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Journalist Dith Pran, 65, dies of cancer

Dith Pran is pictured in his room at Roosevelt Care Center in Edison, New Jersey, on March 14. PHOTO: AP

Dith Pran, the Cambodian-born journalist whose harrowing tale of enslavement and eventual escape from the murderous Khmer Rouge revolutionaries in 1979 became the subject of the award-winning film The Killing Fields, died on Sunday. He was 65.

Dith died at a New Jersey hospital 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 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 four-and-a-half years later. Eventually, Dith resettled in the US and went to work as a photographer for the Times.

It was Dith who coined the term "killing fields" to describe the horrifying clusters of corpses and skeletal remains of victims he encountered on his desperate journey to freedom.

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 2 million of Cambodia's 7 million people.

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

With thousands being executed simply for manifesting signs of intellect or Western influence -- even wearing glasses or wristwatches -- 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 UN High Commissioner for Refugees and founded the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project, dedicated to educating people on the history of the Khmer Rouge regime.

In a letter to the staff of the Times, executive editor Bill Keller called Dith "a journalist and hero," adding, `"that last word is not one I use lightly."

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.

Dith's survivors include his companion, Bette Parslow; his former wife, Meoun Ser Dith; three sons; a daughter; six grandchildren including a boy named Sydney; and two step-grandchildren.

His three brothers were killed by the Khmer Rouge.
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