Confronting Cambodia's past at the Killing Fields

Saturday, August 21, 2010
Story and photography by THOMAS HUANG
The Dallas Morning News
thuang@dallasnews.com

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia – I wander the fields, tracing the gentle slopes where the mass graves were. I want to hear the voices of those who died here. I want to hear their stories; that might be a way of honoring them.

Instead, silence enshrouds me. Perhaps that's not a bad thing.

Silence allows me to pray.

Silence helps me hold back the tears.

I've come to the Killing Fields to pay respect to the dead. I've come to remember Dith Pran.

Pran was a wise soul. He had persevered through a great horror, but you wouldn't have known it from his quiet demeanor.

I met him through the Asian American Journalists Association about 15 years ago. Every year at our national convention, I taught and mentored college students on a newspaper project. Every year, Pran, a small man who always carried a camera with him, entered the room and offered words of encouragement.

"Do you know who this man is?" I would ask my students. No, they would say.

Dith Pran So I would tell them Pran's story. He'd been a photojournalist and translator working with a New York Times reporter in Cambodia in the mid-1970s. He stayed to cover the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge. He survived four years of hard labor under that regime, pretending to be uneducated and hiding his American ties. Finally, Pran escaped to Thailand. He eventually came to the United States and became a Times photographer.

In a way, I knew Pran even before I met him. His story was the subject of the film, The Killing Fields. I was in college when the movie came out, and when I learned about Pran's courage, something stirred inside me. I began to think about becoming a journalist.

I remove my shoes and walk up the steps to the Buddhist stupa, a towering shrine that was built two decades ago next to the fields. I pass an altar of figs, flowers and incense sticks. I'm joined by a few other tourists, but no one says a word.

The sign at the entrance says: "Would you please kindly show your respect to many million people who were killed under the genocidal Pol Pot regime."

From 1975 to 1979, Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge leader, was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians. In these fields, known as Choeung Ek, the Khmer Rouge executed and disposed of several thousand people.

Many of them had been interrogated, tortured and brought to the fields from Tuol Sleng, known as S-21, an old school that's now a museum a few miles away. Many of them were killed with farm tools: hoes, knives, shovels and hatchets.

I enter the memorial. Before me, on several levels, lie piles of human skulls. They stare back at me, some discolored, others showing the damage inflicted upon them during the executions.

At first, I am overwhelmed with sorrow and revulsion.

Then I ask myself: How else should we remember the genocide and memorialize the dead?

The Cambodians are still struggling with the best way to bring those responsible to justice. (In July, a United Nations tribunal convicted the first Khmer Rouge official of war crimes and sentenced him to serve 19 years in prison. Four other former leaders await trial.)

But, at least at this memorial, the Cambodians have decided to confront the terrible past and resist erasing history.

Pran died in March 2008 after battling pancreatic cancer. He had worked hard to educate us about the Cambodian genocide. He had worked hard to encourage younger journalists like me.

As I leave the memorial, I say a prayer for Dith Pran, hoping he has finally found some measure of peace.

I say another prayer for his country. Despite Cambodia's beauty, I know it's one of the world's poorest countries, devastated by the killings.

As I leave the fields and walk out onto the city street, a girl approaches me. "Papa," she says in rehearsed English. "Give me one dollar, and I go away."

Then a man nudges his 2-year-old daughter, who is naked, toward me. She holds up her tiny hands in prayer, beseeching me. I turn away; I fear that if I give her money, more people will approach me.

She is silent, and in that silence, I hold back my tears. It isn't until I write these words a few months later that I begin to weep.

GETTING THERE

Access Phnom Penh on most major airlines, including Korean Air and Delta Air Lines with a connection through Seoul, South Korea. American Airlines has flights with connections through Los Angeles and Hong Kong.

THE KILLING FIELDS

The Killing Fields site, known as Choeung Ek, is about 10 miles south of Phnom Penh, so you'll need to hire a taxi or motorbike to get you there. To enter the memorial, you're asked to donate $3. With that donation, you can get a guide to show you around, but I didn't find that necessary. It's a small area and easily walkable. Steel yourself before you view the human skulls in the Buddhist stupa. In addition to the memorial, signs indicate where detention areas were located, and a visitors center provides historical information about the Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian genocide. Details: www.cekillingfield.com

Tuol Sleng, also known as S-21, is the former school where thousands of people were interrogated and tortured. It's now the Museum of Genocide. The most moving, and overwhelming, section contains hundreds of photos of the newly arrived. Details: www.tuolsleng.com

WHERE TO STAY, EAT

I enjoyed my stay at the colonial-style Raffles Hotel Le Royal (92 Rukhak Vithei Daun Penh; www.raffles.com). It was built in the late 1920s and has a lot of charm. I also received recommendations for Blue Lime, a more modern hotel with 14 rooms (42 Street 19Z; www.bluelime.asia).

The Foreign Correspondents' Club (363 Sisowath Quay) has become a bit of a tourist draw, a multilevel complex with a cafe, restaurant, bar and shops. I had a decent chicken sandwich for lunch and an Angkor beer while looking out upon the Tonlé Sap River, trying to do my best foreign correspondent impression.

WHERE TO SHOP

Phnom Penh was evacuated during the Khmer Rouge regime and became a ghost town. When people moved back, it became a city of drugs, prostitution and violence. Those problems have largely subsided in recent years – or at least are less than evident to the tourist. Still, it's odd to think there'd be good shopping here. Street 240 is known for its antique shops and boutiques. I liked Couleurs D'Asie (33 Street 240), which sells beautiful, traditional Khmer cotton scarves.

MORE TO DO

The National Museum (just north of the Royal Palace) is a gem. You'll find hundreds of artifacts and statuary from across Cambodia, as well as a courtyard with fountains full of koi. It's a good place to relax after viewing the horrors of the Killing Fields and Tuol Sleng. Details: www.cambodiamuseum.info

Back on the warpath in 'Killing Fields'

Sunday, June 20, 2010
Andrea Boyarsky SILive.com (Staten Island, New York, USA)

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — A native Staten Islander has collaborated with a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist to publish a new book featuring writings on war and its consequences.

Dr. Robert Miraldi, a former Advance reporter who grew up in Westerleigh, edited “Beyond the Killing Fields: War Writings” (Potomac Books), a collection of Sydney Schanberg’s reporting and commentary from wars he reported on in Bangladesh, Vietnam, Cambodia and Iraq.

“One reviewer called the book a ‘grim reminder’ of war. It really is; it just shows us what wars do and how inhuman we can be,” said Miraldi, who is also author of “The Pen Is Mightier: The Muckraking Life of Charles Edward Russell” (St. Martin’s Press).

The journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz continued, “It gives you pause for why it is we need to think long and hard before we enter into a war. Not only is it wonderful journalism and wonderful reportage, it’s right on the mark about how war repeats itself in grim and horrible ways.”

In 2001, Miraldi met Schanberg, who won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his New York Times coverage of the communist takeover of Cambodia. Schanberg was a visiting professor at SUNY New Paltz as the first James H. Ottaway Sr. Distinguished Professor of Journalism.

Several years back, Miraldi came up with the idea to do an anthology of Schanberg’s work and proposed it to his friend. At first, they wanted to do a “best of” collection but with so much to choose from decided to concentrate the book on his war reporting.

“It’s partly because we’re always at war and we’re still at war. It seemed the natural and logical thing,” explained Miraldi, who currently resides in Stone Ridge, N.Y. He pointed to some of Schanberg’s other works focusing on New York, noting, “we thought his war stories has a wider reach.”

Miraldi worked with Schanberg to edit copy, find articles to feature in the book and get it ready for publication. They were also aided by Miraldi’s wife, Mary Beth Pfeiffer, also a former Advance reporter, and Schanberg’s wife Jane Freiman.

