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."