Dith Pran, eloquent survivor, reporter of Cambodia genocide

NEW YORK - Dith Pran, whose harrowing account of enslavement and eventual escape in 1979 from the murderous Khmer Rouge revolutionaries in Cambodia became the subject of the award-winning film "The Killing Fields," died yesterday at a New Jersey hospital. He was 65.

Mr. Dith had pancreatic cancer, said Sydney Schanberg, his former colleague at The New York Times.

Mr. 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.

With thousands being executed in Cambodia simply for manifesting signs of intellect or Western influence - even wearing glasses or wristwatches - Mr. 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.

For slaughter on the scale inflicted by the Khmer Rouge - an estimated 1.5 million died of starvation, executions, overwork, and torture - the grief could be immobilizing, but not for Mr. Dith. He saved Schanberg from death at rebel hands before facing it himself many times during the four years of the Khmer Rouge's bloody reign.

When Schanberg won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for his Cambodia reporting at The New York Times, he shared the honor with Mr. Dith, who at the time was missing in his native country.

With Schanberg's help, Mr. Dith began life anew in the United States as a photographer for the Times. Mr. Dith emerged as an eloquent spokesman for Cambodian genocide victims, a role he filled until his death.

"A clear-eyed reporter who lived through horror and survived to tell his story in his own words, for 30 years Dith Pran . . . played a key role in bringing the crimes of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime to world attention, especially in the United States," said Ben Kiernan, founding director of the Cambodian Genocide Program at Yale University.

He was "a journalist and hero," New York Times executive editor Bill Keller said in a letter to the staff yesterday. He added: "that last word is not one I use lightly."

Mr. Dith was named a goodwill ambassador to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. He established the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project to educate students about the atrocities. He sought to preserve evidence of the genocide and bring the perpetrators before the ongoing international tribunal as a member of the Cambodia Documentation Commission, a human rights group. And he compiled first-person accounts of the Khmer Rouge's crimes against children in a 1998 book, "Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields."

"I am a Cambodian holocaust survivor," he often declared, "and I have to be a messenger."

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 US 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, Mr. Dith worked at other jobs. When Sihanouk was deposed in a 1970 coup and Cambodian troops went to war with the Khmer Rouge, Mr. 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 secret US bombing attack on Neak Leung, a vital river crossing on the highway linking Phnom Penh with eastern Cambodia.

After Vietnamese forces invaded Cambodia in 1979, seized control of territory, and ousted the Khmer Rouge, Mr. 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."

"I am reborn," Mr. Dith sobbed when he saw Schanberg again. "This is my second life."

It was Mr. 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.

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

After Mr. Dith moved to the United States, 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.

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 Mr. Dith through their work with the Asian American Journalists Association.

Schanberg described Mr. Dith's ordeal and salvation in a 1980 magazine article titled "The Death and Life of Dith Pran."

The magazine article became the basis for a book and 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."

Mr. 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."

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

Mr. Dith's three brothers and another sister were executed by the Khmer Rouge. His father died of starvation.

Material from the Los Angeles Times was used in this report.