Killing Fields journalist dies

2008-03-30 21:01

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 on Sunday at the age of 65.

Dith died at a New Jersey hospital on 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 4½ years later.

Eventually, Dith settled 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.

Toiled in the fields

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 two million of Cambodia's seven million people.

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

With thousands being executed simply for manifesting signs of intellect or Western influence - even wearing glasses or watches - 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 US, 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.

Second fight for his life

"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'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.

- AP