The book’s centerpiece is Schanberg’s signature work, “The Death and Life of Dith Pran,” which was turned into the Academy Award winning movie “The Killing Fields” starring Sam Waterston as Schanberg.

Pran was a Cambodian photojournalist assigned to translate and help Schanberg navigate the country, which was being taken over by the communist Khmer Rouge who massacred millions of people. In 1975 when the capital fell, Schanberg was forced to leave the country and Pran was taken captive. For several years, Schanberg didn’t know what happened to his friend, who managed to survive the genocide.

The book is dedicated to Pran, who died in 2008 of pancreatic cancer, and Schanberg’s wife, Jane.

“One of the characteristics of a great reporter is constant passion and indignation,” Miraldi noted. “When you read Schanberg’s work, there’s always this passion for people who are the victims.... This book really speaks to that.”

For more information on “Beyond the Killing Fields,” visit www.beyondthekillingfields.com.

Son of Dith Pran says father would have relished seeing Khmer Rouge brought to justice at trials

Dith Pran and his family (Photo: AP)

Titony Dith and his father, Dith Pran (Photo courtesy of Titony Dith)

Sunday, February 15, 2009
By Karen Lee Ziner
The Providence Journal Staff Writer (Rhode Island, USA)

In April of 1975, as the Khmer Rouge advanced on Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, Titony Dith saw the rocket attacks and dead and wounded people lying on the streets. He was just a boy.

That was shortly before the Khmer Rouge captured his famous father, Dith Pran, whose story was immortalized in the film The Killing Fields. Dith Pran died of cancer last year, before Khmer Rouge leaders could be brought to trial.

“He would love to have seen the Khmer Rouge brought to justice,” said Titony Dith, 44, in a phone interview from his home in Virginia. “Before he became sick, he told me he’d like to see the trial go on, and for the Khmer Rouge to be brought to justice for all the people who died under the brutal regime of Pol Pot.”

Dith Pran had ties in Rhode Island’s Cambodian community — one of the largest in the country –– and made numerous visits here, including to speak about the Khmer Rouge holocaust. After his death, Cambodians here said that if not for Dith Pran, the world might not have recognized their suffering.

“He tried to volunteer his time to educate the American public about some of the things he’d seen,” said Titony Dith. His father tried to relate his own experience and the agony suffered by fellow Cambodians under the Khmer Rouge, “being tortured and having their lives turned upside down in misery.”

“He would have just liked to see justice being done, so this thing will never, never happen again, not just to Cambodia but to other places around the world,” he said.

Dith Pran was a Cambodian photojournalist and assistant to New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg when the Khmer Rouge seized the capital. He put his family on one of the last rescue helicopters to leave the country, and was soon captured by the Khmer Rouge. He disappeared for the next four years, until he made his way to a refugee camp at the Thai-Cambodian border.

After he was reunited with his family and Schanberg, The Times hired Dith Pran as a photographer.

Titony Dith, who works in information technology at the Pentagon, remembers the evacuation.

“I was on one of the last Chinook helicopters to leave the [U.S.] Embassy compound. He was there to say goodbye, and Sydney was there, too. And just like the movie, we ran to the helicopter and after that, we never saw my father again for a long time.”

He added, “I remember we went to pick him up at the San Francisco International Airport. He’d lost some teeth and he was just crying and happy to see all of us. He said everything’s all gone in Cambodia during that time, because the Khmer Rouge had turned Cambodia upside down. I didn’t understand what he was talking about. I didn’t know there were mass killings or mass graves, and that people were being tortured to death.”

Titony Dith said he will “watch and see what happens” as the first trial gets under way. “I hope that justice will be served for the people who committed these atrocities. I’d like to see them put behind bars, forever.”

kziner@projo.com

From the archive: Pol Pot victory

Fall of Phnom Penh, April 17, 1975

July 6, 2008
Jon Swain
Times Online (UK)

Jon Swain was on the last civilian flight into the city before it was captured by communist Khmer Rouge forces under Pol Pot. An estimated 1.7m people would die in Cambodia’s “killing fields” over the next three years.

Swain sent The Sunday Times a diary recounting the last hours before the city fell.

Monivong Bridge

Already Takhmau, the industrial suburb three miles south of the Monivong Bridge, has been lost and now the fighting centres on the bridge itself. Once it has fallen, the city will be open to attack by insurgents from the east as well as from the south.

Nearby is the scene of last night’s terrible fire. The conglomeration of wooden houses standing on stilts just upstream from the bridge was caught in Khmer Rouge shelling. Hundreds of inhabitants were trapped and burnt to death. Many more tried to escape by leaping into the river. Naval gunboats, searchlights blazing, manoeuvred among the bobbing bodies, attempting to fish out survivors.

University Building

From the roof of the university I have a grandstand view of the war. The rattle of machineguns is now very close and a string of ambulances suddenly scream past, carrying wounded from the front.

In the university grounds, half-tracks churn up the grass, positioning themselves for clearer fields of fire. Students have barricaded the stairs with desks and watch the battle from classroom balconies.

In the sunshine outside, two young lovers sit on the grass holding hands, wrapped up in their own private world.

Preah Ket Mealea hospital

This is one of the city’s 11 hospitals. The inflow of casualties has grown too great for the doctors to be able to cope with them all.

A Scottish medical team has been operating from dawn to dusk with total unconcern for their own safety. The anaesthetist, Murray Carmichael, 33, has been going out to buy blood in return for a bowl of rice and a bit of fish. He says the monks are the most reliable donors.

Hotel Phnom grounds

A bungalow attached to the Phnom hotel has been taken over by the Scottish medical team and converted into an operating theatre. Surgeon Mike Daly, 33, throws open a cupboard and says he has enough instruments to operate on 12 patients without having to pause to wash up.

He and his nurses, Helen Fraser and Pat Ash, say their day at the Preah Ket Mealea hospital has been the blackest of the war. In two hours Daly did 10 operations: “I didn’t have time to put on gloves or a gown. I simply splashed alcohol over my hands and didn’t even have time to change the instruments between operations.”

Early evening, city centre

Suddenly the war declares itself in the centre of the city. The attempts to keep the refugees to the outskirts have ceased and refugees converge from all sides, pushing, shoving, jostling, desperate to escape the fighting breathing down their necks.

The trim walkways and flower-scented parks are submerged under the heaving mass of homeless families, weeping lost children, pigs, ducks, chickens, all hungry and increasingly afraid.

Casualty Receiving Centre

Over the years in Indochina I have become a reluctant expert on human misery, but the carnage here shakes me to the core. A converted volleyball court serves as the main receiving centre for the wounded and with today’s fighting it has become overwhelmed.

A dozen doctors and nurses have today had to deal with more than 700 soldiers and civilians. The chief medic is in despair. Wounded people lie two or three to a bed. The floor is streaked with blood. The bins overflow with gory bandages and field dressings.

A recently amputated leg pokes out of a cardboard box where the surgeon has tossed it in a hurry. Its owner lies staring blankly on a stretcher.

Evening, Hotel Phnom

The prospect of the hotel – this exclusive hangout of foreigners and rich Cambodians – being converted into a high class refugee camp has brought out the worst in some of the journalists and French businessmen. They are rudely assailing the Red Cross officials for letting some of the refugees into our sanctuary.

Refugees are being admitted, family by family, after the officials have thoroughly searched their bodies and belongings to confiscate weapons. The disarmed refugees tramp through the lobby, into the garden, spread down little rush mats and fall into exhausted sleep.

A green plastic cord separates them from the handful of westerners dining in elegance on the other side of the pool. “That’s what we call apartheid,” says a French journalist formerly in Johannesburg.

