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'Killing Fields' survivor Dith Pran dies


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'Killing Fields' survivor Dith Pran dies

 

By RICHARD PYLE, Associated Press Writer 2 hours, 3 minutes ago

 

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. He was 65.

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Dith 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 â?? even wearing glasses or wristwatches â?? 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 Associated Press 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.

 

"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 Phnom 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.

 

___

 

The AP's News Research Center in New York contributed to this report.

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Almost 15 years ago; in my other life, I helped assemble and hang a major show of Gulf War photographs by James Nachtwey, one of this era's most compelling photojournalists. Dith Pran was a friend of Nachtwey and attended the opening reception.

 

Nachtwey was pleased with how the show had been set up and brought Pran over and introduced him to me. At the time, I was doing volunteer work, teaching photography to kids in one of the Boston areas old mill towns which had a sizable Cambodian population. When I mentioned that there were several Cambodian kids in my class, he said he would like to go to the class and meet them. I jumped on the offer and two days later, he showed up at the art center where the class was held.

He was great with the kids, enthusiastically praising their work and offering encouragement; the Cambodian kids were in total awe and he paid special attention to them, speaking softly in Khmer.

He stayed for a long time and helped me clean up the darkroom after the kids had left. We talked a bit about New York but mostly, he wanted to talk about the kids and about how working with them gave him a lot of hope that someday they would go to Cambodia and help rebuild a society there.

 

I feel privileged to have met and spent a bit of time with him: he was quiet and unassuming but he was the real deal.

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Around 1986 or '87, there were plans to bring Dith Pran to Bangkok to call attention to the plight of Cambodians, and I'd hoped to meet him (since I was a writer and editor back then). However, word got out that the Khmer Rouge were extremely pissed off at him and planned to have him killed. When that became known, his proposed visit was cancelled. As I recall, the UNHCR planned to bring him here.

 

Goodbye, Dith Pran. You were a hero.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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I was an extra in The Killing Fields. I once spoke to Haing Ngor, though at the time I didn't even know who he was. I didn't even realise he was the co-star. He just seemed like a nice friendly guy, so I said hello. Whats-his-name who played Shanberg seemed a bit full of himself. Chris Walken and John Malkovich were regular guys though.

 

 

 

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Yeah...original theory was that he was snuffed cuz of his activist roles in the U.S. I seem to recall that some Oriental Boyz gang shits were have found to have murdered him in a robbery attempt for $$$ for some drugs. After doing their time, hope they're sent back to Cambo or Laos or wherever.

 

HH

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