phnom Penh, Schanberg was able to obtain safe passage to Thailand through the French Embassy, but Mr. Dith was among the many Cambodians turned away after the Khmer Rouge threatened embassy officials about awarding passports to help locals escape.

He found work in rice fields near his home village. Like others, he was reduced to daily rations of a spoonful of rice plus whatever snails, rats, insects and tree bark he could find. Any excuse was used to beat or execute people, including unauthorized work breaks.

After months of extreme malnourishment, Mr. Dith said, he took a risk one night by sneaking into a rice paddy to steal rice kernels. Two guards caught him and ordered villagers to beat him. He was left bleeding in the rain.

After the Vietnamese invasion, Mr. Dith began searching for his family. Only his mother and one sister had survived. The rest had starved or had been executed.

Seeking refuge in Thailand, he traveled a circuitous route of 60 miles, careful to avoid bands of Khmer Rouge soldiers, unmarked mine fields and other dangers. He was accepted into a refugee camp and was treated for malaria.

The New York Times arranged for his safe passage to New York and trained him to work as a staff photographer, a position he held since 1980,while also assuming a greater role as an activist.

"The Killing Fields," starring Sam Waterston as Schanberg and Haing S. Ngor as Mr. Dith, elevated his name recognition. Ngor, a Cambodian doctor-turned-actor, won an Academy Award for his supporting role. Ngor was killed in a robbery in 1996.

Soon after the film's release, Mr. Dith became a U.S. citizen and goodwill ambassador for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

"I'm not a politician. I'm not a hero. I'm a messenger," he said. "It's very important that we study genocide because it has happened again and again. We made a mistake because we didn't believe Cambodians would kill Cambodians.

"We didn't believe that one human being would kill another human being. I want you to know that genocide can happen anywhere on this planet. . . . Like one of my heroes, Elie Wiesel, who alerts the world to the horrors of the Jewish holocaust, I try to awaken the world to the holocaust of Cambodia, for all tragedies have universal implications."

His marriages to Meoun Ser Dith and Kim DePaul ended in divorce.

Survivors include four children from the first marriage, Titony Dith of Herndon, Hemkarey Tan of Silver Spring and Titonath Dith and Titonel Dith, both of Lynwood, Wash.; a sister; and eight grandchildren (including one named Sydney).