Hours later the city centre was in Khmer Rouge hands.

A life in the world’s war zones

Jon Swain was captured by the Khmer Rouge and was about to be executed when his life was saved by the New York Times interpreter Dith Pran, a story told in the film The Killing Fields.

His 10,000-word report on a country in the grip of terror earned him his job on The Sunday Times. He has reported on nearly every major conflict since, winning numerous awards.

In 1976 Swain was kidnapped in Ethiopia and held prisoner for three months.

In 1999 he trekked across the mountains into Kosovo to witness its ethnic cleansing.

Now 60, he undertakes arduous assignments with undiminished passion.

He once wrote that “powerful writing and powerful pictures will not curtail wars, but they are valuable because they make it more difficult for the world to close its eyes to human suffering”.

Award-Winning Journalist Praises Congressional Resolution Honoring Dith Pran

By Reasey Poch, VOA
Washington
08 May 2008

The U.S. Congress recently passed a resolution to honor the late Cambodian photographer Dith Pran, the Khmer Rouge survivor whose life story was made into an award-winning movie 'The Killing Fields'. VOA's Reasey Poch reports the U.S. Senate resolution calls the photo-journalist who died at the end of March, a 'modern-day hero'.

Sydney Schanberg, the long-time friend and colleague of the late New York Times photographer Dith Pran, says he is pleased to hear Congress recognize his friend's works and legacy, but wishes there was more than just a resolution in his honor.

Speaking to VOA by phone from his home in New York, Schanberg said he would like to see action. "Pran would be more impressed if governments, legislators, and presidents and so forth, did more than pass resolutions, by doing something to prevent genocide from happening," he said.

The U.S. Senate passed a resolution, introduced by Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse on April 29, to honor the human-rights advocate whose heroism during the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge regime was documented in the Academy Award-winning 1984 film 'The Killing Fields'.

The House of Representatives also passed a similar resolution this week (May 6th) that says it 'honors the life and legacy of Mr. Dith for his commitment to raising awareness about the atrocities that took place under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia'.

Dith Pran worked as an interpreter for Sydney Schanberg who covered the war in Cambodia for the New York Times when the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia on April 17, 1975. Pran was credited with saving Schanberg's life by negotiating with the Khmer Rouge to let Schanberg and the other foreign journalists leave.

Mr. Dith stayed behind in Cambodia. In 1979 when Vietnamese soldiers invaded Cambodia and toppled the Khmer Rouge regime, he escaped to Thailand. In 1980 he migrated to the United States to reunite with his wife and children who left Cambodia just before the Khmer Rouge takeover.

Their ordeal was made into the movie.

Mr. Dith dedicated his life to educate people about the genocide in Cambodia by giving lectures at colleges around the United States, while continuing to work for the New York Times as a photojournalist until earlier this year when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He died of the disease March 30th in New Jersey.

Senator Whitehouse's communication director and spokeswoman, Alex Swartsel, this week explained to VOA why Pran was chosen. "Senator Whitehouse felt that Dith Pran is an extraordinary person, someone who has worked tirelessly throughout his life to educate the people of the world and the people of America about what had happened to his people in Cambodia. Someone who had endured extraordinary personal trial and great difficulty, and was worthy of this recognition," he said.

Schanberg said Dith Pran did not just talk about the genocide that took place in Cambodia, but against genocide around the world. "His message was that we always say that 'never again'. It should never happen again and of course it keeps happening again, so Pran's goal was to made 'never again' a realty, not just a phrase," he said.

Dith Pran's widow, Se Moeun Dith, told VOA in a phone interview this week that she was very happy about the resolutions.

She says she is very touched that the U.S. Congress has chose her husband, who tried to bring the message to the world and the United States about the tragedies in Cambodia during that period of time.

An estimated 1.7 million people died of starvation, sickness, and extrajudicial killings in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge from April 1975 to January 1979.

The five surviving top Khmer Rouge leaders are in their 70s and in custody of a U.N.-assisted tribunal awaiting trial. They are charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Dith Pran on the Cambodian Holocaust

April 24, 2008
Written by David C. Innes
World on the web

In November of 1986 at Boston College, I heard Dith Pran relate his experiences in “the killing fields” of Cambodia under the radical communist Khmer Rouge (as if communist weren’t radical enough). Many are familiar with him as the photojournalist in the 1984 Roland Joffe film, The Killing Fields. He died in New Jersey of pancreatic cancer at age 65. This is what he told us that day.

The population of Cambodia was 7 million in 1970 when Cambodia entered the Vietnam War. The Khmer Rouge took power in 1975, and by 1978 when the Vietnamese toppled them they had killed 2-3 million Cambodians, one third of the country’s population. They did this for the good of humanity.

Dith became convinced that something was monstrously wrong when the Khmer Rouge began emptying the hospitals. They also emptied the cities, abolished all institutions, even money.

To establish a truly communist society and build a new humanity, everyone whom they did not kill had to become a peasant. Put simply, the people must work the land. To reach this goal they killed off the educated class. Wearing eye glasses was sufficient indication of one’s corruption by education. If you were a high official, you and your whole family were killed. Lower officials were also killed, but not their families. People would tell the Khmer Rouges what they used to do as an occupation in the hope of getting their jobs back, but they were put to death unless they were unskilled. Teachers would admit to being so because they could not imagine a country without education. These were not killed right away, but sometimes a few years later. To save his own life, Dith pretended to be an illiterate taxi driver.

Generally, people’s imagination for evil fell far short of the plans the Khmer Rouges executed. Dith said it was as though they were from another planet. But of course they were not. They share the same human nature that we do. What restrains us? What civilizes us? Whatever it is, are we preserving it, or eroding it? This question gets scant attention in our universities. (Obviously, it is a central concern at The King’s College in New York City where I teach.)

The Khmer Rouges came in both male and female form, he said. Both were brutal. People had to pull both plough and wagon. Eighty year olds had to work. Everyone who ate had to work. There was no mercy. They killed children in front of their parents. Husbands and wives were tortured in front of each other. They separated husbands, wives and children. They buried the dead in wells (the only source of water), B-52 craters and trenches.

People played stupid. “The Khmer Rouges has many eyes.” If you said, “I miss coffee” or “I miss noodle soup,” you had an imperialist, capitalist mind. When they gave you your meager food ration and asked you, “Is that enough?,” you were sure to say, “yes.”

Dith said that The Killing Fields is a very accurate account of his experiences although the film is mild compared to what actually happened because American audiences can’t stomach anything stronger. I require my Introduction to Politics students to see The Killing Fields (or one of a number of other films of that sort) in order to make them dramatically aware of the stakes that are involved in political life, the dimensions of evil that can proceed from the human heart, and thus how important it is for them to understand tyranny and liberty, wise and unwise political institutions, the importance of political culture and citizen character, the dimensions of God’s amazing common grace, and where we are and in what direction we are moving on the spectrum between the Founding and the killing fields.

Of course, this is just a glimpse at the horror. Sydney Schanberg, the New York Times journalist whose life he saved, wrote The Death and Life of Dith Pran (1980). Dith himself wrote Children of Cambodia’s Killing Fields: Memoirs By Survivors (Yale, 1999). Haing Ngor, a Cambodian doctor with no acting experience who played Dith in The Killing Fields, wrote Survival in the Killing Fields (2003). You may also read Dith Pran’s obituary in The New York Sun.

Ith Chhun of Phnom Penh before the revolution: Gone but not forgotten

Monday, April 14, 2008
By Donald Kirk
World Tribune (Springfield, Virginia, USA)

The young man approached me with a simple enough offer as I strolled through the grounds of the Royal Palace near the banks of the Tonle Sap in Phnom Penh all those years ago. Did I need a guide; maybe an interpreter?

