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.

Fearless Fotog - Sad Salute to "Killing Fields" Hero

'SURELY EXTRAORDINARY': Sydney Schanberg, former Times colleague of Dith Pran, pays tribute to his friend yesterday at the South Plainfield, NJ, funeral of the man who endured unspeakable horrors in Cambodia.

By AUSTIN FENNER and ANDY GELLER
New York Post (USA)

April 7, 2008 -- Dith Pran, the diminutive photojournalist whose barbaric enslavement in Cambodia was made into the award-winning film "The Killing Fields," was remembered yesterday as a man who embodied "extreme bravery."

"There are special human beings - Pran was one of them - who are not perfect, not saintly, but are surely extraordinary," Sydney Schanberg, his friend and former colleague at The New York Times, said at Dith's funeral in South Plainfield, NJ.

More than 400 people - some colleagues wearing photographers' vests like Dith's trademark one - filled the South Plainfield Funeral Home to take part in a Buddhist service for the journalist, who died March 30 of pancreatic cancer at the age of 65.

Dith was diagnosed with the illness three months ago, and Schanberg said that when he visited his friend in the hospital, the two discussed the possibility of life after death.

"Pran thought for a couple of seconds and said, 'I'll send you my dreams,' " Schanberg recalled.

"I'll send you mine," Schanberg said he replied.

'"Pran is still with us," the former correspondent said. "I believe Pran is still with us."

Dith was working as an interpreter and assistant to Schanberg, who was covering Cambodia for the Times in the 1970s, when the country was taken over by Khmer Rouge revolutionaries who installed a murderous regime.

Schanberg managed to escape - and won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting - but was forced to leave his friend behind.

Dith - Cambodian first and last names are often reversed - remained in the war-ravaged country for 41/2 years, working in the countryside as a virtual slave and surviving on a diet of rats, snails and insects. He coined the phrase "killing fields" to describe the clusters of corpses and skeletal remains he saw.

After leaving Cambodia, Dith moved to the United States and became a photographer for the Times.

His harrowing story became the subject of the famed 1984 film "The Killing Fields."

At the service, Schanberg recalled how Dith argued for two hours to stop Khmer Rouge soldiers from killing Schanberg and two other journalists.

"He risked his own life to save ours," Schanberg said, adding that his friend's life was the definition of "extreme bravery."

austin.fennerlastname@nypost.com

Dith Pran's Funeral

Buddhist monks pray next to the casket of New York Times photojournalist Dith Pran during his funeral service in South Plainfield, New Jersey, April 6, 2008. Dith is known for his experiences in his native country of Cambodia, where he was imprisoned and later escaped the genocide of the Khmer Rouge, which was turned into the Academy Award winning movie, "The Killing Fields." REUTERS/Chip East
Ser Moeun Dith prays over the casket of her former husband, at the funeral service for New York Times photojournalist Dith Pran, in South Plainfield, New Jersey, April 6, 2008. Dith is known for his experiences in his native country of Cambodia, where he was imprisoned and later escaped the genocide of the Khmer Rouge, which was turned into the Academy Award winning movie, "The Killing Fields." REUTERS/Chip East
New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg speaks at the funeral service for his close friend, New York Times photojournalist Dith Pran, in South Plainfield, New Jersey, April 6, 2008. Dith is known for his experiences with Schanberg in his native country of Cambodia, where he was imprisoned and later escaped the genocide of the Khmer Rouge, which was turned into the Academy Award winning movie, "The Killing Fields." REUTERS/Chip East
Former New York Times journalist Sydney Schanberg delivers the eulogy during funeral services for New York Times photojournalist Dith Pran in South Plainfield, N.J., Sunday April 6, 2008. Dith was the Cambodian-born journalist whose harrowing tale of enslavement and eventual escape from that country's murderous Khmer Rouge revolutionaries in 1979 became the subject of the award-winning film 'The Killing Fields.' He was working as an interpreter and assistant for Schanberg in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, when the Vietnam War reached its chaotic end in April 1975 and both countries were taken over by Communist forces. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

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."

Our sincere condolences to Mr. Dith Pran's Family and Friends

Photojournalist Dith Pran, smiles during his assignment in New York in this file photo taken in 1980. Pran, whose harrowing experiences in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge were dramatized in the film "The Killing Fields," died on Sunday at the age of 65. He died of pancreatic cancer at a New Brunswick, New Jersey, hospital, The New York Times said on its Web site. REUTERS/The New York Times/Handout
The New York Times photographer Dith Pran is shown in this handout photo taken on March 29, 2004. Dith, whose harrowing experiences in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge were dramatized in the film "the Killing Fields", died on March 30, 2008 at the age of 65. REUTERS/The New York Times/Handout
This photo provided by David Barron shows New York Times photographer Dith Pran, Saturday Feb. 9, 2008. 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. (AP Photo)

'Killing Fields' survivor Dith Pran dies

Sun Mar 30, 2008
By RICHARD PYLE
Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK - Dith Pran, the Cambodian-born journalist whose harrowing tale of enslavement and eventual escape from that country's murderous Khmer Rouge revolutionaries in 1979 became the subject of the award-winning film "The Killing Fields," died Sunday, his former colleague said.

