Asia Weekly

Cambodia Obituaries

A fighter for Cambodian justice

The world knew Dith Pran as a "powerful voice for the ghosts of the Cambodian killing fields," says Newhouse News Service. Dith, a photojournalist for The New York Times whose ordeal in his native country was recreated in the 1984 film The Killing Fields, used that prominence to "tenaciously press for his people's rights," says the paper. He died March 30 of pancreatic cancer at a hospital in New Jersey at 65, said his friend and former colleague Sydney H Schanberg.

Dith, born in Siem Reap, had worked as a photographer at The New York Times since 1980. His connection to the newspaper began when he worked as an interpreter and assistant to Schanberg, a reporter covering the Cambodian civil war, from 1972 to 1975, says Agence France-Presse. When the Khmer Rouge seized power in April 1975, Dith and Schanberg stayed on to cover the fall of Phnom Penh. Schanberg later was evacuated to the US, but was unable to rescue Dith, who survived by "donning peasant clothes and passing himself off as a taxi driver," says the Los Angeles Times. Dith was sent to the countryside, where for four years he suffered starvation and torture while working in the fields 14 to 18 hours a day. Schanberg, meanwhile, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his coverage of the conflict, which he accepted on behalf of Dith. Dith escaped to Thailand in 1979, and was reunited with his family in the US. He later established the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project to educate people about the regime's atrocities.

Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, an independent center researching the Khmer Rouge's crimes, told The Associated Press it was "very sad" that Dith died before Cambodia's genocide tribunal tried former Khmer Rouge leaders for their alleged roles in the atrocities. But Dith "continues to be with us now and in the future for the cause of genocide justice."

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