Dith Pran

Apr 1 2008 by Emma Pinch, Liverpool Daily Post

DITH PRAN was the kindly-faced photo-journalist whose story was told in the Oscar-winning film, The Killing Fields.

He risked his life chronicling the mass slaughter by the Khmer Rouge in 1975 – which killed an estimated 40% of his compatriots – before escaping to the US to work for The New York Times.

Born into a middle-class Cambodian family in 1942, in Siem Reap, Pran was the son of a road-building supervisor. He was an interpreter for tourists and film crews when civil war broke out between forces of the US-backed dictator Lon Nol and the Khmer Rouge, and then he began working as a guide and interpreter for reporter Sydney Schanberg, from The New York Times.

When, in April, 1975, it became clear that Phnom Penh would fall to the Khmer Rouge, US personnel were evacuated and millions of city dwellers tried to flee. But he and Schanberg decided to stay, reporting on the casualties from the bloody takeover. Dith saved Schanberg and two other journalists from almost certain execution, but was unable to get out of the country himself after a fake passport failed to pass muster.

To save his life, he reinvented himself as an illiterate peasant and was put to work in the rice paddies for two years.

In late 1977, Dith was relocated to become a house servant in the village of Bat Dangkor. In January, 1979, when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia, Dith went back to Siem Reap, where he was made village administrative chief. He dubbed the area – stretches of emerald green where corpses had nourished the ground – “the killing fields”. Over 50 members of his family died there.

On July 29, 1979, he set out to walk the 60 miles of landmines, booby traps and armed forces that lay between him and the Thai border. Dith arrived on October 3, and Schanberg met him there on October 9.

Roland Joffe’s The Killing Fields was inspired by Schanberg’s book The Death and Life of Dith Pran (1980). The book made Dith famous and he used his celebrity to publicise the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge. “I am a one man crusade,” he once said. “I must speak for those who did not survive and for those who still suffer.”

Dith Pran is survived by his partner Bette Parslow, three sons and a daughter.

Dith Pran, photo-journalist; born September 27, 1942, died March 30, 2008