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”.

War reporter Jon Swain pays tribute to Dith Pran

New York Times photographer Dith Pran in a portrait taken in the 1980s

April 6, 2008
From The Sunday Times
Times Online (UK)

Jon Swain was about to be shot by the Khmer Rouge when Dith Pran intervened. The Sunday Times war reporter pays tribute to the courage of his friend, who died last week

Four years after his enslavement by the Khmer Rouge, an intrepid Cambodian stumbled out of the thickly wooded jungle to freedom. His legs were wobbly. He was weak with malaria. His front teeth were broken. His face was gaunt. He was incredibly thin – but he still retained his lopsided grin.

That grin was still in place – although fading – in the weeks before Dith Pran died last Sunday in a hospital in America, his adopted home, from pancreatic cancer. He was 65. Although wan and thin, he moved on gracefully, loved and mourned by all whose lives he had touched. “This is my path and I must go where it takes me,” he said shortly before the end.

Pran’s harrowing personal tale of enslavement and escape from the Khmer Rouge in 1979 had eventually become the subject of the Oscar-winning film The Killing Fields, directed by Roland Joffé, which focused global attention on one of history’s worst genocides.

Pran was justly famous. Were it not for this former tourist guide to the fabled Angkor temples, who later became interpreter and assistant to Sydney Schanberg, a reporter for The New York Times, in Cambodia, the world’s eyes would probably not have been opened to the monstrous atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge in his native land. In its rush to forge a new society, 2m people died in executions or from starvation, disease and overwork – nearly a third of the population.

However, Pran did more. After his escape he moved to America, where he worked as a photographer for The New York Times and spent the rest of his life speaking out about what his countrymen had been through. He also pushed for war crimes trials for the Khmer Rouge leaders – trials that are finally due to begin this year in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital. Pran, alas, will never see them.

“I am a one-person crusade,” he once said. “I must speak for those who did not survive and those who still suffer.”

I owe this honourable Cambodian a debt of gratitude that I can never erase. He saved my life when I was captured by the Khmer Rouge.

At the time the Cambodian war was a sideshow to the war raging next door in Vietnam and some aspects of it seemed comic. Before sallying forth every morning into the countryside to witness the fighting, we reporters would meet at the Groaning Table – an open-air cafe – for a military briefing from a charming colonel called Am Rong, whose unfortunate name was a butt of endless jokes. His military communiqués, I remember, were invariably nonsense.

The seductive wartime capital, with its brothels and opium parlours, encouraged all kinds of indiscretions and we conducted our lives as though we were characters in a Graham Greene novel; or we liked to imagine that we did.

However, the war was deadly serious. So we also took insane risks and witnessed and reported on some of the most appalling human suffering that I have seen.

In the process more than 20 of the tiny foreign press corps of about 60 were killed in a matter of months by the Khmer Rouge, who never took prisoners. And many more Cambodian journalists also died.

We loved the Cambodians, who had a disarming insouciance in the face of danger. The difference between us and the band of local journalists we hired to interpret the language, politics and culture was that they were seeing and reporting on their own country being destroyed. We, on the other hand, were reporting from the privileged position of visitors who could always bail out. For them, there could be nowhere else to go: they and their loved ones were trapped by the war and their survival was dependent on the outcome.

It was Pran who was the unacknowledged dean of this Cambodian press corps, not because of the status that his job with the venerable New York Times gave him, but because he was so unusually acute and resourceful and had unassailable integrity.

The horrors of the war had made morality a luxury that many of his fellow countrymen had long since discarded. Yet, unlike so many of the politicians and generals for whom survival and money were the ultimate objectives, Pran remained faithful to his principles. He believed passionately that the story of the destruction of his beautiful homeland needed to be told. And to that end he risked his life time after time.

I first met Pran in 1972. Although his loyalty was always to Schanberg, he was ready to give help and advice to me and all the other journalists. Never more so than on April 17, 1975 – the day of the fall of Phnom Penh.

