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Where EAST meets the Northwest
Dith Pran, 1942 - 2008
From The Asian Reporter, V18, #15 (April 8, 2008), page 8.
What he leaves behind
Dith Pran
September 27, 1942 - March 30, 2008
Father and grandfather.
Cambodian genocide survivor.
Founder of the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project.
New York Times photojournalist.
By Ronault L.S. Catalani
Dith Pran’s suffering ended Sunday morning, March 30, 2008. He perished of pancreatic cancer, diagnosed only three months ago. He left a sister, a daughter, three sons, and six grandchildren. Before Mr. Dith’s own passing, he was left by 50 family members, many of their broken bodies left in a drinking-water well, all murdered by Khmer Rouge Cambodians. Those departed included three brothers, one of whom mad soldier boys fed to crocodiles.
During Mr. Dith’s difficult life, two million men and mothers, daughters and grandmas, were beaten or starved or sickened to death by a brutal Communist regime left to its own insanity, an entire society left to be devoured by a world too weary to witness or intervene.
Of so many things he left, Mr. Dith may be best remembered by those surviving him and his times for being the subject of the 1984 Academy Award-winning film The Killing Fields. Indeed, Dith Pran coined that term and this concept of a harvest of mass murder. Of genocide.
The Hollywood film and the Khmer story are about New York Times writer Sydney Schanberg and his local translator, negotiator, and photographer Dith Pran, both of them reporting on the 1975 fall of Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh. Mr. Schanberg was expelled and won a Pulitzer Prize for his work, Mr. Dith was marched away as forced labor. Mr. Schanberg wrote frantically about Mr. Dith in an effort to save him and millions like him abandoned to their faraway nightmare.
His 1980 New York Times Magazine article "The Death and Life of Dith Pran" became the screenplay for The Killing Fields. Mr. Pran, meanwhile, managed to stay alive and ultimately escaped Cambodia.
Mr. Schanberg’s reporting and acclaimed director Roland Joffé’s film gave Dith Pran the international recognition needed to educate a reluctant world about the Khmer Rouge, one of modern history’s most monstrous social experiments. The Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project was one among his many humanitarian efforts.
Both are our history
Kim Heang, recently arrived in Portland and now working as an anti-poverty resource specialist at northeast Portland’s Asian Family Center, recalls Mr. Dith in yet another light. She heard him a few years ago at the Royal University in Phnom Penh. He was gentle and well-spoken. She remembers him telling her generation of young Khmer to know Cambodia’s Dark Years but also urged them to never forget those wise Angkor Kings who brought Southeast Asia’s first multiple and bountiful rice harvests, who established Kampuchea’s elegant cultural traditions in dance and music, her rich history of art and architecture.
Sokpak Bhell, the anti-poverty programs coordinator at the Asian Family Center, agreed with her colleague Ms. Heang. "I’ve always admired Dith Pran’s courage in telling the world what happened to him and his family in Cambodia. Because so many people keep to themselves what the Khmer Rouge did to us," she said. "It’s hard to think about Cambodia without thinking about the Khmer Rouge, but there are so many great things about Cambodia before and after our Tragedy. Both are our history."