The response was easy. Sure, why not? The price was right too – less than the equivalent of US$1 for a one-hour look around as music tinkled from a pavilion and dancers rehearsed a ballet for Prince Norodom Sihanouk’s entourage.

Those were “the old days” when Cambodia was, as Prince Sihanouk liked to say, “an oasis of peace”, at least as seen by correspondents visiting from the far more dangerous war in Vietnam.
My guide, Ith Chhun, had learned English from Christian missionaries, and made just enough to support himself by showing people around the palace grounds.

He was happy to interpret for me for interviews in Phnom Penh and around the country.

Cambodia then was on the verge of the war that Prince Sihanouk had hoped to avoid by staying “neutral” while the North Vietnamese set up bases near the Vietnam border. He was travelling from Europe to Moscow and Beijing when he was overthrown in March 1970 by his U.S.-backed prime minister, Lon Nol.

As the war spread, Ith Chhun interpreted for an article I wrote for The New York Times Magazine on the terrible Cambodian army and for stories for the old Washington Star on battles down deceptively tranquil roads. One morning, as we drove towards the South Vietnam border, we discovered the bodies of 90 Vietnamese, men, women and children, mowed down by Cambodian soldiers as anti-Vietnam hatred ran wild.

Later, after I got back from writing a book on the widening war, I went down roads that seemed serene and secure, turning back when old men and women warned Ith Chhun the Khmer Rouge were nearby. While journalists were getting killed on forays from Phom Penh, I reported for the Chicago Tribune on villages terrorised by Khmer Rouge executions and on high-level corruption in the capital.

These memories flashed by as I read recently of the passing in New Jersey of Dith Pran, the Cambodian interpreter who became famous from the film The Killing Fields. Dith Pran worked mainly for The New York Times correspondent Sydney Schanberg. When Schanberg was away and Ith Chhun was with his family in some outlying town, Dith Pran worked for me and others. He and Ith Chhun were among a small group of interpreters taking the same risks, setting forth with journalists in old Mercedes-Benz cars from the Hotel Royale in Phnom Penh.

I was in New York when Cambodia fell to the Khmer Rouge, in April 1975, two years after America had stopped bombing Cambodia and left US-equipped government soldiers to fend for themselves. I read about the evacuation of Schanberg and others from the French embassy, feared for Dith Pran’s life and was immensely relieved when he showed up in Thailand after four years surviving in a jungle ruled by the Khmer Rouge.

I wondered, though, what had happened to Ith Chhun. Stories of slaughter in the countryside, during the three years, eight months and 10 days of Khmer Rouge rule, reminded me of the kidnappings and executions that peasants had told Ith Chhun and me were going on in the early 1970s while scholars were writing that nothing bad would happen when the Khmer Rouge took over in an “agrarian revolt”.

I thought of Ith Chhun concealing any knowledge of English, throwing away his glasses, books and notes, and joining the peasantry as their new masters drove them from the cities into the fields. As a Christian in a Buddhist society, Ith Chhun would have been more vulnerable than even the Buddhist monks whom the Khmer Rouge killed off as they destroyed pagodas and shrines.

When I returned, in May 1985, after covering the 10th anniversary of “the fall” of Vietnam, I ran into people in markets, repair shops and drink stands who remembered me. Some pointed to scars on their bodies where they had been bound and beaten. They all told of the loss of relatives and friends.

I asked about Ith Chhun, revisited the palace, heard from drivers who thought maybe they had heard about him but weren’t sure. The last time I was there, six years ago, no one remembered him.

I wondered if his bones were among those piled up in “the killing field” that visitors see outside the capital – a sampling of all the places where people were bludgeoned or strangled by guards to whom shooting was a waste of bullets.

It was as if he had never existed, had vanished in a time of killing when 2 million people like him had died, their images faded in flickering memory, nameless and forgotten.
----------------
Donald Kirk wrote two books on the war, Wider War: the Struggle for Cambodia, Thailand and Laos, and Tell it to the Dead: Memories of a War.

The relevance of Cambodia

April 11, 2008
Daily Press (Virginia, USA)

There are some names in the obituary columns that say more than the voices of the living.

Such is the name of Dith Pran, who died last Sunday at 65. He was the Cambodian photographer who somehow survived the collection of killing fields that his country became after the Americans abandoned it. And who somehow made his way to the United States to tell the world about it.

Hundreds of thousands of his countrymen would lose their lives after the Khmer Rouge swept into Phnom Penh and began rounding up just about anybody who could read and write. Literacy is dangerous. It gives people ideas, and the only ideas allowed in the new Cambodia were the Party's.

The toll of the Khmer Rouge's brief reign of terror in Cambodia (1975-78) is uncertain –– a million, two? Maybe a third of the country's pre-Communist population. The numbers can only be estimated, but the pictures of pyramids of skulls are well known. They've become emblematic of that bloody time.

It wasn't supposed to happen that way, not according to the sophisticates who were advocating an American withdrawal from Indochina in the 1970s. They blithely dismissed all the warnings that a bloodbath would follow once the United States abandoned its allies in Southeast Asia:

"Indochina Without Americans/For Most, A Better Life," –– headline in The New York Times, April 13, 1975.

The Times' correspondent in Phnom Penh, Sydney Schanberg, may have been the most blithe of all about Cambodia's better future once the Americans left. In a report four days before Phnom Penh fell, he wrote that for "ordinary people of Indochina ... it is difficult to imagine how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone."

Schanberg's limited imagination would soon enough be demonstrated by the unspeakable realities to follow. He was still sending optimistic dispatches even as the holocaust was proceeding. He was so monstrously wrong about what would happen in Cambodia after the Communist victory there that he won a Pulitzer Prize for it. The name of his Cambodian photographer, translator, guide and friend? Dith Pran.

The fast-talking Cambodian managed to save Schanberg and other Western journalists from the Khmer Rouge, but was unable to make it out of the country with them. In the swirling chaos of the Communist takeover, all was terror and confusion. The Khmer Rouge were emptying schools and hospitals and whole cities in their hunt for class enemies. (Anybody who wore glasses –– the surest sign of a bourgeois intellectual –– was in danger.)

Dith Pran managed to survive the ceaseless labor, the brutal beatings and the starvation diet (a tablespoon of rice a day), and eventually snuck across the Thai border. Reunited with Schanberg, he would go on to become a photographer for the Times.

Now, once again, the sophisticates are urging Americans to abandon an ally, this time beleaguered Iraq. The leading Democratic presidential candidates speak glibly of pulling out of that country as if there would be no ill effects. As in Cambodia?

This week the American commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, is testifying once again before Congress, and once again he'll be met by a chorus of cynicism, no matter how much real progress his strategy, aka The Surge, has made. Last time he testified, Hillary Clinton told the general it would take "a willing suspension of disbelief" to credit what he said. The critics of the war have their script and are sticking to it. Just as Sydney Schanberg knew all would be better once the Americans had left Cambodia.

What would an American withdrawal now mean for the Iraqis? It is now too late to ask Dith Pran. But his life and trials speak eloquently enough.

Greenberg is editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Send e-mail to pgreenberg@ arkansasonline.com.

'Killing Fields' Survivor Dith Pran Passes

By Cheoung Pochin, VOA Khmer
Original report from Washington
01 April 2008

Dith Pran, a New York Times photographer and survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime whose plight was made famous by the film "The Killing Fields," died in New Jersey Sunday morning, friends of the deceased said.

The cause of death was pancreatic cancer.

Sidney Schanberg, a former colleague at the Times and life-long friend, told VOA Khmer Dith Pran had been a determined reporter, staying in Cambodia as the Khmer Rouge rose to power in order to document for the world the brutality of the regime and the story of the Cambodian people.

