Born: 23 September, 1942, in Siem Reap, Cambodia, Died: 30 March, 2008, in New Jersey, aged 65. DITH Pran was a photojournalist whose gruesome ordeal in the killing fields of Cambodia was re-created in a 1984 movie that gave
him an eminence he tenaciously used to press for his people's rights.
Dith saw his country descend into a living hell as he scraped and scrambled to survive the barbarous revolutionary regime of the Khmer Rouge from 1975-79, when as many as two million Cambodians – a third of the population – were killed. Dith survived through nimbleness, guile and sheer desperation.
He had been a journalistic partner of Sydney Schanberg, a journalist with the New York Times assigned to south-east Asia. He translated, took notes and pictures and helped Mr Schanberg manoeuvre in a fast-changing milieu. With the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975, Mr Schanberg was forced from the country, and Dith became a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian communists.
Mr Schanberg wrote about Dith in newspaper articles and in the New York Times Magazine, in a 1980 cover article entitled "The Death and Life of Dith Pran". (A book by the same title appeared in 1985.) The story became the basis of the movie The Killing Fields. The film, directed by Roland Joffé, portrayed Mr Schanberg, played by Sam Waterston, arranging for Dith's wife and children to be evacuated from Phnom Penh as danger mounted. Dith, portrayed by Dr Haing S Ngor, insisted on staying in Cambodia with Mr Schanberg to keep reporting the news.
A dramatic moment, in reality and cinematically, came when Dith saved Mr Schanberg and other western journalists from certain execution by talking fast and persuasively to the trigger-happy soldiers who had captured them.
But despite frantic effort, Mr Schanberg could not keep Dith from being sent to the countryside to join millions working as virtual slaves.
Mr Schanberg returned to the United States and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Cambodia. He accepted it on behalf of Dith as well.
For years there was no news of Dith, except for a rumour that he had been fed to alligators, as his brother had been. After more than four years of beatings and backbreaking labour on a diet of a tablespoon of rice a day, Dith escaped over the Thai border on 3 October, 1979. Mr Schanberg flew to greet him.
Dith moved to New York and in 1980 became a photographer for the New York Times, where he was noted for his imaginative pictures of city scenes and news events. In one, he turned the camera on mourners rather than the coffin to snatch an evocative moment at the funeral of Rabbi Chaskel Werzberger, a rabbi murdered in 1990.
Dith also spoke out about the Cambodian genocide, appearing before students, pensioners and other groups. "I'm a one-person crusade," he said.
Dith Pran was born in Siem Reap, Cambodia, a provincial town near the ancient temples at Angkor Wat. His father was a public-works official.
Having learned French at school and taught himself English, Dith was hired as a translator for the US military assistance command. When Cambodia severed ties with the US in 1965, he worked with a British film crew, then as a hotel receptionist.
In the early 1970s, as unrest in neighbouring Vietnam spread and Cambodia slipped into civil war, the Khmer Rouge grew more formidable. Tourism ended. Dith interpreted for foreign journalists. While working for Mr Schanberg, he taught himself to take photographs.
When the Khmer Rouge won control in 1975, Dith became part of a monstrous social experiment: the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of people from the cities and the suppression of the educated classes with the goal of recreating Cambodia as an agricultural nation.
To avoid summary execution, Dith hid the fact that he was educated or that he knew Americans. He passed himself off as a taxi driver. He even threw away his money and dressed as a peasant.
Over the next four-and-a half years, he worked in the fields and at menial jobs. For sustenance, people ate insects and rats and even the exhumed corpses of the recently executed, he said.
In November 1978, Vietnam, by then a unified Communist nation after the end of the Vietnam War, invaded Cambodia and overthrew the Khmer Rouge. Dith went home to Siem Reap, where he learned that 50 members of his family had been killed; wells were filled with skulls and bones.
The Vietnamese made him village chief. But he fled when he feared they had learned of his American ties. His 60-mile trek to the Thai border was fraught with danger. Two companions were killed by a land mine.
He had an emotional reunion with his wife, Ser Moeun Dith, and four children in San Francisco. Though he and his wife later divorced, she was by his bedside in his last weeks, bringing him rice noodles.
Dith's second wife, Kim DePaul, from whom he was either separated or divorced, now runs the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project, which spreads word about the Cambodian genocide.
At his death, Dith was working to establish another, still-unnamed organisation to help Cambodia. In 1997, he published a book of essays by Cambodians who had witnessed the years of terror as children.
Dr Ngor, the physician turned actor who had himself survived the killing fields, had joined with Dith in their fight for justice. He was shot to death in 1996 in Los Angeles by a teenage gang member.
Dith nonetheless pushed ahead in his campaign against genocide everywhere.
"One time is too many," he said in an interview in his last weeks, expressing hope that others would continue his work. "If they can do that for me," he said, "my spirit will be happy."
Dith is survived by his companion, Bette Parslow, a daughter, three sons, a sister, six grandchildren and two stepgrandchildren.
The full article contains 1006 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