On that same day Schanberg, Al Rockoff, an American photographer, and I were captured by the Khmer Rouge.

A squad of teenage soldiers with hate-filled eyes forced us into a captured armoured personnel carrier (APC). Pran, realising we were going to be executed, selflessly argued to be allowed to join us inside, knowing full well that without his communication skills we were doomed.

It is this story that is told in The Killing Fields. And it was Dith Pran himself, by the way, who coined the phrase “killing fields” after seeing the grim piles of corpses and skeletal remains on his desperate trek to freedom.

That was in the future. Back when Pran volunteered himself as a prisoner, there seemed little hope of escape for any of us. First we were taken to the banks of the Mekong river; then the rear door of the APC opened and a pair of Khmer Rouge soldiers, pointing rifles, beckoned us out. We knew they were going to shoot us.

Pran got out first and began to talk softly and firmly, as he always did. He told the Khmer Rouge that we were neutral journalists who had come to report on their historic “liberation”; and, after a while, our would-be killers began to calm down. The tension suddenly evaporated and we were freed.

A few days later we tried to doctor one of my two British passports for Pran so that he could be evacuated with us to Thailand as a foreigner – but we failed.

The Khmer Rouge forced him to go into the countryside – by now becoming a giant labour camp – where he somehow survived torture, starvation and a life of unremitting hard toil.

When he emerged four years later, 50 members of his family had perished. Mercifully, Schanberg had evacuated Pran’s wife, Ser Moeun, and his four beloved children before Phnom Penh fell and they were safely in America.

The first I knew of his freedom was when I received a telegram from Schanberg, who had been tortured by guilt about Pran’s disappearance and had led his own one-man crusade to trace his helper and friend.

The telegram included a personal message from Pran, patterned on a Cambodian proverb: “Hi Jon. The world is round. Now I meet you again. Pran was in bad shape, but the life is remained. Love Pran.”

I still have it. In subsequent years I saw him several times back in Cambodia.

It is a place that takes over the soul, and those who have known it at its worst are irresistibly drawn back. We revisited old spots – including, once, the place on the riverbank where, blinking in the sunlight, we had stood facing the rifles of the Khmer Rouge peasant boys, waiting for the volley of shots that would kill us.

The slight man I had known had put on weight; he had adopted American food and habits and had a New Jersey twang. Beneath all that he was still the same Pran: warm and attentive, with that peculiarly Cambodian joie de vivre and a mischievous sense of humour.

His business card announced simply: “Dith Pran – photographer”. On the other side, however, it listed information about how the Khmer Rouge had ruined his beloved homeland.

Using his survival as a tool against injustice and genocide, he became a good-will ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, founded a holocaust awareness project and compiled a book of children’s accounts of growing up under the Khmer Rouge.

It is given to few journalists to make a real difference to people’s lives. Once safe in America, Pran could have retreated into the background. Countless Cambodians did. But he saw it as his duty to stop the memory of what had happened to his country fading away. That and his courage and loyalty are what made Pran magnificent.

Latterly, friends said, he had become disappointed with the way Cambodia was becoming rotten again with corruption and cruelty. His marriage to Ser Moeun had broken up and another marriage had failed.

Despite personal setbacks, he bore his public role gracefully. Right to the end he always thought there was more that he could do, according to Schanberg, who spent many days attending to his dying friend.

“Pran was a true reporter – a fighter for the truth and for his people,” Schanberg said. “When the cancer struck, he fought for his life again. And he did it with the same Buddhist calm and courage and positive spirit that made [him] so special.”

Having been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer too late for much hope of survival, Pran urged others to undergo early testing. “I want to save lives, including my own,” he said.

He had triumphed over the Khmer Rouge and outlived their leader, Pol Pot, who had turned Cambodia into a madhouse. But Pran knew deep down that the battle against cancer was one he could not win.

“Cambodians believe we just rent this body,” he said not long before he died. “It is just a house for the spirit; and if the house is full of termites, it is time to leave.”