Born Sept. 23, 1942, in Siem Reap province, Dith Pran was captured by the Khmer Rouge after refusing to evacuate Phnom Penh with his family in 1975, instead staying to help Schanberg in his coverage of the conflict.

Schanberg has said that he and other journalists would have been killed by Khmer Rouge soldiers in April 1975 had Dith Pran not intervened.

Dith Pran escaped the "killing fields" in 1979 and was reunited with his family and Schanberg.

He continued to work as a photographer for the Times and to crusade for the plight of Cambodians still embroiled in conflict and poverty.

Dith Sermoeun was Dith Pran's first wife and mother of his four children. She was by his bedside during the final weeks.

Before his death, she said, his memory was slipping and he was able to say little.

Dith Pran: A gallant guide

Tuesday, April 1, 2008
By H. D. S. Greenway
The International Herald Tribune

The world got to know of Dith Pran, who died of cancer Sunday, through the power of movies, specifically "The Killing Fields," in which he was played by Haing Ngor, who won an Oscar for his performance.

I first got to know Pran - in Cambodia the first name often comes last - when he was a receptionist behind the desk of a hotel just outside the ancient ruins of Angkor Wat. That was more than 40 years ago when Cambodia was at peace while the war raged throughout the rest of what was once French Indochina.

If you flew in from Vietnam you could always tell you had crossed over the Cambodian frontier when you saw a train moving on the ground. Trains didn't run very much in Vietnam in those days. But Cambodia was an oasis of calm. And Angkor Wat was something that war reporters longed to see, especially since there was no one shooting at you. Pran arranged evening elephant-back rides to a high hill overlooking the Tonle Sap, Cambodia's great inland sea.

But the ides of March 1970, saw a coup that deposed Cambodia's eccentric ruler, Norodom Sihanouk. The war he had so assiduously maneuvered to avoid overwhelmed Cambodia with a fierceness that would eventually overshadow Vietnam in cruelty and access.

When the tourist business abruptly shut down - the Khmer Rouge ultimately burned Pran's hotel to the ground - Pran, along with many of his colleagues, moved to the capital, Phnom Penh. There they found another, less wealthy and infinitely more dangerous group of clients, the foreign press, who desperately needed their services to get around in a country they knew little about.

Pran seemed to me to be the best of them. We worked together a couple of times, but when I tried to hire him permanently for The Washington Post, for which I was working, I got a polite no. He was signing up with Sydney Schanberg of The New York Times, and there began the extraordinary friendship that "The Killing Fields" portrayed.

I have often thought of those gallant guides and interpreters as similar to big-game hunters who would bring their exotic customers from overseas into close proximity to the dangerous beasts of war so that they could shoot their pictures and get their stories. If needs be they would risk their own lives to get their clients out of trouble.

It was these guides who taught us how to survive. If, for example, you came to a village and no children surrounded your car, you got out quick. For if the normally curious children were kept out of sight, then there was trouble in the neighborhood of which the adults might be too afraid to speak.

When the end came, and the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh, Pran found his clients in more trouble than he could imagine. The fanatic Khmer Rouge were about to shoot Sydney, and his British colleague, Jon Swain, out of hand. Pran saved their lives by softly and persistently talking to their captors, who eventually let them go.

It was their white skins that immediately made Schanberg and Swain suspect, but later on it was their white skins and foreign passports that saved them in their refuge inside the French embassy. Pran's Cambodian skin almost cost him his life. Schanberg was unable to save Pran when the Khmer Rouge said all Cambodians had to leave the safety of the French Embassy compound, and so he slipped away, pretending to be an illiterate in a new genocidal society in which even to be able to read or write, or be caught with eyeglasses, was a death sentence.

The New York Times editor, Bill Keller, got it right when he spoke of a "special category of journalistic heroism - the local partner, the stringer, the interpreter, the driver, the fixer who knows the ropes," and who makes the work of "foreign reporters in frightening places" possible.

This is especially true today in Iraq where some 150 Iraqis have died trying to get the news or help foreign reporters in very frightening places. They seldom get the credit they deserve, but the news would not come to you without them.

H. D. S. Greenway's column appears regularly in The Boston Globe.

New York Times: DITH PRAN The Last Word

New York Times photographer Dith Pran survived the Cambodian killing fields. He dedicated his life to telling the story of the Khmer Rouge's genocide. Live with Honor and Die with Honor.

Courageous voice now beyond the killing fields

After his escape, Dith Pran educated people about the Khmer Rouge genocide and what it meant to the world. Picture / Reuters

Tuesday April 01, 2008
By Andrew Gumbel
The New Zealand Herald

On April 12, 1975, the day the United States withdrew from Cambodia and evacuated its embassy in the enveloping chaos of a civil war gone horribly wrong, New York Times journalist Sydney Schanberg made a fateful decision. He wanted to stay behind.

For three years, as the paper's Southeast Asia correspondent, Schanberg had become increasingly drawn to the tragedy of a country that had endured a covert US bombing campaign, a succession of puppet Governments inspiring popular disgust and, now, the threat of an impending takeover by the fanatical and murderous Khmer Rouge.

But Schanberg had also developed a more personal passion, and that was the strong bond tying him to his invaluable interpreter and local assistant, Dith Pran. He had no intention of doing anything in Cambodia without Dith's support and help.

So when the word came that US citizens and their Cambodian friends and dependants had just a few hours to report to the embassy and flee to safety, the first thing Schanberg did was to send a messenger for Dith.

They both had a choice, he explained. To leave now, while their safety could still be guaranteed, or to cut their ties with American officialdom and take their chances.

"Though we have little time," Schanberg later wrote, "his face is calm. He knows I want to stay and he says he doesn't see any immediate risk and therefore no reason we should leave now. We reinforce each other's compulsions and desires.

"He is as obsessed as I am with seeing the story to the end."

They both calculated, wrongly, that once the Khmer Rouge overran Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, and took over the Government, they would temper their ferocious rampage and make some effort to unify the country under their leadership.

Journalistic passion, or friendship, or an exaggerated sense of professional loyalty - it's hard, even after the passage of more than three decades, to be sure which - blinded them to the dangers. And it nearly killed them both.

Five days later, the Khmer Rouge entered the city and began the brutal campaign of revenge and ideological frenzy that would later grow into one of the worst instances of mass murder in modern history, the killing, by starvation or assassination, of almost half of Cambodia's seven million people.

On the very morning of the Khmer Rouge's arrival, Schanberg, Dith, their driver and two other Western journalists - Jon Swain of the Sunday Times and freelance photographer Al Rockoff - were picked up by troops patrolling the streets in an armoured car. Quickly, they became convinced that they were about to be executed.

All but Dith were thrown into the armoured car; the translator stayed outside arguing, pleading and entreating with the soldiers.

At first, Schanberg thought Dith was trying to avoid being thrown into the car and save his own life. But, in fact, quite the opposite was happening.

Dith was making the case that he should be allowed to accompany his Western friends, whatever fate awaited them, calculating that, without him, their death was certain.

He was, Schanberg said, "offering, in effect, to forfeit his own life on the chance that he might save ours".

And that is exactly how things played out. For 40 minutes, on a gut-wrenching drive to a remote riverside where the journalists almost certainly faced summary execution, and then for another hour after the vehicle had stopped, Dith talked and argued and cajoled and reasoned with the men until, at last, they put down their rifles and offered their prisoners something to drink.

Dith later explained to Schanberg: "Even if I get killed, I have to first try to say something to them. Because you and I are together.

"I was very scared, yes, because in the beginning I thought they were going to kill us, but my heart said I had to try this. I understand this and know your heart well. You would do the same thing for me."

