Four years after his enslavement by the Khmer Rouge, an intrepid Cambodian
stumbled out of the thickly wooded jungle to freedom. His legs were wobbly.
He was weak with malaria. His front teeth were broken. His face was gaunt.
He was incredibly thin – but he still retained his lopsided grin.
That grin was still in place – although fading – in the weeks before Dith Pran
died last Sunday in a hospital in America, his adopted home, from pancreatic
cancer. He was 65. Although wan and thin, he moved on gracefully, loved and
mourned by all whose lives he had touched. “This is my path and I must go
where it takes me,” he said shortly before the end.
Pran’s harrowing personal tale of enslavement and escape from the Khmer Rouge
in 1979 had eventually become the subject of the Oscar-winning film The
Killing Fields, directed by Roland Joffé, which focused global attention on
one of history’s worst genocides.
Pran was justly famous. Were it not for this former tourist guide to the
fabled Angkor temples, who later became interpreter and assistant to Sydney
Schanberg, a reporter for The New York Times, in Cambodia, the world’s eyes
would probably not have been opened to the monstrous atrocities committed by
the Khmer Rouge in his native land. In its rush to forge a new society, 2m
people died in executions or from starvation, disease and overwork – nearly
a third of the population.
However, Pran did more. After his escape he moved to America, where he worked
as a photographer for The New York Times and spent the rest of his life
speaking out about what his countrymen had been through. He also pushed for
war crimes trials for the Khmer Rouge leaders – trials that are finally due
to begin this year in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital. Pran, alas, will
never see them.
“I am a one-person crusade,” he once said. “I must speak for those who did not
survive and those who still suffer.”
I owe this honourable Cambodian a debt of gratitude that I can never erase. He
saved my life when I was captured by the Khmer Rouge.
At the time the Cambodian war was a sideshow to the war raging next door in
Vietnam and some aspects of it seemed comic. Before sallying forth every
morning into the countryside to witness the fighting, we reporters would
meet at the Groaning Table – an open-air cafe – for a military briefing from
a charming colonel called Am Rong, whose unfortunate name was a butt of
endless jokes. His military communiqués, I remember, were invariably
nonsense.
The seductive wartime capital, with its brothels and opium parlours,
encouraged all kinds of indiscretions and we conducted our lives as though
we were characters in a Graham Greene novel; or we liked to imagine that we
did.
However, the war was deadly serious. So we also took insane risks and
witnessed and reported on some of the most appalling human suffering that I
have seen.
In the process more than 20 of the tiny foreign press corps of about 60 were
killed in a matter of months by the Khmer Rouge, who never took prisoners.
And many more Cambodian journalists also died.
We loved the Cambodians, who had a disarming insouciance in the face of
danger. The difference between us and the band of local journalists we hired
to interpret the language, politics and culture was that they were seeing
and reporting on their own country being destroyed. We, on the other hand,
were reporting from the privileged position of visitors who could always
bail out. For them, there could be nowhere else to go: they and their loved
ones were trapped by the war and their survival was dependent on the outcome.
It was Pran who was the unacknowledged dean of this Cambodian press corps, not
because of the status that his job with the venerable New York Times gave
him, but because he was so unusually acute and resourceful and had
unassailable integrity.
The horrors of the war had made morality a luxury that many of his fellow
countrymen had long since discarded. Yet, unlike so many of the politicians
and generals for whom survival and money were the ultimate objectives, Pran
remained faithful to his principles. He believed passionately that the story
of the destruction of his beautiful homeland needed to be told. And to that
end he risked his life time after time.
I first met Pran in 1972. Although his loyalty was always to Schanberg, he was
ready to give help and advice to me and all the other journalists. Never
more so than on April 17, 1975 – the day of the fall of Phnom Penh.
On that same day Schanberg, Al Rockoff, an American photographer, and I were
captured by the Khmer Rouge.
A squad of teenage soldiers with hate-filled eyes forced us into a captured
armoured personnel carrier (APC). Pran, realising we were going to be
executed, selflessly argued to be allowed to join us inside, knowing full
well that without his communication skills we were doomed.
It is this story that is told in The Killing Fields. And it was Dith Pran
himself, by the way, who coined the phrase “killing fields” after seeing the
grim piles of corpses and skeletal remains on his desperate trek to freedom.
That was in the future. Back when Pran volunteered himself as a prisoner,
there seemed little hope of escape for any of us. First we were taken to the
banks of the Mekong river; then the rear door of the APC opened and a pair
of Khmer Rouge soldiers, pointing rifles, beckoned us out. We knew they were
going to shoot us.
Pran got out first and began to talk softly and firmly, as he always did. He
told the Khmer Rouge that we were neutral journalists who had come to report
on their historic “liberation”; and, after a while, our would-be killers
began to calm down. The tension suddenly evaporated and we were freed.
A few days later we tried to doctor one of my two British passports for Pran
so that he could be evacuated with us to Thailand as a foreigner – but we
failed.
The Khmer Rouge forced him to go into the countryside – by now becoming a
giant labour camp – where he somehow survived torture, starvation and a life
of unremitting hard toil.
When he emerged four years later, 50 members of his family had perished.
Mercifully, Schanberg had evacuated Pran’s wife, Ser Moeun, and his four
beloved children before Phnom Penh fell and they were safely in America.
The first I knew of his freedom was when I received a telegram from Schanberg,
who had been tortured by guilt about Pran’s disappearance and had led his
own one-man crusade to trace his helper and friend.
The telegram included a personal message from Pran, patterned on a Cambodian
proverb: “Hi Jon. The world is round. Now I meet you again. Pran was in bad
shape, but the life is remained. Love Pran.”