Dith, 65, died at a New Jersey hospital Sunday morning of pancreatic cancer, according to Sydney Schanberg, his former colleague at The New York Times. Dith had been diagnosed almost three months ago.

Dith was working as an interpreter and assistant for Schanberg in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, when the Vietnam War reached its chaotic end in April 1975 and both countries were taken over by Communist forces.

Schanberg helped Dith's family get out but was forced to leave his friend behind after the capital fell; they were not reunited until Dith escaped four and a half years later. Eventually, Dith resettled in the United States and went to work as a photographer for the Times.

It was Dith himself who coined the term "killing fields" for the horrifying clusters of corpses and skeletal remains of victims he encountered on his desperate journey to freedom.

The regime of Pol Pot, bent on turning Cambodia back into a strictly agrarian society, and his Communist zealots were blamed for the deaths of nearly 2 million of Cambodia's 7 million people.

"That was the phrase he used from the very first day, during our wondrous reunion in the refugee camp," Schanberg said later.

With thousands being executed simply for manifesting signs of intellect or Western influence — even wearing glasses or wristwatches — Dith survived by masquerading as an uneducated peasant, toiling in the fields and subsisting on as little as a mouthful of rice a day, and whatever small animals he could catch.

After Dith moved to the U.S., he became a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and founded the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project, dedicated to educating people on the history of the Khmer Rouge regime.

He was "the most patriotic American photographer I've ever met, always talking about how he loves America," said AP photographer Paul Sakuma, who knew Dith through their work with the Asian American Journalists Association.

Schanberg described Dith's ordeal and salvation in a 1980 magazine article titled "The Death and Life of Dith Pran." Schanberg's reporting from Phnom Penh had earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1976.

Later a book, the magazine article became the basis for "The Killing Fields," the highly successful 1984 British film starring Sam Waterston as the Times correspondent and Haing S. Ngor, another Cambodian escapee from the Khmer Rouge, as Dith Pran.

The film won three Oscars, including the best supporting actor award to Ngor. Ngor, a physician, was shot to death in 1996 during a robbery outside his Los Angeles home. Three Asian gang members were convicted of the crime.

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

Dith spoke of his illness in a March interview with The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., saying he was determined to fight against the odds and urging others to get tested for cancer.

"I want to save lives, including my own, but Cambodians believe we just rent this body," he said. "It is just a house for the spirit, and if the house is full of termites, it is time to leave."

Dith Pran was born Sept. 27, 1942 at Siem Reap, site of the famed 12th century ruins of Angkor Wat. Educated in French and English, he worked as an interpreter for U.S. officials in Phnom Penh. As with many Asians, the family name, Dith, came first, but he was known by his given name, Pran.

After Cambodia's leader, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, broke off relations with the United States in 1965, Dith worked at other jobs. When Sihanouk was deposed in a 1970 coup and Cambodian troops went to war with the Khmer Rouge, Dith returned to Phom Penh and worked as an interpreter for Times reporters.

In 1972, he and Schanberg, then newly arrived, were the first journalists to discover the devastation of a U.S. bombing attack on Neak Leung, a vital river crossing on the highway linking Phnom Penh with eastern Cambodia.

Dith recalled in a 2003 article for the Times what it was like to watch U.S. planes attacking enemy targets.

"If you didn't think about the danger, it looked like a performance," he said. "It was beautiful, like fireworks. War is beautiful if you don't get killed. But because you know it's going to kill, it's no longer beautiful."

After Vietnamese forces invaded Cambodia in 1979 and seized control of territory, Dith escaped from a commune near Siem Reap and trekked 40 miles, dodging both Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge forces, to reach a border refugee camp in Thailand.

From the Thai camp he sent a message to Schanberg, who rushed from the United States for an emotional reunion with the trusted friend he felt he had abandoned four years earlier.

"I had searched for four years for any scrap of information about Pran," Schanberg said. "I was losing hope. His emergence in October 1979 felt like an actual miracle for me. It restored my life."

After Dith moved to the U.S., the Times hired him and put him in the photo department as a trainee. The veteran staffers "took him under their wing and taught him how to survive on the streets of New York as a photographer, how to see things," said Times photographer Marilynn Yee.

Yee recalled an incident early in Dith's new career as a photojournalist when, after working the 4 p.m. to midnight shift, he was robbed at gunpoint of all his camera equipment at the back door of his apartment.

"He survived everything in Cambodia and he survived that too," she said, adding, "He never had to work the night shift again."

Dith spoke and wrote often about his wartime experience and remained an outspoken critic of the Khmer Rouge regime.

When Pol Pot died in 1998, Dith said he was saddened that the dictator was never held accountable for the genocide.

"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," he said.

Dith's survivors include his companion, Bette Parslow; his former wife, Meoun Ser Dith; a sister, Samproeuth Dith Nop; sons Titony, Titonath and Titonel; daughter Hemkarey Dith Tan; six grandchildren including a boy named Sydney; and two step-grandchildren.

Dith's three brothers were killed by the Khmer Rouge.
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AP News Research Center contributed to this report.