Behind the success of almost every foreign correspondent who ventures into hazardous territory in lands where the customs and the language are unfamiliar lies the efforts of a local assistant, or "fixer", like Dith.

Fixers don't just act as interpreters for interviews, or perform secretarial tasks to set up appointments. They are the correspondent's window into a culture, their instant expert telling them where the boundaries of reasonable risk lie, their No 1 inside source who can provide access to key officials or rebel leaders.

Mostly, they remain unsung - paid well by local standards while the news story is hot, then left to return to their normal life, or what is left of it, once the conflict subsides and media attention moves on.

Dith Pran, though, was a little different - not only because of the extraordinary personal risks he took and the heartbreaking personal catastrophe that ensued but also because of the dogged loyalty and friendship of Schanberg, who told his story of horror and survival in an absolutely gripping New York Times magazine piece, published after he finally escaped from Cambodia in 1980.

THAT piece became the basis of the hit movie The Killing Fields, directed by Roland Joffe and starring another Khmer Rouge survivor, Haing S. Ngor, as Dith.

Now the story is being widely retold after Dith's death, at 65. He succumbed at the weekend to pancreatic cancer at his adoptive home in New Jersey, 29 years after he arrived in the US emaciated from hunger, his teeth rotting but his spirit, miraculously still intact. His is the ultimate survivor's story, as powerful as anyone's who has faced the horrors of genocide and come out alive.

As a Cambodian, Dith paid a far higher price for his journalistic courage than his Western friends. Shortly after their first narrow brush with death in Phnom Penh, they all rushed to the one remotely safe place left in town, the French embassy.

But the embassy compound was hardly secure. After three days, Dith decided he would head out of the city rather than wait until all the foreigners had left.

And so, on April 20, he left in a rickety Toyota wagon, carrying US$2600 in potential bribe money as well as food and cigarettes given to him by the Western journalists. Schanberg, Swain and the others were trucked out of the country by the end of the month.

Dith quickly understood that, as an educated man who had worked with Westerners, he was in mortal danger from the Khmer Rouge's campaign against the middle classes. So he passed himself off as a humble taxi driver, in dirty clothes, sandals and a working-class neckerchief.

The civil war wrecked the harvest that first year, leading to mass starvation. Dith worked slave-labour hours in the fields but saw his rice ration reduced to a spoonful a day. He was caught stealing rice and was beraten with machetes.

Once he heard that the Vietnamese had taken over his hometown, Siem Reap, he headed there to look for his family. His father had died of starvation and four of his five siblings had been killed by the Khmer Rouge.

In a nearby forest, he saw the remains of as many as 5000 of his former neighbours scattered among the trees and clogging up water wells. In July 1979, he made the dangerous journey to Thailand. He got word out to Schanberg and was taken to the US, where his wife and four children had endured 4 1/2 years of uncertainty.

With the New York Times' help, Dith worked as a news photographer and roving ambassador, educating audiences about the Khmer Rouge genocide and its implications for the rest of the world. "I am a one-person crusade," he liked to say.

He prospered in his American life, but his ordeal stayed with him to the end, like an open wound.

"There is no doctor who can heal me," he once said.

"But I know a man like Pol Pot, he is even sicker than I am ... We both have the horror in our heads. In Cambodia, the killer and the victim have the same disease."

Obituary: Dith Pran

Cartoon by Sacrava (on the web at http://sacrava.blogspot.com)

Quotes from 'Killing Fields' survivor Dith Pran

March 30 (Reuters) - Dith Pran, whose ordeal at the hands of Cambodia's brutal Khmer Rouge regime was depicted in the movie "The Killing Fields," became a crusader for the restoration of his homeland.

Dith, who died on Sunday at age 65, compiled a book of recollections of survivors of Cambodia's genocide and was named a goodwill ambassador for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. In addition to working as a photographer for The New York Times, he ran the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project.

Following are quotes from Dith about Cambodia:

* "It is important for me that the new generation of Cambodians and Cambodian Americans become active and tell the world what happened to them and their families ... I want them never to forget the faces of their relatives and friends who were killed during that time. The dead are crying out for justice."

-- Introductory note in his compilation "Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields: Memoirs by Survivors."

"I see ... a pile of skulls and bones. For the first time since my arrival, what I see before me is too painful, and I break down completely. These are my relatives, friends and neighbors, I keep thinking ... It is a long time before I am calm again. And then I am able, with my bare hands, to rearrange the skulls and bones so that they are not scattered about."

-- Writing about his return to Cambodia for The New York Times in 1989.

* "This is sad for the Cambodian people because he was never held accountable for the deaths of 2 million of his fellow countryman. The Jewish people's search for justice did not end with the death of Hitler and the Cambodian people's search for justice doesn't end with Pol Pot."

-- Upon the death of Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot in 1998, quoted in The Times.

"There is no doctor who can heal me. 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."

-- A 1991 Los Angeles Times interview.

* "I saw light, like the sunrise, when I got to the border but I felt nervous until today -- when I get complete freedom."

-- Quoted in The Times in 1986 on the day he became a U.S. citizen and recalling his escape from Cambodia into Thailand. (Compiled by Bill Trott; Editing by Patricia Zengerle)

Cambodia survivor faces another battle

Inspiration for 'Killing Fields,' Dith Pran, battling pancreatic cancer.

Monday, March 24, 2008
BY JUDY PEET
The Star-Ledger (New Jersey, USA)

WOODBRIDGE, N.J. - The world knows him as a powerful voice for the ghosts of the Cambodian Killing Fields, but Dith Pran speaks barely above a whisper now.

The man who survived starvation, torture and Pol Pot's murderous children's brigade is now fighting a new war from a hospital bed in New Jersey. This time the enemy is even more relentless: pancreatic cancer.

Friends and family say that if anyone can win this battle, it is Pran, 65, once described as a survivor "in the Darwinian sense," whose story was the basis for the Academy Award-winning 1984 movie "The Killing Fields."

Pran says he intends to beat the odds, but ultimately, "this is my path, and I must go where it takes me."

"We have already forced the enemy into the suburbs," Pran said jokingly of his cancer last week as he rallied after finishing a round of radiation therapy. "Food, medicine and meditation are good soldiers, and I am ready to fight."

The healthy, round-faced man who danced at his son's wedding just last fall is now a gaunt 118 pounds. The only time in his adult life that he weighed less was when he staggered out of the jungle on the Thai border in 1979, malnourished, covered in scars and suffering from malaria.

But with typical Pran grace, he refuses to despair about his medical odds -- "I know how to recover from adversity." He plans to use his condition as a platform to campaign for early cancer screening. It is also a time to reflect on an extraordinary life well lived.

"You or I could never have survived what Pran has. And he is still one of the nicest people I ever met," said former New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg, 74, who insisted on sharing his 1976 Pulitzer Prize for covering the war in Cambodia with his translator, assistant and friend, Dith Pran.

"Pran saved my life, nearly at the cost of his," Schanberg added, as he bustled around Pran's hospital room, talking to staff, taking notes, reading messages from the legion of friends Pran has acquired in his 30-year photojournalism career. "There are no words to say what Pran means to me."

In 1975, Schanberg and other journalists were eventually granted safe passage to Thailand by the Khmer Rouge rebels who had seized power in Cambodia. Pran was forced into the countryside, where he spent more than four years in conditions that destroyed more than 1.5 million people -- nearly a third of his country's inhabitants.

They were killed because they were connected to the former government, because they were intellectuals or doctors or lawyers or teachers. People were killed by the Khmer Rouge because they wore glasses, held hands, gave rice to their dying children or just because.

It was in this environment that Pran lived by hiding his intelligence, education and his strength. He withstood beatings and torture, disease and malnutrition. Fifty other members of his family, including his father, three brothers, sister, nieces and nephews, did not survive.