I still have it. In subsequent years I saw him several times back in Cambodia.
It is a place that takes over the soul, and those who have known it at its
worst are irresistibly drawn back. We revisited old spots – including, once,
the place on the riverbank where, blinking in the sunlight, we had stood
facing the rifles of the Khmer Rouge peasant boys, waiting for the volley of
shots that would kill us.
The slight man I had known had put on weight; he had adopted American food and
habits and had a New Jersey twang. Beneath all that he was still the same
Pran: warm and attentive, with that peculiarly Cambodian joie de vivre and a
mischievous sense of humour.
His business card announced simply: “Dith Pran – photographer”. On the other
side, however, it listed information about how the Khmer Rouge had ruined
his beloved homeland.
Using his survival as a tool against injustice and genocide, he became a
good-will ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees,
founded a holocaust awareness project and compiled a book of children’s
accounts of growing up under the Khmer Rouge.
It is given to few journalists to make a real difference to people’s lives.
Once safe in America, Pran could have retreated into the background.
Countless Cambodians did. But he saw it as his duty to stop the memory of
what had happened to his country fading away. That and his courage and
loyalty are what made Pran magnificent.
Latterly, friends said, he had become disappointed with the way Cambodia was
becoming rotten again with corruption and cruelty. His marriage to Ser Moeun
had broken up and another marriage had failed.
Despite personal setbacks, he bore his public role gracefully. Right to the
end he always thought there was more that he could do, according to
Schanberg, who spent many days attending to his dying friend.
“Pran was a true reporter – a fighter for the truth and for his people,”
Schanberg said. “When the cancer struck, he fought for his life again. And
he did it with the same Buddhist calm and courage and positive spirit that
made [him] so special.”
Having been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer too late for much hope of
survival, Pran urged others to undergo early testing. “I want to save lives,
including my own,” he said.
He had triumphed over the Khmer Rouge and outlived their leader, Pol Pot, who
had turned Cambodia into a madhouse. But Pran knew deep down that the battle
against cancer was one he could not win.
“Cambodians believe we just rent this body,” he said not long before he died.
“It is just a house for the spirit; and if the house is full of termites, it
is time to leave.”
I have just returned from Cambodia and seen one of the killing fields and the school used as a prison and torture centre for myself. I found it unbearably moving, especially as our guide could tell us of his one experiences as a child during those terrible years of the Khmer Rouge. I read Jon Swain's excellent account River of Time on the flight home. A sorrow that Dith Pran, after all he went through, has died before his time.
Eileen Fawcett, Prayssac, France
I was a young journalist at university, unsure of my direction in life and in my career, when I saw the film "The Killing Fields" in late 1984.
The story of Dith Pran and then-New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg profoundly moved and inspired me. I knew that that was the direction I wanted to go as a journalist: being the 'voice of the voiceless ones' who are silenced by oppression, discrimination, and even death. I have tried to follow Pran's and Schanberg's example ever since then in both my work and in my personal life.
I very much appreciate Jon Swain sharing his memories with us of a time and place that seem so far away now. That world of Cambodia in the early 1970s may indeed be gone, but today the Cambodian people are still steadily working to get some sense of justice from their Khmer Rouge torturers and killers. Let us hope that their justice comes soon.
Thank you very much Jon, thank you Sydney, and rest in eternal peace Dith Pran.
Brian Ohkubo Covert, Hyogo, Japan
To me the story of Dith Pran told in the killing fields of Cambodia is something that we should never forget. In 2005
I visited the death camp S21 used by the Khmer Rouge to cruelly torture and murder. I also visited the killing fields and walked around the pits and saw with my own eyes where men, women, children and small babies had been ruthlessly murdered by their own people in a nightmare almost beyond imagination. The skulls piled high in a monument to the dead and the skull in the ground I accidently uncovered with my boot are things that I will never forget. Later when I sat in the foreign Correspondents Bar in Phnom Penh overlooking the beautiful view of the river I imagined that day in April 1975 when the lives of these people changed in the blink of an eye. It made me feel good to be alive as I drank a cold beer and watched the sun go down and deeply sad for those who had perished in those terrible years. Dith Pran you will always be remembered in the hearts of good people.
david hambly, St Albans/ Hull, Uk
A very moving, inspirational tribute to a great man. Thank you Jon for your words.
Richard Tarr, Swansea,
With a fraction of his courage most people would considered brave beyond all imagination.
Damian, Melbourne, Victoria
Thanks Jon for great tribute! I've gotten to meet "pu" Pran on several occassions and gotten to know him these last dozen years or so. He is one of the finest man ever to walk this earth.
Rest in Peace lok Pu Pran!
Sincerely,
Lundi Seng, M.D.
http://www.ThearySeng.com
Lundi Seng, M.D., Long Beach, California
Having read his courageous, inspirational story in this article, it brought me back a lot of sad memories from the Khmer Rouge era. I was 6 yrs when Pol Pot's madness descended over Cambodia. My family and others were forced out of the house at gunpoint and we walked and walked under the hot and burning sun (100F) for miles and miles with no food or water. Along the road leading us to hell on earth, I saw thousands of decomposed bodies, particularly a very young child trying to get milk from his mother but she died already and he was crying and crying of hunger. This particular scene always gives me tears in my eyes until today. I lost all my parents and siblings during four and half years in hell, except one brother in USA. God and Bhudda bless all the victims and their souls and to be born again in a place where peace and harmony are eternal. God bless Mr Pran's soul and may he rest in peace.
Ieng chan pheap, Montreal, Canada