But survival came at a huge cost, one that Pran thinks may now have come due.

"I ate bugs and even more disgusting things. I drank dirty water; who knows what kind of poisons were in it from all the (American) bombs? Maybe that is why the cancer comes, 30 years later," he says with a small, philosophical shrug.

Pran says he is not a religious man but he has a Buddhist sense of destiny. "It was right for me to stay behind for Sydney, even if it means I am on this path now," he says with quiet dignity. "I want to save lives, including my own, but Cambodians believe we just rent this body."

Judy Peet may be reached at jpeet@starledger.com or 973-392-5983.

Dith Pran, survivor of Cambodian horror, faces cancer with serenity

HIS LAST WITNESSING

Wednesday, March 19, 2008
BY JUDY PEET Star-Ledger Staff (New Jersey, USA)

The world knows him as a powerful voice for the ghosts of the Cambodian Killing Fields, but Dith Pran speaks barely above a whisper now.

The man who survived starvation, torture and Pol Pot's murderous children's brigade is now fighting a new war from a hospital bed in New Jersey. This time the enemy is even more relentless: pancreatic cancer.

Friends and family say that if anyone can win this battle, it is Pran, 65, once described as a survivor "in the Darwinian sense," whose story was the basis for the Academy Award-winning 1984 movie, "The Killing Fields."

Pran, who lives in Woodbridge, says he intends to beat the odds, but ultimately, "this is my path and I must go where it takes me."

"We have already forced the enemy into the suburbs," Pran joked of his cancer last week as he rallied after finishing a round of radiation therapy. "Food, medicine and meditation are good soldiers, and I am ready to fight."

The healthy, round-faced man who danced at his son's wedding just last fall is now a gaunt 118 pounds. The only time in his adult life that he weighed less was when he staggered out of the jungle on the Thai border in 1979, malnourished, covered in scars and suffering from malaria.

But with typical Pran grace, he refuses to despair about his medical odds -- "I know how to recover from adversity." He plans to use his condition as a platform to campaign for early cancer screening. It is also a time to reflect on an extraordinary life well lived.

"You or I could never have survived what Pran has. And he is still one of the nicest people I ever met," said former New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg, 74, who insisted on sharing his 1976 Pulitzer Prize for covering the war in Cambodia with his translator, assistant and friend, Dith Pran.

"Pran saved my life, nearly at the cost of his," Schanberg added, as he bustled around Pran's hospital room, talking to staff, taking notes, reading messages from the legion of friends Pran has acquired in his 30-year photojournalism career. "There are no words to say what Pran means to me."

It is a poignant reversal from a time Pran took care of Schanberg. It was April 1975, in Cambodia, five years into civil war.

The capital, Phnom Penh, was surrounded by the Khmer Rouge, the Chinese-supported Communist insurgents. Most of the Americans had already left, but Schanberg, the Times correspondent, decided to stay and witness the city's fall.

Schanberg offered safe passage out to Pran, his wife and four children. Pran sent his family out on an American helicopter, but stayed behind to help his friend. According to Schanberg's 1980 account, "The Death and Life of Dith Pran," he and a handful of other journalists were arrested almost immediately and would have been killed if Pran had not intervened on their behalf.

He saved their lives, but was targeted by the Khmer Rouge, about to launch "the agrarian reform," which became a holocaust.

Schanberg and the other journalists were eventually granted safe passage to Thailand. Pran was forced into the Cambodian countryside, where he spent more than four years in conditions that destroyed more than 1.5 million people -- nearly a third of his country's inhabitants.

They were killed because they were connected to the former government, because they were intellectuals, or doctors or lawyers or teachers. People were killed by the Khmer Rouge because they wore glasses, held hands, gave rice to their dying children, or just because.

Those who didn't die were worked in labor camps 16 hours a day, planting rice that was given to China or hand-building dams and roads.

Those who didn't die from overwork and malnutrition were plagued by disease, poisonous insects and infection.

It was in this environment that Pran lived by hiding his intelligence, education and his strength. He withstood beatings and torture, disease and malnutrition. Fifty other members of his family, including, his father, three brothers, sister, nieces and nephews, did not survive.

But survival came at a huge cost, one that Pran thinks may now have come due.

"I ate bugs and even more disgusting things. I drank dirty water; who knows what kind of poisons were in it from all the (American) bombs? Maybe that is why the cancer comes, 30 years later," he says with a small, philosophical shrug.

Pran says he is not a religious man, but he has a Buddhist sense of destiny. "It was right for me to stay behind for Sydney, even if it means I am on this path now," he says with quiet dignity. "I want to save lives, including my own, but Cambodians believe we just rent this body.

"It is just a house for the spirit, and if the house is full of termites, it is time to leave."

Before locking the door, however, there is still cleanup to be done, Pran says. There are understandings to be reached with his first wife, Meoun, who brings him rice noodles every day, and his close friend of many years, Bette Parslow, who brings his little white dog, Gabby, to sit on his bed.

The women respect each other's place in Pran's life. Meoun, whose marriage to Pran was arranged when she was 16 years old, has been divorced from him for several years, "but a husband is like a kite. You let the string loose, but you never let go," she says.

She puts out pictures of their children, one of which is the family Red Cross passport photo when they escaped Phnom Penh in 1975. "I can still remember him standing there as we went to the helicopter. I didn't see him for four years, and when he came back, the nightmares were so bad."

She gently touches Pran's face, then tidies up the room. She pulls out get-well wishes from journalists around the world, acknowledging the contribution of this legendary humanitarian and photographer who has worked for the New York Times since 1980.

More visitors arrive with cameras. They are planning a documentary to be shot in his hospital room. It could be blended with footage of his exhaustive campaigning on behalf of Cambodian genocide victims and refugees, his 1989 Ellis Island Medal of Honor and his 1985 appointment as goodwill ambassador to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

There are visits with his children, grandchildren and dozens of colleagues who ignore hospital rules and wander in constantly. They are, after all, media.

There is the determination to use his late-life celebrity to help raise awareness about the "sneaky" ravages of pancreatic cancer, the same disease faced by actor Patrick Swayze and which claimed the lives of Michael Landon and Luciano Pavarotti.

"I thought because I didn't drink, smoke or do drugs that I was safe. But I ignored signs (weight loss, abdominal pains) until it was too late," Pran says. "I hope people learn from me and insist that your doctor test for cancer. Do it every six months.

"I am not afraid to die, but I hate to see a life wasted."

Ironically, Pran's illness was diagnosed on the eve of war crimes trials for the top surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge -- Pol Pot died of a heart attack in 1998 -- but he says it no longer matters. "It was all political, the same way America dropping bombs on Cambodia was political.

"It doesn't matter if death came from bombs or torture," Pran said. "What matters is that we remember and we keep talking and maybe some day we will mean it when we say about a holocaust: 'never again.'"

In 1989, Pran returned to Cambodia with a human rights commission. While there, he went back to his birthplace near Angkor Wat to finally inter the ashes of his parents, the only members of his family whose remains he could find after the war.

At the end of the Buddhist ceremony, the monks released a small turtle.

Recounting the ceremony in a Times article, Pran said: "By giving freedom to another living creature we gain merit and release from suffering, for ourselves or for the people we love, in the life to come."

Judy Peet may be reached at jpeet@starledger.com or (973) 392-5983.

Dith Pran's photos during his hospital treatment

(Photos: Courtesy of Dith Pran's family)

Legendary Photojournalist Dith Pran Battling Cancer

----------
Anyone who wish to send well-wishers to
Mr. Dith Pran may do so by sending them to the following address:

Dith Pran
Roosevelt Care Center
Edison, N.J. 08837
USA
----------

By Stephen Wolgast
National Press Photographers Association

NEW YORK, NY (March 8, 2008) - Dith Pran, who survived torture under the genocidal Khmer Rouge after helping The New York Times’s Cambodia correspondent for three years, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in January. He was hospitalized for three weeks starting in mid-February, and was released to the Roosevelt Care Center in Edison, NJ, on Friday.

After escaping his country in 1979, Dith, 65, became a photographer for The New York Times in 1980, where he remains on staff. [His given name is Pran; Dith is his family name.] He was made famous by the 1984 film “The Killing Fields,” which depicts him in his role as a translator and journalist assisting Sydney Schanberg, then a foreign correspondent for The Times.

Schanberg covered the Cambodian civil war from 1972 until the Communists took over in 1975, creating a slave society, banishing city dwellers to work camps in the countryside and executing anyone perceived as educated. Most Western reporters left the country when the severity of the Khmer Rouge’s rule became apparent, but Schanberg and a handful of others stayed, with Dith continuing to assist.

Visiting a hospital with Schanberg and two other journalists, Dith and the others were arrested and held for execution. Dith saved their lives by convincing the Khmer Rouge that the reporters were neutral French nationals (they were not). Schanberg and the other foreigners soon left the country.

Dith was exiled to a labor camp, where one of the deprivations was being fed only one spoonful of rice a day. In October 1979 he walked to Thailand, where he gained his freedom. In January 1980, Schanberg wrote “The Death and Life of Dith Pran” in The New York Times Magazine. The memoir became the basis for the movie, and Dith’s renown was established.

During the Khmer Rouge regime, about 1.5 million Cambodians were killed or starved to death by the government. Dith, who was born September 27, 1942, lost 50 family members to the Khmer Rouge, including his parents, three brothers, a sister and their families. Only one sister survived.

Dith founded the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project to educate American students about the mass killings. He has testified before U.S. House and Senate subcommittees on East Asia and the Pacific, and was appointed a Goodwill Ambassador by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in 1985.

In 1997 he compiled “Children of Cambodia’s Killing Fields: Memoirs by Survivors” (Yale). The child witnesses, now grown up, write of babies killed by bayonets and adults killed with the backs of hoes — to save on bullets. In a review of the book in The New York Times, Lance Gould writes, “The overwhelming simplicity of the contributors’ recollections builds a solid, irrefutable censure of one of humanity’s most shocking crimes.”

Despite his accolades, including four honorary doctorates, Dith remains humble and dedicated to his homeland. “Part of my life is saving life. I don't consider myself a politician or a hero. I’m a messenger. If Cambodia is to survive, she needs many voices.”

Dith Pran battling cancer

Dith Pran

The Killing Fields, the Hollywood movie featuring Dith Pran's life under the KR regime

Dith Pran gravely ill in the US

11 March 2008
By San Suwith
Radio Free Asia
Translated from Khmer by Heng Soy

Dith Pran, the former prisoner of the wall-less jail (KR regime) of the Democratic Kampuchea regime, whose biography under the KR regime was featured in the Hollywood film “The Killing Fields”, is gravely ill because of pancreatic cancer.

65-year-old Dith Pran used to be a translator and an aid to US reporter Sydney Schanberg of the New York Times before Phnom Penh fell into the hands of the KR.

Dith Pran helped Sydney Schanberg and 2 other reporters escaped the KR by lying to them that these reporters were French, therefore, they were independent.

After 1979, he met Sydney Schanberg again, and he became a photographer for The New York Times. He wrote and helped in the writing of several notes about the KR Killing Fields.

Mrs. Vornida, Dith Pran’s daughter-in-law, told RFA that, right now, Dith Pran stays at the Roosevelt Health Care Center in Edison, New Jersey.

Following medication and radiation, the doctors found that the lump in Dith Pran’s pancreas is still growing, and they have decided to stop all medical intervention to allow him to have some time to spend with his friends and family.

OU Int'l Week speaker recalls Cambodia's killing fields

2007-05-17
By Meghan Montgomery
Athens NEWS Campus Reporter
Ohio University, USA

The keynote speaker for Ohio University's 2007 International Week recounted his survival from one of history's worst genocides Tuesday night at Baker Center.

"I never gave up, and I promised in my heart over time that I would never stop talking when I survived," said Dith Pran, whose story was told in the award-winning film, "The Killing Fields." "This story needed to be told, so you can save lives for the future generations, because this could happen again and again."

Dith Pran survived the Cambodian genocide committed by the Communist Khmer Rouge regime, explained a representative from OU's Cambodian Student Association during Pran's introduction.

In the late 1970s, Pran covered the Cambodian civil war for The New York Times, but was not permitted to leave the country when other foreign correspondents evacuated. According to the Cambodian student representative, Pran endured four years of torture and starvation in labor camps, while the Khmer Rouge killed nearly a quarter of the population, including 50 of Pran's relatives.

Now, as the founder of the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project, Pran speaks about the Cambodian holocaust to promote awareness and prevent future genocides. "I'm not a hero, I am a messenger," said Pran.

In the beginning of his speech, Pran explained how the Communist regime was allowed to take power partly because of negative American public opinion after the Vietnam War. "People ignored Cambodia because American voters at the time said 'don't go back to Southeast Asia...enough is enough,'" said Pran. "I know why America did not look back, because they said 'we lost so many people already.' That's why during the time no one paid attention."

Pran said that when the Khmer Rouge came to power, they thought communism was the best way to change the world. "Communism to them meant you work together, you sleep together, you eat together, and you are supposed to be one person," said Pran. "But this is not how it works, because they have another rule... a jungle rule that we suffer."

Pran said that when the Khmer Rouge took the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, in 1975, he made the mistake of staying behind. "That's why we lost so many people, because we never believed the Khmer Rouge would do such horrible things to people, such as killing children and killing priests," said Pran.

According to Pran, when the Communist regime came to power, their first initiative was to rebuild Phnom Penh and empty the city by moving the urban population to the countryside. He said the Khmer Rouge destroyed everything because they believed in starting from zero.

"They wanted to kill all of the generation who knew anything 'American,' and who felt what lies in the city is better than the countryside," said Pran. "They wanted to get rid of the city people and promote the country people, because they believed they could turn the people in the countryside into robots who would not question and who would just do what they want."

Pran said that although the Khmer Rouge wanted to supposedly rebuild the country, they killed the engineer who could build irrigation; they killed the doctor who could save lives; and they stopped educating the children who were supposed to be the future generation. Pran said they didn't have hospitals because the Khmer Rouge closed them, so they made untrained teenagers their nurses and doctors. "They killed by allowing people to starve to death, by killing doctors, and by confiscating medicine," recalled Pran.

In order to survive, Pran said he would eat crickets, or anything he could. "Cambodians don't eat wolf, but when you have no choice and you are sent to a jungle with plenty of wolf... you learn how to make a trap," he said.

Pran stated the importance of keeping hope in order to survive the genocide. "Losing hope happened to many people. Some people gave up hope, but I never gave up hope," said Pran. "I believed that the evil never could stay forever, but I pretended to be stupid. That's how I survived; you have to know how to play games with the enemy in order to survive."

At the end of his speech, Pran affirmed the importance of speaking out in situations like these, in order to minimize the killings. "We cannot stop it completely, but we must learn how to do something instead of saying we can't do it," he said.

Pran's story and message is depicted in "The Killing Fields" and in his book, "Children of the Killing Fields." He testified before the House of Representatives about the Cambodian genocide, and today receives recognition for his struggle and his mission.

Tuesday night, Thomas Hodson, director of the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at OU, awarded Pran the school's Carr Van Anda Award for his contributions to journalism.

"I suffered tremendously, but I have people here who care, and who won't let this happen again. I hope together we can make a change," said Pran.